May 2, 2007: Tired of messing with pesky printer settings to get your photos to look right? Longing for a simpler method of color management?  According to the New York Times, Xerox may have your answer:

To the human eye, that flower in the photo is reddish orange, that sky is light blue, that sun shines brilliant yellow.

But when software tells a printer to reproduce that image, it uses a long, unwieldy set of numbers and letters to describe those colors — and a totally different set of characters to describe shades that are a tad lighter, or a bit darker, or a whole lot brighter. The upshot is that most laymen would have to attend the computer equivalent of Berlitz to learn how to get the shades they want.

But if Xerox has its way, that will not be true much longer. This week the company introduced the software equivalent of a translator that can turn plain color speech into fluent computerese. Type the command, “Make the sun a brighter yellow,” and the printer will read, “Go with color CIELAB[88, -3, 64].”

“You shouldn’t have to be a color expert to make the sky a deeper blue or add a bit of yellow to a sunset,” said Geoffrey Woolfe, a principal scientist in the Xerox Innovation Group, who is based in Webster, N.Y., near Rochester. “So we’re providing that middle layer that turns plain speech into mathematical code.”

Color experts are already impressed. “They’ve taken common words and modifiers and transformed them into mathematical directions,” said Roy S. Berns, a professor of color science at the Rochester Institute of Technology, which has just inaugurated a doctoral program in color science.

Now, if only they could get something like this going for digital camera, we’d be in business. I could just tell my Canon “take better pictures” and my photography would immediately improve! Of course, I can’t get my partner or kids to listen to me, so I bet my technology is going to be stubborn, too.

Scott

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