Color management and the ICC have had many successes, and a few failures - but there are still many real world problems waiting to be solved. What more can we do to improve the customer experience with color, and what can we learn from the problems we've seen so far?

A number of years ago we looked at the state of the ICC specification, the market, and some thoughts about the future. The market for the current technology matured to the point that any large changes would cause immediate market disruption. The state of technologies that employed color and the needs for different types of color management triggered the concept of ICClabs: an advanced, open source color management philosphy that did not rely upon OS resources for implementation.

ICC color management is limited to using D50 colorimetry for profile connection purposes. This becomes problematic if other light sources, observers, (multi-) spectral information, or lighting geometry needs to be used as part of profile connection. Recent work within the ICC Architecture Working Group (code name ICCLabs) has resulted in preliminary specifications for extensions to ICC architecture that allow for more flexible PCS connection, named color specification, and transform definition and implementation. A reference implementation of these extensions has been undertaken as part of the RefIccLabs project which will eventually be released to the general public under an open source license. This discussion will highlight some of the aspects of the RefIccLabs implementation with a call for others to participate in the specification process.

The light that comes from an surface to a viewer of the surface is a complex function that is controlled by many factors. As a surface as view from different angles or the angle of the light shining on the surface changes, the appearance of the object will change. Specular highlights can appear, colors can change. These aspects of surface reflection are described by a Bidirectional reflection distribution function (BRDF). Next generation ICC profiles will optionally contain BRDFs that provide a more complete description of the color behavior of the surface that is profiled. This talk will describe and demonstrate a baseline implementation of BRDFs in an ICC profile.

Print production has many color challenges and may have been the driving force in ICC color management for related fields of digital imaging. Today's color engineering for print is done mainly with ICC profiles. I will discuss the reasons for color engineering at each point in the print production workflow and what ICC profiles provide as a solution to those production problems.

As the market for distributed imaging grows from desktop to mobile, the challenges for color management multiply exponentially. The wide range of capture and viewing environments present formidable obstacles to high quality color reproduction across the range of viewer experiences and more importantly, viewer expectations. This paper examines the current technologies employed by users today, as well as looking forward at short term technological developments that have an impact on these issues.

This talk will start by looking at the new frontier that is digital publishing - specifically for tablets and other mobile devices - including the common tools and technologies that are used to deliver these publications. With that understanding, the various issues and concerns about color will be presented as well as various solutions.

Mobile computing devices such as smart-phones and tablets often include one or more capture modules. Use of a custom designed color chart allows an app to dynamically estimate unknown scene colors in manner that is both robust to unknown illuminants, camera rendering pipelines and display properties. In addition this processing is highly automated, computational efficient and color accurate over a range of test conditions. The resulting app can then be used for color measurement and the result is a color patch that has effectively been colorimetrically rendered. Given this corrected color it is then possible to communicate this result to either a cloud computing environment for additional analysis or to a web-enabled printer for hardcopy reproduction. The corresponding print can be generated dynamically such that the corrected color is used to adaptively refine the design of the printed page and also to achieve a more colorimetric print reproduction. This presentation will describe both, the mobile capture and processing, as well as the web-based printing and processing.

The Android operating system has been around for only half a decade, but has spawned thousands of different mobile devices in that time frame. With each of these devices comes different hardware and slightly different operating system modifications. The future support for each of these devices a couple months from their release rely upon popular demand and adaptation of the hardware by the community.

Android is the mobile platform that needs color calibration more than any other or any others that will probably follow it. Color managing these mobile platforms will not be a simple case in this fast paced community. With a million device activations each day and still climbing, there?s a large market of users who could benefit from the technologies. Beyond handheld devices, Android has even branched into other non-mobile hardware that such as displays, television sets and even virtual screens. The near and short term solutions could be extremely beneficial to various industries and professionals.

Color affects many areas of the visual-effects pipeline, from texture painting to lighting, rendering, compositing, image display, and digital intermediate. This section will begin with an introduction to VFX color processing and its relationship to image fidelity and physical realism. Topics include: common misconceptions about linearity, gamma, and working with high-dynamic-range (HDR) color spaces. Pipeline examples from recent films by Sony Pictures Imageworks explain which color transforms were used and why.

Motion picture production has transitioned from film to a digital image capture. Many of the techniques of digital color management available in other fields are being adopted and adapted to the needs of motion picture production. I am going to be discussing the motion picture color management: hardware limitations, and how on set color decisions are made and communicated.