Friday 23 April 2010

What colour is it?

I have always been fascinated, or you could call it confused, by colour representation and reproduction. What is all this about colour gamuts?

It seems that there are colours we can't see on our Red-Green-Blue computer screens and colours we can't print in the simple Cyan-Magenta-Yellow-Black printing process. The problem is translating the colour we see by light emitters, your computer screen, and light reflectors, the printed page.

So here is a great diagram I found recently (at arstechnica) which shows the different capabilities of different colour spaces

Screen shot 2010-04-23 at 09.33.27.png


What you see is the enclosed space that different colour reproduction capabilities can show. sRGB is one of the most common capabilities of digital cameras. As you see it is much wider than the capability of your CMYK printer, that's why your lovely colour photos do not print out so well, and look all washed out, especially for the deep reds and greens.

I quote all this because to day no one makes an RGB printer to match your RGB computer display, they all use CMYK. But Apple is proposing a CMYK screen using filters in place of light emitters.

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