First ICC developers conference draws robust audience
More than 130 professionals took part in the first Developers? Conference on color management presented by the International Color Consortium in mid-November in Scottsdale, Arizona.
The conference was created to provide a forum at which members of the ICC could exchange information, ideas and practical feedback with advanced color management users and product developers who are incorporating ICC-based color management into software, devices and other products.
The full-day program offered a basic review of color management, along with 13 half-hour tutorials on technical topics and a luncheon panel that provided a view "from the trenches" of actual user experiences. "The main message of all of the speakers was that in 10 short years color management has changed the way work is done in the printing and publishing industry," says ICC Chair Craig Revie of Fuji Film Electronic Imaging.
Revie notes that the conference program was structured to meet the needs of a very diverse audience, including professionals with many different levels of color management knowledge and experience. "The audience included some of the original scientists who had helped create the color science architecture upon which the ICC is based," Revie says, "as well as application developers and advanced users just beginning to become actively involved in color management issues."
Among the highlights of conference presentations:
- Ann McCarthy of Lexmark International described the role of color management in making the critical connection between digital device number values and perceived color. She emphasized that the aim of color management is to maintain and deliver color fidelity, i.e., the successful interoperation of color data and color transforms from image creation to output across multiple targets to achieve color production quality consistent with the user?s intent.
- Bob Hallam of Quebecor World stressed that the industry is at a crossroads between RGB and CMYK workflows. He described advantages and disadvantages of both workflow options and noted that despite its numerous advantages, data encoded in RGB is non-traditional, and most printers do not know how to handle this type of file properly.
- Jack Holm and Ingeborg Tastl of HP explained the features of the perceptual rendering intent in V4 of the ICC specification. They showed how V4 removes potential ambiguities over how to re-render source images, and demonstrated methods of optimising the perceptual intent for preferred colour reproduction.
- Luke Wallis of Apple described the LUT structures in the V4 specification. He explained the advantages over the V2 structures, and gave details of how to construct the different LUT types and populate matrix and curve entries.
- Chris Cox of Adobe Systems argued that lack of testing may result in bad profiles, or bad color management modules, and a single bad result on a critical job or test prompt critics to say ICC color management doesn?t work. A lot of products are being shipped that just barely work, and that isn?t good enough, Cox argued, citing several high quality CMMs and implementations that could serve as models for developers.
- In addition, several speakers addressed specific features of Version 4 of the ICC Specification, including its enhancements compared to earlier versions and tips on how to work successfully with the spec.
About the International Color Consortium (ICC)
The International Color Consortium was established in 1993 by eight industry vendors for the purpose of creating, promoting and encouraging the standardization and evolution of an open, vendor-neutral, cross-platform color management system architecture and components. The outcome of this co-operation was the development of the ICC profile specification. ICC currently has 70 member companies.
