True Accurate color is often not pleasing color.
Let me see if I can succinctly provide guidance between color accuracy and pleasing color.
Pleasing color has one goal: make color that is pleasing. Usually to the image creator. It has nothing really to do with color accuracy both in its goal and in how it is reported.
Pleasing color IS subjective. We cannot measure nor report how pleasing the color is to anyone.
Color Accuracy is not ambiguous, the results are based on measurements and analysis whereby the accuracy of two colors, the color photographed at the scene, and some resulting digital color number, output somewhere, are compared. Then an accuracy metric (deltaE) can be provided. Stating the accuracy between two solid colors is a dE 2000 of 4 is just as precise as saying my backyard wall when measured, is 6 feet tall.
Accurate color is more often not pleasing to look at. Scene referred color is often very ugly and why it is output referred. Examples and explanation here:
http://www.color.org/ICC_white_paper_20_Digital_photography_color_management_basics.pdfPleasing color is simply arrived when someone states what they are seeing is pleasing.
Accurate color requires measurements and analysis and a numeric report of the accuracy.
I can measure the color of an object at the scene someone is photographing. I will get a spot measurement of one color. That one color may take up 000.1% of the resulting image or 100% of the resulting image. I can compare that measured number or many more, and the number or many numbers produced on the computer or resulting print and produce a color accuracy measurement. For each color, for an average of all the colors. And if that one color is say 1% of the image that tells us 1% about the color accuracy. We rarely see such images in photography.
We define all kinds of accuracy by measuring things: distance, height, weight, output of an illuminant, heat, and color. We don’t (we should not) subjectively report any of the above, we should measure them. We have instruments to do this. There is no need to assume or guess! There are reasons we use thermometers, rulers, and Spectrophotometers instead of assuming a measurement. Then stating incorrectly it is accurate by assumption.
If you pay to have a wall built in your back yard, and you ask for it to be 6 feet tall, you can buy a $3 wooden ruler at Home Depot and measure that wall. If you find it is 6 feet 1/2 inch tall, you know the accuracy in how tall it was built. You might use a far more expensive laser measuring device and find it is 6 and 5/1000th of a foot but if your goal is a 6 foot wall not costing tens of thousands of dollars for the added accuracy, the first wall, and measuring device are fine for the task. If the wooden ruler shows the wall is 5 feet, you need to decide about having a conversation with the builder! 5 feet or 5 feet 1/10000 of an inch, something is wrong.
The third category is a tough one: Matching Color. It’s very, very hard to do in many cases. It takes a bit of pleasing color and maybe accurate color into this mix.
You shoot a Macbeth 24 patch target. The goal is a print from an Epson that matches it. The colors might be accurate (color in equals color out) but probably not. Some color patches may match, and some patches may not. Because of a slew of issues: the illuminant and its spectrum, the illuminant and it’s interaction with OABs in that paper. The white of the paper. The surround in which both the target and print are viewed. The observer (maybe he/she has cataracts, is red/blue color-blind), the issues of both observer metameric failure and other metameric failure in the process from capture to print. Digital cameras do not ‘see’ and record color like humans do. Color Matching may require hugely inaccurate colors to produce a visual match!
There are photographers who take pictures and fewer that make pictures but everyone in these parts fancies themselves photographers. Some say they want “accurate color“ without understanding what they want. Or what they mean. Some understand they wish for pleasing color for them and hopefully their audience. Some buy into the marketing hype that someone is selling something and promising their product will produce “accurate color“ . And photographers who don’t understand this think they do want and need and should pay for “accurate color“ . Neither they nor the people selling this stuff can define what they mean by accurate color. So now *some* photographers here can see what a silly notion buying into that concept is. And why. And if they really do want accurate color, that they need measuring devices and software to report accurate color at the scene of capture and then thereafter.
I’ll submit again as I have in the past, and which some here admittedly forgotten: Most photographers simply desire and should attempt to produce pleasing color (or non color) rendering. That’s been the norm for the nearly 200 years of phtography.
