COLOR

  • Is a MacBeth Colour Rendition Chart the Safest Way to Calibrate a Camera?

    www.colour-science.org/posts/the-colorchecker-considered-mostly-harmless/

     

     

    “Unless you have all the relevant spectral measurements, a colour rendition chart should not be used to perform colour-correction of camera imagery but only for white balancing and relative exposure adjustments.”

     

    “Using a colour rendition chart for colour-correction might dramatically increase error if the scene light source spectrum is different from the illuminant used to compute the colour rendition chart’s reference values.”

     

    “other factors make using a colour rendition chart unsuitable for camera calibration:

    – Uncontrolled geometry of the colour rendition chart with the incident illumination and the camera.
    – Unknown sample reflectances and ageing as the colour of the samples vary with time.
    – Low samples count.
    – Camera noise and flare.
    – Etc…

     

    “Those issues are well understood in the VFX industry, and when receiving plates, we almost exclusively use colour rendition charts to white balance and perform relative exposure adjustments, i.e. plate neutralisation.”

    ,
    Read more: Is a MacBeth Colour Rendition Chart the Safest Way to Calibrate a Camera?
  • HDR and Color

    https://www.soundandvision.com/content/nits-and-bits-hdr-and-color

    In HD we often refer to the range of available colors as a color gamut. Such a color gamut is typically plotted on a two-dimensional diagram, called a CIE chart, as shown in at the top of this blog. Each color is characterized by its x/y coordinates.

    Good enough for government work, perhaps. But for HDR, with its higher luminance levels and wider color, the gamut becomes three-dimensional.

    For HDR the color gamut therefore becomes a characteristic we now call the color volume. It isn’t easy to show color volume on a two-dimensional medium like the printed page or a computer screen, but one method is shown below. As the luminance becomes higher, the picture eventually turns to white. As it becomes darker, it fades to black. The traditional color gamut shown on the CIE chart is simply a slice through this color volume at a selected luminance level, such as 50%.

    Three different color volumes—we still refer to them as color gamuts though their third dimension is important—are currently the most significant. The first is BT.709 (sometimes referred to as Rec.709), the color gamut used for pre-UHD/HDR formats, including standard HD.

    The largest is known as BT.2020; it encompasses (roughly) the range of colors visible to the human eye (though ET might find it insufficient!).

    Between these two is the color gamut used in digital cinema, known as DCI-P3.

    sRGB

    D65

     

    , ,
    Read more: HDR and Color
  • Photography Basics : Spectral Sensitivity Estimation Without a Camera

    https://color-lab-eilat.github.io/Spectral-sensitivity-estimation-web/

     

    A number of problems in computer vision and related fields would be mitigated if camera spectral sensitivities were known. As consumer cameras are not designed for high-precision visual tasks, manufacturers do not disclose spectral sensitivities. Their estimation requires a costly optical setup, which triggered researchers to come up with numerous indirect methods that aim to lower cost and complexity by using color targets. However, the use of color targets gives rise to new complications that make the estimation more difficult, and consequently, there currently exists no simple, low-cost, robust go-to method for spectral sensitivity estimation that non-specialized research labs can adopt. Furthermore, even if not limited by hardware or cost, researchers frequently work with imagery from multiple cameras that they do not have in their possession.

     

    To provide a practical solution to this problem, we propose a framework for spectral sensitivity estimation that not only does not require any hardware (including a color target), but also does not require physical access to the camera itself. Similar to other work, we formulate an optimization problem that minimizes a two-term objective function: a camera-specific term from a system of equations, and a universal term that bounds the solution space.

     

    Different than other work, we utilize publicly available high-quality calibration data to construct both terms. We use the colorimetric mapping matrices provided by the Adobe DNG Converter to formulate the camera-specific system of equations, and constrain the solutions using an autoencoder trained on a database of ground-truth curves. On average, we achieve reconstruction errors as low as those that can arise due to manufacturing imperfections between two copies of the same camera. We provide predicted sensitivities for more than 1,000 cameras that the Adobe DNG Converter currently supports, and discuss which tasks can become trivial when camera responses are available.

     

     

     

    , ,
    Read more: Photography Basics : Spectral Sensitivity Estimation Without a Camera
  • Björn Ottosson – How software gets color wrong

    https://bottosson.github.io/posts/colorwrong/

     

    Most software around us today are decent at accurately displaying colors. Processing of colors is another story unfortunately, and is often done badly.

     

    To understand what the problem is, let’s start with an example of three ways of blending green and magenta:

    • Perceptual blend – A smooth transition using a model designed to mimic human perception of color. The blending is done so that the perceived brightness and color varies smoothly and evenly.
    • Linear blend – A model for blending color based on how light behaves physically. This type of blending can occur in many ways naturally, for example when colors are blended together by focus blur in a camera or when viewing a pattern of two colors at a distance.
    • sRGB blend – This is how colors would normally be blended in computer software, using sRGB to represent the colors. 

     

    Let’s look at some more examples of blending of colors, to see how these problems surface more practically. The examples use strong colors since then the differences are more pronounced. This is using the same three ways of blending colors as the first example.

     

    Instead of making it as easy as possible to work with color, most software make it unnecessarily hard, by doing image processing with representations not designed for it. Approximating the physical behavior of light with linear RGB models is one easy thing to do, but more work is needed to create image representations tailored for image processing and human perception.

     

    Also see:

    https://www.pixelsham.com/2022/04/05/bjorn-ottosson-okhsv-and-okhsl-two-new-color-spaces-for-color-picking/

    Read more: Björn Ottosson – How software gets color wrong

LIGHTING