Requirements for digital colour reproduction

Colour reproduction goals have traditionally been defined in terms of colorimetric, appearance-matching or preferred reproductions. In modern digital colour reproduction this paradigm is extended to include multiple reproduction goals for a single image, which transitions through a series of image states between initial capture and reproduction.

The impetus in colour reproduction today is towards a more idealised encoding of both source and destination data, and a workflow where a reference intermediate colour space links standard source encodings, with a well defined relationship to colorimetry or appearance, to a virtual printing condition, based closely on real-world media and reproduction gamuts.

Future colour reproduction systems must be standards-based where possible, and should support a highly flexible transform structure. They will need to go beyond the limitations of trichromatic colour matching for a fixed viewing condition and support multi-spectral colour reproduction, handling of high dynamic range image data, and be capable of applying appearance transforms to compensate for differences in viewing conditions. They will need to recognize the current ‘state’ of an image and process it accordingly. They will also need to handle multiple different rendering strategies to accommodate media and gamut differences, user preferences and so on. All this requires a dynamic and flexible colour reproduction architecture.