Some ill-formed thoughts about colour and the near future

[susie_flo]

Last night I had this thought...   as the E-Ink technology (used by the Sony Reader) moves on to include full colour capability, computer monitors will cease to be backlit and could start to behave more like paper.   So, theoretically, it ought to be possible to represent colours on screen far more acccurately than ever before, in terms of the exact hue, value and chroma of the colour, with no backlighting to take into account. 

So I started to wonder - wouldn't it be great if html colour tags were replaced by, say, the Munsell notation system, whereby exact colours are described in terms of all three variables (hue/value/chroma) and then represented accurately on screen?   Furthermore, if industries all began to adopt the same notation standards...  your wall paint, car, furniture, shoes, clothes, etc. could all be categorised by their exact Munsell colours.  Then you would be able to select any colour in any web page and say "find me paint in this colour" or even "find me shoes that are complementary to this dress".

Well, it's a nice idea anyway...  (tecchie bods, feel free to point out why this is complete nonsense)

Here's more about Munsell:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Munsell_color_system

 

Comments

[steer.livejournal.com]

I think that system can directly translate to an RGB (Red-green-blue) value which is what html colour tags become. In other words, I think we already use a system like this.

The problem is that given an RGB triple which specifies a colour, all computers render it differently -- after all, the computer doesn't know what the monitor you're sending to is actually doing and you may have fiddled with brightness, colour, contrast controls and so on.

[the-meanest-cat.livejournal.com]

Maybe you're right... I thought Munsell was the only one that fully dealt with Chroma as well as Hue and Value, but if there is a direct mapping between RGB and Munsell, at the same level of granularity, then I am probably talking bollox.

I know that the quality of the individual monitors would still be an issue... I just thought that the new e-Ink technology would have a more fighting chance for all-round colour accuracy.

[steer.livejournal.com]

I'm not really sure because I don't understand e-ink.

In printing there is a big (and slightly weird) issue that I don't understand that commercial printers use CMY not RGB.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CMYK

This is something to do with dithering and weird stuff about how the colours actually get on the paper.

[the-meanest-cat.livejournal.com]

If they could all map to each other (with no loss of nuance or accurately) I spose it would not matter too much. (Says she, with a blithe lack of awareness of the years of research and invention that have got things to work thus far)

I just want the scientists to sort it all out for me so I can have the right colours on my lovely inky screen.

[kissmeforlonger.livejournal.com]

Ooooh - printing :-)

Surely if one method uses additive colours and the other uses subtractive colours, it's going to be hard to match them up?

[the-meanest-cat.livejournal.com]

What would be good is if the 'end results' of all of these systems were in sync - e.g. take CYM as an example - it would be good if printers (via whatever method works for printers) could recognise and accurately reproduce the exact same hue/value/chroma as a specific colour that has been described by the Munsell or RGB notations. And vice versa.

It would require all of the systems to be mappable at the same level of granularity, which may be totally unfeasible (as you may guess, I have no idea what I'm blithering on about)

Really I just want someone else to crack it, so that one day soon I can surf the web with my lovely inky screen that is 100% accurate and come across a banner with a nice coloured background and say to myself "ooh, I want a rug in that colour", and then click on a link to find where I can buy one in that exact colour... type thing. I don't want much y'know...

[steer.livejournal.com]

You would have thought that but apparently no. It's something to do with dither and halftone. It means there's no real way to get a proper convert between it all for reasons I don't understand properly.

Hold on, why am *I* telling you this? You're Ms Printing 1997. Don't you have a degree in this.

It's an issue for something like the GIMP photo manipulation program which is RGB and hence not suitable for professional standard printing because the colours are a little bit off. So I'm told by people who know.

[the-meanest-cat.livejournal.com]

Hey - I had an even better idea.

Get rid of printing and just use portable e-ink screens that are 'waffeur thin' for everything. That would be cooooooool!

[steer.livejournal.com]

They're so great. I really want a good quality e-book device with no DRM.

I think gothgrr might get upset if you suggest doing away with printing though.

[the-meanest-cat.livejournal.com]

Well, I don't mean we should stop printing books and things like that. (Even if I get an e-book device, I could not bear to part with my lovely real-life volumes on shelves.)

But for holiday snaps, documents and everyday things that you would usually print out on A4 or A3, we could just stop bothering and use inky screeny goodness instead.

[kissmeforlonger.livejournal.com]

I would so miss books if I had to have a portable reader. There's something lovely about them as a physical object.

Just think, if they went, there'd be an even bigger excuse for builders to give us smaller and smaller houses with less and less storage space :-(

[kissmeforlonger.livejournal.com]

I do have a degree in it, with distinction no less, but it didn't go that deeply into the technical aspects of colour matching print and screen.

Trying to explain to people why you couldn't get consistency with this was how I spent most of the late 90s :-(