Once again, great questions and comments. I will try to address each in turn. I am sure that my answers will raise more questions and comments.
Thank you, dwm1953. It is true that new technology is often greeted with skepticism at first. I recall in 2000, when I was a technical-rep for a digital camera-back manufacturer, introducing digital cameras to reluctant professional commercial photographers. Now digital cameras outsell film cameras. Opinions change quickly. I appreciate this forum as an opportunity to share information.
“You provide anecdotal justification for the hypothesis but no real scientific explanation.” The scientific explanation is simple; we observed a well documented problem, devised a theory to solve the problem and tested (and tested and tested). In short, DCF Full Spectrum is our proprietary color specification model designed to overcome color deficiencies identified by means of a full-blown psychophysical analysis of color difference between two color systems, RGB and human color perception. It is a color appearance model, or what I have earlier referred to as a palette of colors. To address the concerns of 61 Dynamic, DCF Full Spectrum is entirely device independent and will work with any color space. It does not alter balance, exposure or color settings.
I first noticed a deficiency in digital capture in 1998 at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University working on one of the first large-scale digitization and preservation projects in the country. Over the course of two years, along with two other photographers, cataloguers, technicians, administrators, and museum staff, we set about the ambitious task of digitizing the entire collection of the museum, over 25,000 works of art. Scanning and quality checking over 65 high resolution images a day in a fully color managed environment, I began to notice that digital capture had a difficult time reproducing certain hues, regardless of the attention spent on proper balance and exposure, and regardless of the calibrated monitors and daylight balanced full spectrum lighting. It was curious, because I could create all the colors on the computer (I remember plotting colored points using Basic in junior high school), but the camera/monitor system could not properly characterize wram greens, deep blues, indigos and of course, purple.
Robin Myers, inventor of ColorSync confirms this observation in a very good article about the digital reproduction of art in which he notices a problem with reproducing cobalt blue,
http://www.betterlight.com/pdf/whitePaper/...urate_photo.pdf. In this article, he addresses 61 Dynamic’s question regarding what the camera actually records. Mr. Myers states that “The basic camera sensor is panchromatic.” A sensor quantifies all wavelengths of light, using filters to limit the sensitivity of a sensor to certain portions of the spectrum. The sensor itself does not see colors; it quantifies volumes of light data. The RGB colors that you see on your screen are mapped using CIE colorimetry.
Charles Poytnon, Fellow of the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers and author of the ubiquitous ColorFAQ and GammaFaq explains, “Color in the real world is best described in terms of distribution of power across the spectrum of visible light. Human vision maps these power distributions into sensory values, then processes these signals at successively higher and higher levels. The famous CIE color matching functions define the mapping from spectral power distributions (SPDs) to tristimulus values; these values are then the basis of color systems used for measurement and image coding. However, psychophysical data has now revealed the "cone fundamentals" that are taken to be the raw spectral sensitivities of human vision. The cone fundamentals don't quite match the CIE color matching functions,” or more simply, “Existing, practical cameras and scanners have spectral responses that don't closely resemble either the cone fundamentals or transformations of the CIE color matching functions. Therefore, these cameras see some colors differently from the way that vision sees those colors.” -
http://www.poynton.com/notes/bio/goals.html DCF Full Spectrum does not create something out of nothing; it remaps data quantified by the sensor. As dmw 1953 states, this is nothing magical; it just hadn’t been done before. Maybe my explanation has provided insight as to why. Certainly if you want to manually color match individual colors using an image editor, there are a million ways to do this. DCF Full Spectrum is a comprehensive automatic solution to an industry wide problem so you don’t have to.