Processing Digital Color Images: From Capture to Display

DEC 01, 1992

Because the devices jn an electronic imaging system represent color in different ways, getting them to communicate in a manner that preserves color fidelity and is transparent to the user is a challenging task.

DOI: 10.1063/1.881325

Jan P. Allebach

Color is a vital part of our everyday experience. It provides essential cues about our environment, adds aesthetic value to the world around us and even has a strong effect on our mood. Yet the role of color in this age of electronic information processing is surprisingly incomplete. We use color in separate and isolated systems and have no way to connect them. We photograph our families and look at the prints in albums; we view time‐varying color images on our television sets; we sit in front of computer monitors that display multicolor windows and icons and perhaps some color pictures. How do we take the family photographs and display them on our televisions, or grab snapshots from television broadcasts and put them into our personal computers, or combine those images with those in the photo albums and print them as color images in a newsletter? These scenarios and others that involve capture, manipulation and display or printing of color images in heretofore unimagined ways are becoming realized in the workplace and home thanks to digital color. (Figure 1 shows a monitor display of one of the window‐based products for processing digital color images, in this case Adobe Systems’ Adobe‐Photoshop.)

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More about the Authors

Jan P. Allebach. Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana.