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True Color in Real Time: The Challenge of Mobile Imaging
rocannon writes "A mobile phone with a color display and built-in camera - it's the quintessential info-imaging tool. But communicating accurate color at high-speed data rates and rendering color on displays that do not deliver even standard screen color rendition are still challenging. Kodak explains why photo and color science are as important as clock speeds and data rates in this expanding market."
Have a look at 10 years old pictures or printouts. Especially those exhibited to light. Make that 10 months for printouts.
Digital images aren't distorted, they just don't fit our colour perception. (AFAIK, among others, more a logarithmic scale in contrast to the linear used in digital images)
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Most geeks don't care about design/looks or anything else poingting in that direction. Geeks want features before fashion. Why should the geek care why the little distorted image looks like a smeared out stamp, the point is that the geek can take the picture, that's it, end of story. I've seen loads of cases when people spend a fortune on their computers and graphicscard. Monitor? The cheapest, biggest.. i.e sampo, samtron or hyundai. Big time degradation (spell) in image quality. On top of that, go buy a no name GeForce card and IT's like watching a TV from the late '80. Put a SONY screen with a Matrox card next to a Sampo with a noname geforce card... Yikes! Oh, I'm not a geek, i'm a perfectionist (spell)
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Not exactly... many films lean towards more green or red, and there are a lot more variables involved than the light source. Differences in developing can also make a very noticable difference in colour. Even so-called black and white images often have a green, blue or reddish cast to them. (I stare at photos all day at my job, professional and not.) The age and quality of the developing fluids, etc, all factor in. As someone who photographs a lot of artwork, I probably see this a bit more often than a lot of people. I usually have to take anywhere from 3-6 photos to get one that looks suitably like the original artwork. I often still have to digitally alter them once they're scanned, anyway. So as far as colour is concerned, I don't think the quality is any better between analog and digital, esp. for the average person (myself included) who doesn't do their own developing and doesn't have much more than a point-and-click knowledge of cameras.
I do agree with you that analog is still currently superior to digital, but that's mostly to do with the fact that the really impressive digital cameras are way beyond the price range of most people, and the less expensive ones leave enough to be desired that film still has the advantage.
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Because otherwise Kodak's business would suck. With this magical message, they can make use of this (System and method for generating a universal palette) (and the other 13696 Kodak patents ?
Skin tones are hard to do because the visual cortex is wired to recognise humans and spots inconsistencies pretty quickly. I've been working with a friend who produces MMS applications for the Nokia 7650.
One of the applications was a slot machine, and it looked great! The colors are simple, and it came out fine. A lot of the content of the internet is still made up of text and icons, which don't have very stringent requirements on color.
We're still going to see a lot of money being put into palletizing for swapping photos of family and loved (in oh so many ways) ones.
Johns: Well, how does it look now? Riddick: Looks clear.
It's all more videophone sillyness. Very low res, no focus, bad optics, no imaging options, 14kbit on most lines outside of huge cities, what's the point? I can take and email much nicer photos just fine with iPhoto and a real camera. This video cell phone thing is yet another attempt to catch star eyed gadgeteers in a trap of mediocrity for the sake of modularity. "The essence of a thing in its purest and most concentrated form?" Concentrated, maybe. Pure? Not half.
This is almost as dumb as "wireless web." WML sucks, guys. It's even more confusing that the regular web's interface, and 40% of people don't understand that. Combine it with the size limit on WML pages (1400 bytes is the max through tmobile's gateway, and the goddamn XML headers take up 100. Hell, this post wouldn't sneak in under 1300 characters!) and you've got a confusing, bland interface with no real data. Hardly the killer app that's going to change the world.
Give me a cell phone with no dumb games, a nice address book, sizable buttons, a clean look with no precarious plastic, plug & play USB interface that works with mac/linux/palm/pocketpc, and a phone plan that doesn't try to put its tongue in my ear every time I do something interesting and you'll have solved the cell phone puzzle. I'll gladly give you my $40 per month.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
Recently, Kodak image scientists developed a way to meet these goals by supplementing the distribution of the input colors with a distribution of selected "important" colors [5]. In particular, they found they could supplement skin tones by appending image skin-tone patches generated from a statistical sampling of the skin color probability density function. A major advantage of this approach is that explicit skin detection, which can be error prone, is avoided.
Sounds like this will be great for photographs of white people!
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Color mangement on PDA should be fundamentally very little different from color management on the desktop. There's should be very little new that Kodak or anyone else has to invent -- except for demand, and a sensible, standard way for device mfgs. and software vendors to solve the problem.
Color management on the desktop has already been solved, however it takes active intervention form the user to work and can be very confusing to acutally use. Apple does the best job with ColorSync, and MS is trying to catch up with ICM. Linux is a color management desert (far as I can tell).
If you use Photoshop on a Mac you can achieve a very successful color-managed workflow with very little work. It seems that the only geeks that care about color are prepress geeks. Nobody else seems to have a clue, so I'm glad Kodak is trying to prick up eveyone's ears.
In principal, the solution is simple. Use color profiles (ICC color profiles). Profiles describe how a device's colors (rgb 255,0,0) for example, map to a "real" color defintion--defined using a device-independent color space.
You need:
1. A profile for the display device.
2. An image file with an attached profile -- often called a "source profile".
3. A "color management engine" that creates the best approximation in the display devices color model of the image based on a "rendering intent" -- usually "perceptual", "relative colormetric", "absolute colormetric", etc.
The problem is that the only way to get truly relaiable profile for a display device is to put an instrument with a suction cup on your monitor and measure the monitor's actual performance. Or, for a printer, scan a print of an IT-8 test pattern into color profile building software. While Windows and Mac OS (9 and X) have buit in support for most of the color workflow, the colorimiters and profile-building software are expensive.
Unless PDA's start coming with mini suction-cupped colorimiters, then the best anyone can do is guess. Just like the sRGB profile which assumes that everyone has an old crappy monitor. That or someone will invent a way to manufacture LCD displays so that every display has exactly (in terms of statistical signifigance) the same color rendering performance, degrading predictably over time.