Digital Color Management: Encoding Solutions, 2nd Edition

PART III

Digital Color Encoding

Most discussions of digital color encoding focus on two areas: image file formats and color spaces. The underlying assumption of such discussions is that if the industry could define file format standards and then agree to use the same “device-independent” colorimetric color space(s), the problems of representing color in digital form and interchanging images among color-imaging systems would be solved.

The discussion presented in this part will be quite different, primarily because we do not concur with that basic assumption. Our experience instead has shown that the current problems of color encoding and interchanging digital images cannot be eliminated simply by file format standards and an industry-wide adoption of any standard colorimetric color space.

The basic reasons for this were introduced in Part II, where it was shown that different types of imaging media do have, and must have, fundamentally different colorimetric properties. Using the same colorimetric color space to encode images from these media, and doing nothing more, will in no way account for such differences. All it will do is quantify those differences in terms of the agreed-upon color space!

In this part, strategies will be devised to deal appropriately with the basic colorimetric differences that exist among various combinations of input imaging media and devices. First, some basic color-encoding concepts will be described. Several encoding methods that have been used successfully ...