has a second job as well, which is to figure out the closest possible word where none exists in the output language. That’s the first part of color management, figuring out how to move things from one language to another without losing the precise meaning.Ī translator at the U.N. Their first job is to take an input language like Japanese and map it to an output language like English. I like to think of this in terms of a translator at the United Nations. A printer displays this same color with a combination of a lot of magenta ink and almost as much yellow, plus a bit of blue and black.Ĭolor management is simply the act of translating colors from one space to another plus figuring out, for the colors that the output device can’t reproduce, what the closest possible color is and substituting all the values of the impossible-to-reproduce color with one the device can output. Pure red in an RGB display would be created when only the red channel is set to its highest illumination, and the R and G channels are set to zero. In a printer, white is made by putting down no ink. In an RGB color space, to display white, a monitor would set each color value to the highest intensity. A printer uses the channels of cyan, yellow, magenta and black, and so CMYK is its color space. Monitors have red, green and blue channels, so their color space is RGB. The space is usually named after the different channels in that space. This core idea is fundamental to how we, as photographers, work with color because it’s important to keep in mind that no devices in our imaging chain can faithfully reproduce the whole range of visible colors.ĭifferent devices have different color “channels” as part of their color space. Creative Commons: By CIExy1931.svg: Sakurambo derivative work: GrandDrake (CIExy1931.svg) Color then is talked about as part of a color space, often displayed as a 2D or 3D model of all the visible colors, and the subset of those colors that a particular device like sRGB or Wide Color can reproduce. Note that it’s larger than the sRGB space, but still not even close to the full range of visible colors. In this model, the triangle represents the “Wide Color” space. By Spigget CC BY-SA 3.0 (/licenses/by-sa/3.0) This model shows the available colors in the sRGB color space. In a color model, all the visible colors are represented by the larger rainbow shape, while the internal triangle shows the available colors represented in a particular color space. Most importantly, these are not the same colors from device type to device type. That means that each type of device has some colors it excels at reproducing and many it is poor at or incapable of reproducing. Be it cameras, monitors or printers, not only is there is no device that can display the full range of visible colors, but these different types of imaging devices use different systems to display colors.
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