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Author Topic: Celebrating 20 Years of Color Management Consulting  (Read 6203 times)

Scott Martin

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Celebrating 20 Years of Color Management Consulting
« on: February 09, 2014, 02:23:32 pm »

I just posted a short article on 20 years of color consulting that perhaps, if nothing else, is interesting for it's look at how we used to 'manage color' 20+ years ago before the days of ICC Profiles. The article ends with some commentary about color management looking back and looking forward.

http://www.on-sight.com/celebrating-20-years-of-color-management-consulting/
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Scott Martin
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Schewe

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Re: Celebrating 20 Years of Color Management Consulting
« Reply #1 on: February 10, 2014, 12:40:40 am »

Did we really manage color 20+ years ago?

:~)

We "barely" managed color...remember, it wasn't till Photoshop 5 that we really used ICC profiles. Prior to that we were mucking about with monitor lookup tables and proprietary systems.

My first "color management" was EFI Color Cache...they gave you printed images and digital files and you loaded monitor tables to try to get the image on screen to look like the known print out. Crude, but darn if it didn't work!

BTW, interesting look back...these young people have no idea how easy they have it these days...

:~)
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Tony Jay

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Re: Celebrating 20 Years of Color Management Consulting
« Reply #2 on: February 10, 2014, 12:56:41 am »

...these young people have no idea how easy they have it these days...
Thank God I say...and everyone else who has made colour management a doable practical proposition and not something akin to witchcraft...although I do interact with individuals on occasion who still clearly believe the whole thing is nothing more than hocus pocus.

Tony Jay
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Tim Lookingbill

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Re: Celebrating 20 Years of Color Management Consulting
« Reply #3 on: February 10, 2014, 01:12:47 am »

Just hoped those 20 years of color management would've gotten owners of $30,000 dry minilabs to stop saying "We're not a professional lab" which is code for no color matching.

This was said to me by a manager of a Walgreens One Hour Photo Lab that invested heavily in upgrading their entire photo finishing lab to one gorgeous Fuji Frontier DL430. It's like handing scissors to children to play on the freeway.

The software now is so simple I could've set the printer myself to give me what I wanted and to hell with the Walgreens "Photo Specialist" who's more interested in going on break than making simple adjustments to the printer driver.
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jerryrock

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Re: Celebrating 20 Years of Color Management Consulting
« Reply #4 on: February 10, 2014, 11:29:27 am »

How is this not an advertisement?
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Gerald J Skrocki

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Re: Celebrating 20 Years of Color Management Consulting
« Reply #5 on: February 10, 2014, 02:03:27 pm »

IMHO, for 20 years, we haven't gotten much. Way back in 1998, Photoshop 5 pretty much but color management on the map and to a larger audience for obvious reasons. Not much has come about since then that's as dramatic (RGB working spaces, soft proofing in a major image editor, BPC). The ICC has about given up on V4 profiles for good reason. Pretty stagnant considering the time spent.
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Jim Kasson

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Re: Celebrating 20 Years of Color Management Consulting
« Reply #6 on: February 10, 2014, 03:00:06 pm »

IMHO, for 20 years, we haven't gotten much.

I'm with Andrew on this. I left the field 19 years ago to work on networking systems. If you'd asked me then what we'd have by now, I'd probably have said:

Color management in every camera, scanner, printer, app and OS
4-color-plane cameras
Surround correction (eg, projected vs mounted on white mat board)
Retinex (or something better) illuminant correction
Gamut-mapping algorithms using neighborhood (not point) processes
Correction for self-luminous and reflection displays

Shows what I lousy prognosticator I am.

Jim
« Last Edit: February 10, 2014, 03:37:53 pm by Jim Kasson »
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digitaldog

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Re: Celebrating 20 Years of Color Management Consulting
« Reply #7 on: February 10, 2014, 03:11:51 pm »

There isn't much to celebrate lately (last 3-4 years). There's no competition. The two companies that supply 'solutions' are not doing anything much of interest. The high end package from X-rite needs a lot of love, we are missing a lot of functionality from products we had years ago and can only use on really old operating systems. I don't see that changing either, instead, rush to market with new products for new segments while pretty much ignoring the last market segment. Going way back to say ColorBlind, there was far more power and options in software than we have today. The new M-series for instruments is useful but not earth shattering. Users still struggle to match print to display. Users still argue about working spaces, just last week on a Linkedin, someone posted the 'just use sRGB' then quoted Ken Rockwell. Barf. We have no color management based on color appearance models that I am aware of. Maybe all the color management problems have been solved? I don't think that is the case but if so, it's a good excuse and I'll celebrate...
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Scott Martin

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Re: Celebrating 20 Years of Color Management Consulting
« Reply #8 on: February 10, 2014, 05:02:23 pm »

Jeff - thanks! Young people do have it pretty easy, and we're lucky to have been able to find our way during these years. Has been fun.

