SCALE 8x: Color management for everyone

“On Sunday at SCALE 8x, Inkscape developer Jon Cruz presented a
talk entitled “Why Color Management matters to Open Source and to
You,” putting the need for color management into real-world terms
for the average Linux user, outlining current development work on
the subject at the application and toolkit levels, and giving
example color-managed workflows for print and web production. Color
management is sometimes unfairly characterized as a topic of
interest only to print shops and video editors, but as Cruz
explained at the top of his talk, anyone who shares digital content
wants it to look correct, and everyone who uses more than one
device knows how tricky that can be.

“”If you have eyes and a display, you need color management”

“Color management, broadly speaking, is the automatic
transformation of image colors so as to provide a uniformly
accurate representation across devices. This includes output-only
devices such as televisions and printers, as well as CRT and LCD
displays on which editing as well as final output is viewed. The
first problem is that every device is capable of generating a
different spectrum of colors — different hues, different
ranges of white-to-black values, and different degrees of
saturation. Collectively, the color capabilities of the device are
its gamut, which can be represented by a three-dimensional volume
in one of several mathematical color models (or “color
spaces”).”

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