What Is Color Management? | Hacker News Reader

What Is Color Management?

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99 pointsPascLeRasc11 comments

A more accessible blog post, also from Netflix, mentioned in the article: https://netflixtechblog.com/protecting-a-storys-future-with-...

Interesting to read this to see the Netflix perspective. My intro to colour management came from digital photography approx ten years ago, where the goal was 'ensure that colours in printed pictures look the same when printed as they do on the screen'.

Printing introduces an additional complexity to the already complex situation described in the OP. Specifically printers have different primary colours (cyan, magenta and yellow) to screens (red, green and blue) and colour is subtractive, so that adding all the colours makes darker results, unlike screens, where increasing the red, green and blue ultimately makes white (actually printers have to add black - the 'Key' in CMYK - to get true black). The colour management and calibration issues are conceptually similar, though.

Fun color-theory fact for those not familiar: the print primary colors are the inverse of the light primary colors.

Cyan is white without red (#00FFFF), magenta is white without green (#FF00FF), and yellow is white without blue (#FFFF00). We use these colors because pigment absorbs different wavelengths of light, so we start with white and absorb (i.e.subtract) different amounts of red, green, and blue (the components of human eye-sight) instead of starting with black and adding them!

As an added bonus fact, black is all of the pigments at the same time, so we can just add black ink to the lowest of all three numbers then add up as needed. The actual math is waaaaaay more complicated because sight, pigment, and light are are bananas more complicated, but that's the gist.

> Interesting to read this to see the Netflix perspective.

This isn't really a Netflix perspective. This is standard movie making 101 kind of information that Netflix just happened to have written down in an accessible way (at least for well funded productions where you can properly staff the required roles). This document writes down the basic conversation between a DP/DIT/editor/colorist should all have before the first frame is ever shot/cut/graded. Sadly, this doesn't always happen. How many Netflix productions must have had issues that they felt the need to produce this document?

It is interesting that the movie studio that is paying for the production is a very technically savvy studio and it is clear that they are trying to future proof their content. Based on this article alone, I would also assume that they have other articles dictating minimum resolutions/frame rates/etc that they will allow their content to be shot.

You want some really awful color management scenarios when it comes to printing? I cut my teeth (or I guess got them covered in cheap ink) developing a workflow for my college newspaper for better newsprint reproduction of photographs. The dot gain on that medium is insane, and trying to get color photos, or worse, arbitrary ads from local businesses, to print and not turn into mud was awful.

I recently found this guide on the fundamentals of color management very helpful. https://hg2dc.com/

What would it be like if our monitors had ambient light sensors so that they could calibrate their color balance to the surrounding room? The human eye tends to "calibrate" itself based on the average of the scene it's observing, so if you really wanted images to look the same on every display you would have to take that into account.

Isn't that what Apple's "True Tone" is about? (I just know of that one, but probably there's something similar on Android devices)

Professional productions can afford to simply work in dark rooms.

They have to calibrate for ambient light still. At least, that's true for radiology.

I'm a dark room lit only by other people's monitors, with each potentially having different scenes onscreen from moment to moment and thus ambient light varying all the time, that's a difficult/impossible thing to calibrate for manually and if automatically recalibrated by a monitor with ambient light sensors could potentially cause a vicious circle of autorecalibrations around the room

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