Andrew - I agree that Adobe really hasn't given us much in Photoshop, at least since 6.0 especially. In fact, things have gotten worse in PS in many respects - 'No Color Management' has been removed and perfectly good custom printer profiles don't always show up in the Print dialog. Profiling CMYK Postscript laser printers and Greyscale processes is more difficult than ever. Arg!

But let's not sell them, or us, short. Since the late 90's we have a whole new Photoshop (Lightroom) written from the ground up around Camera RAW which does come with really decent profiles for all major cameras. And while aqueous printer drivers used to be terrible, they deliver incredible quality today, and many printers ship with decent profiles for all of their own media. Most 3rd party media ship with profiles as well. Today we have $500 devices that make darn good printer profiles pretty quickly. And, of course the average person's knowledge and understanding of color management is vastly, vastly improved thanks in large part to people like yourself. Most photo enthusiasts these days  know they need to calibrate their display and need to use good profiles when printing.

So I'd say there's a lot to celebrate - from a consumer perspective things are way better than they were in 1998. But of course, like many, I would have thought things would be even better than they are. Unfortauntely, relative to 1998 there isn't much money in color management - companies like XRite, Datacolor, etc can't invest the kind of resources that they could 10+ years ago. CM is a commodity now, not an exciting new frontier. I see the lousy calibration process in so many RIPs as one of the few remaining areas where developers can still contribute heavily too, and hope that happens soon. We'll see.

Regardless, the last 20 years, and the process of figuring this all out as we go, has been fun.
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digitaldog

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Re: Celebrating 20 Years of Color Management Consulting
« Reply #9 on: February 10, 2014, 06:16:24 pm »

Andrew - I agree that Adobe really hasn't given us much in Photoshop, at least since 6.0 especially. In fact, things have gotten worse in PS in many respects - 'No Color Management' has been removed and perfectly good custom printer profiles don't always show up in the Print dialog. Profiling CMYK Postscript laser printers and Greyscale processes is more difficult than ever. Arg!

Actually I don't believe we agree <g>. First off, Adobe has done quite a bit in terms of color management since Photoshop 6. We now have a far better way to handle scene referred raw data thanks to DNG camera profiles. We have a free product to both build and edit them thanks to Adobe. They have since provided new functionality in Convert to Profile allowing the use of LUT's and abstract profiles. It isn't anything I care about but it shows they are at least working to improve functionality. We have Lightroom which makes color management far easier has soft proofing, and a far, better environment for soft proofing and in handling output specific edits and on virtual copies too boot. And the Print module makes color management far easier. As for No Color Management in Photoshop, that was the right move to make IMHO. It just confused users. It only served two purposes, one being output of targets to build profiles which isn't and shouldn't be their responsibility. You can also thank Apple for them removing that feature as Apple kept screwing everything up from OS release to OS release. They could fix the scaling issue in the free Adobe Color Print Utility but seriously, to print such targets, it's X-rite and DataColor's job, not Adobe's.

Good custom printer profiles not showing up is a new one for me.

Quote
Unfortauntely, relative to 1998 there isn't much money in color management - companies like XRite, Datacolor, etc can't invest the kind of resources that they could 10+ years ago. CM is a commodity now, not an exciting new frontier. I see the lousy calibration process in so many RIPs as one of the few remaining areas where developers can still contribute heavily too, and hope that happens soon. We'll see.

Can't speak for Datacolor because they don't have any products I'd even look at! They did a pretty good job of copying other products and (OK I'll say it) ripping them off. Be it X-rite's Passport solution within LR (their implantation SpyderCal was simply silly), or Spydergallery (which doesn't appear to even work), SpyderCube which existed years before they even though about it (I believe Ken Boydston at Megavision produced a product just like it in the 90s), then they ripped off Michael Tapes with their SpyderLensCal product. So unlike X-rite, they get zero respect from this dog! They need to invest in some original ideas!

