Color Management - A Brief History


Color Management ”A Brief History

In the years before the desktop publishing revolution, professional color systems were used in the creation and modification of high-quality printing and publishing. These methods for processing color relied on what is called a closed-loop system, the idea being that nothing ever escaped the system. No outside files were accepted, and no files were ever allowed to leave the system except in the form of separated film, ready for printing. Looking back, those were the good ol days when the reliability of color was ”mostly ” under control. These closed-loop systems were expensive, and compared to today s computers, very slow. But they worked, and the people who used them learned to trust them.

Desktop technologies created a distributed model for color production. Some of the work was done on a computer that wasn t connected to a prepress color system. It was the differences between systems ”different displays, different viewing conditions, and different software applications ”that created the need for color management.

Scientists went to work on the problem in the late 1980s, developing a model for color management that would eventually provide software tools to ensure that color would match, location-to-location and device-to-device. The first practical color management system, Apple ColorSync, arrived in 1991 and has undergone several significant improvements since. Over the years, Apple s ColorSync technology became the core of an industry-accepted method for managing color for computer displays, scanners , and various printing technologies. This method has been adopted by most professional software applications ” including Adobe Photoshop. Today most computers and operating systems have a facility for color management, and most applications support color management. The challenge is setting it up correctly and getting it to work.

In the fall of 1998, the Adobe Photoshop development team rocked the design and printing community with a completely new outlook on color. The release of Photoshop 5 got the attention of all color practitioners in the digital imaging world. Prior to Photoshop 5, the color in an image was limited to the color available on the display, which proved to be a severely limiting factor in imaging.

Photoshop 5 removed that limitation, and created a new component to images handled by Photoshop.




Photoshop CS Savvy
Photoshop CS Savvy
ISBN: 078214280X
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2004
Pages: 355

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