This was the 6 th annual conference on color in imaging. It was perhaps the best. The attendance was a little lower than in past years, a reflection of the uncertainty in the desktop publishing markets, but the quality of the attendees was a bit higher. This meeting remains the premier conference for technology advancements in color imaging and color reproduction.
I attended two tutorials on the first day, both related to evaluation of the quality of color printing. The first class, Color Quality in Desktop Printing, was given by Gabriel Marcu of Apple Computer Corp. It emphasized the many variables that are present when trying to transfer an image from a CRT display to a process color, desktop printer. Marcu is an expert on gamut mapping, and that was the strongest section of the tutorial. The second tutorial, Color Fidelity Testing, was given by Michael Stokes of Hewlett-Packard and co-authored by Tom White of Microsoft Corporation. This was a much broader based session and identified a series of methods that can be used to evaluate the color fidelity of printing. Many of the methods were visual rather than instrumental, since most of Hewlett-Packard's customers do not have color measuring equipment. HP and Microsoft are preparing a test suite of images to be supplied to customers and vendors to use in evaluating the quality of the color imaging in devices used under Microsoft Windows. Windows98 will automatically use a color management scheme known as sRGB, which was invented by HP and Microsoft. The test images will verify that the color management system is working correctly.
The main part of the conference was broken into ten separate sessions on ten different technical areas. The first session was on the Human Visual System. The keynote speaker was Nobel laureate David H. Hubel from Harvard University. He presented an excellent overview of the physiological mechanisms of primate color vision (with occasional references to cats). He described it as his one-semester course on neurophysiology compressed into 45 minutes. He made many interesting points and gave a remarkable demonstration, where he stood before the audience, dressed in a yellow shirt and red tie. He then had the projectionist put in a slide that was a strong red filter. The shirt was visible, but the tie had very poor color fidelity. The projectionist then replaced the red filter with a strong blue filter, and the red tie appeared black while the yellow shirt was dark. The red tie was obviously not reflecting any blue light.