Meanwhile, we're still stuck at version 1.5 of i1Profiler, the big overhaul and uber color product to replace no less than two high end packages that remains buggy, has a pretty aweful UI and is missing a whole lot of functionality we had in ProfileMaker Pro/Profiler. Yes the color engine IS better. That was big news like 3+ years ago. They spent enormous engineering resources (and poorly) building XRD which serves end users nothing but headaches and zero benefits. And they have spent that little enginering resource creating products forthcoming that will likely be of little interest to this audience while leaving i1P rotting on the fine. They did a great job with the Passport and associated software. That's about the last good product they created for the photo market.

So my perspective is, there hasn't been much to celebrate in terms of color management in the last 10 years outside Adobe and partially X-rite. There are the little guys thankfully like Danny Pascale at BableColor and Robin Myers who brought us SpectraVision. Oh and Steve Upton who at least keeps ColorThink running and ocassionally fixes bugs. He's focused on Maxwell which is a very, very cool product but for a niche market that few at LuLa would look at or need. Few here need ColorThink, that's a color geek tool.

As for RIPs, not my expertise but they've traditionally been expensive, complext and a big PITA, no wonder there are entire color management consultants who specialize in that area alone. That's needed. I had my fill with ImagePrint back when it first came out on OS9 (nightmare) which was focused on the photo industry, my area of concentration.
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Scott Martin

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Re: Celebrating 20 Years of Color Management Consulting
« Reply #10 on: February 10, 2014, 07:07:20 pm »

Actually I believe we DO agree <g> LOL! Obviously, Adobe has done a lot for CM. If we consider the Camera RAW plugin as seperate from the PS application itself, and ACPU, and the DNG Profile Editor, not a *whole lot* has changed in the PS app itself since 6.0. The printer profile problem is a well documented bug that's being work on now, FWIW. Lightroom really does illustrate how the whole workflow could be (and was) re-imaginged, and it's wonderful....

When we look at it from a common end-users perspective, things have improved alot. I'm glad the profiles in i1Profiler are much better than what we had before, even if the geek tools aren't there. Us color geeks will always be frustrated that we don't have better tools (or even the same tools!), I'm afraid. We just aren't the target audience. I can accept that. I care more about my client's well being than my own.

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Scott Martin
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digitaldog

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Re: Celebrating 20 Years of Color Management Consulting
« Reply #11 on: February 10, 2014, 07:10:26 pm »

I'm glad the profiles in i1Profiler are much better than what we had before, even if the geek tools aren't there.
Agreed altought there are still some functionality that's missing that's far from being geeky (the averaging of measured data comes to mind, the current 'implantation' compared to MT is awful). 
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Scott Martin

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Re: Celebrating 20 Years of Color Management Consulting
« Reply #12 on: February 10, 2014, 07:23:07 pm »

"implantation" - I love it!!
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Scott Martin
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digitaldog

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Re: Celebrating 20 Years of Color Management Consulting
« Reply #13 on: February 10, 2014, 08:01:10 pm »

"implantation" - I love it!!
Got to love the iPhone spell checker
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Schewe

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Re: Celebrating 20 Years of Color Management Consulting
« Reply #14 on: February 11, 2014, 12:10:56 am »

Lightroom really does illustrate how the whole workflow could be (and was) re-imaginged, and it's wonderful....


Well, if you like the way color management in LR "just works", you can thank two people...Mark Hamburg for listening to Bruce Fraser and making CM easy in LR and, of course, Bruce Fraser for bitching for years about how convoluted CM was in Photoshop :~)
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Alan Goldhammer

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Re: Celebrating 20 Years of Color Management Consulting
« Reply #15 on: February 11, 2014, 08:22:15 am »

And let us not forget Graeme Gill whose ArgyllCMS can do just about anything a photographer needs in terms of CM (though to be sure it's not particularly user friendly for those who don't know their way around the command line).
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Chris_Brown

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Re: Celebrating 20 Years of Color Management Consulting
« Reply #16 on: February 12, 2014, 08:45:11 pm »

IMHO, for 20 years, we haven't gotten much.

+1
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smilem

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Re: Celebrating 20 Years of Color Management Consulting
« Reply #17 on: February 22, 2014, 08:58:50 am »

I don't think we have anything to celebrate for, well maybe x-rite inventing xrga after 3 or 4 years after they purchased gretagmacbeth and uncovered that their etalons were different. Where were they 3-4 years?

It does take more than great color engine in i1profiler to make the software usable. And exchanging competitor logo to your own is not advancement. How about making fair prices for European customers, Dollar -> Euro by exchange rate, not same price in Dollars and in Euros for European customers. That would be a start.
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