Category Archives: professional

Invitation for papers on colour theory

I am one of the editors of JAIC – the Journal of the International Colour Association. Next year we are planning a special issue of papers about colour theory. One of the good things about JAIC is that it is a journal in which it is free to publish and free to read. So if you want to read some really good colour content please take a look at it here.

However, next year we are having an issue that will collate papers about colour theory. For this special issue we have appointed the renowned colour expert Robert Hirschler as the guest editor. The call for papers is already open (deadline next August) so you can already submit your papers. To do so please click on the link to the special issue where you will find more information.

A route to better colour knowledge

I have been providing free information about colour on the internet since … well, almost since the internet existed! My posts here on colourchat have received over 300,000 views from more than 200,000 people. But before I ran this blog I ran something called an FAQ. FAQs were on the internet long before blogs and my colour physics FAQ was available for free for decades, providing free information about colour measurement to anyone who was interested. I have also contributed to TheConversation and my post there the effect of colour on our bodies and minds is the 7th most read article on TheConversation by anyone at the University of Leeds with about 170,000 reads. I am passionate about colour education and I am part of the colour literacy project.

Recently I had the idea to generate even better content that can educate about colour and to this end I started a patreon page. For some of this content I am charging a couple of dollars per month for access. But the idea is to generate some funds to allow the highest quality colour education material to be developed. That’s my dream anyway. If you would like to support me doing this – and also see the material that is being developed – please think about supporting me at the patreon website.

Whatever happens I will continue to keep this Colourchat resource free and will post here as often as I can.

Colour in Fashion

For our sixth episode of our colour podcast we chatted about colour in fashion covering colour forecasting and the future of fashion. We brought in a guest, Caroline Hemingray, who leads the MA in Fashion Marketing at the University of Leeds. It’s mainly for fun – and as an educational resource – but I hope you find it interesting. You can see the podcast here.

What colour does a red apple reflect?

It might seem a strange question but this is a question I answered on quora today. You can read the full answer here. However, in short, it is not simply the red wavelengths. Below you can see the light reflected by a typical red object such as an apple.

You can see that the apple reflects quite broadly between about 550 and 600nm. That includes all of the wavelengths we associate with yellow and orange as well as red. The apple even reflects nearly 10% of the light at 400nm (which we normally associate with blue) that falls upon it.

Colour is complex. You need to understand stuff way beyond the spectrum of light to understand colour.

AIC2017

There is still time to submit an abstract for AIC2017 which will be held this autumn in Jeju island in South Korea. It’s probably the largest colour conference of the year and every four years they have an especially large one called the congress. We hosted the last congress in UK but this time it is the turn of South Korea. If you can attend this conference I highly recommend it as a way to meet all sorts of interesting and colourful people.

accurate colour on a smartphone or tablet

Electronic displays can vary in their characteristics. Although almost all are based on RGB, in fact the RGB primaries in the display can vary greatly from one manufacturer to another. Colour management is the process of making adjustments to an image so that colour fidelity will be preserved. In conventional displays – desktops and laptops – the way this is achieved is through ICC colour profiles. Colour profiles store information about the colours on a particular device that are produced by RGB values on that device. So to make a display profile you normally need to display some colours on the screen and measure the CIE XYZ values of those colours; you then have the RGB values you used and the XYZ values that resulted. The profiling software can use these corresponding RGB and XYZ values to build a colour profile so that the colour management engine knows how to adjust the RGB values of an image so that the colours are displayed properly. Building a profile often requires specialist colour measurement equipment – though this can often be quite inexpensive now. If you are using your desktop or laptop display and you have never built a profile then you are probably using the default profile that was provided when your display was shipped. The default profile will ensure some level of colour fidelity but particular settings (such as the colour temperature or the gamma) may not be adequately accounted for. If you want accurate colour then you should learn about colour profiling.

It all sounds simple except for the fact that ICC colour profiles are not supported by iOS or Android operating systems on mobile devices. I find this really surprising but that’s how it is for now. Maybe it will be different in the future.

This means that ensuring colour fidelity on a smartphone or tablet is not so straight forward. So what can you do?

Well, there are two commercial solutions to this problem that I am aware of. They are X-rite’s ColorTrue and Datacolor’s SpyderGallery. ColorTrue and SpyderGallery are apps that will use a colour profile and provide good colour fidelity. These are great solutions. Perhaps the only drawback is that the colour correction only applies to images that are viewed from within the app. Having said that, they allow your standard photo album photos to be accessed – but the correction would not apply, for example, to images viewed using your web browser. This is why a proper system implemented at the level of the operating system would be better, in my opinion.

There are two alternatives. The first would be to implement your own colour correction and modify the images offline before sending them to the device. This would not suit everyone – the average consumer who just wanted to look at their photos for example. But it is what I typically do here in the lab if I want to display some accurate colour images on a tablet. But if you were a company and you wanted to display images of some products for example – it might be a reasonable approach. It has the advantage that the colour correction will work when viewed in any app on the device because the colour correction has been applied at the image level rather than the app level. But it does mean you need to do this separately for each device and keep track of which images are paired to each device. This is ok if you have one or a small number of devices but maybe not so good if you have hundreds of devices.

The second alternative would be to build your own app. If you want to do things with your images that you cannot do in ColorTrue or SpyderGallery or if you have lots of devices and you can’t be bothered to manually convert the images for each device, then you could install your own app that implements a colour profile and then does whatever else you want it to do.

curved displays are the future

samsungevent

Yesterday I spoke an an event to launch Samsung’s latest curved screen displays. The technology is really gorgeous and everyone who attended was wanting one of the new displays after seeing them.

I am convinced that curved screens will become ever more popular in the future because not only do they look good but they offer serious advantages for users who undertake intensive tasks – the sort of tasks that need a large desktop display rather than a mobile device. When it comes to desktop displays it is really quite simple – bigger is better.

Many people – and I am one of them – are what is known as ‘double screeners’. I have two screens attached to my desktop and my operating system is spread seamlessly across them because I wanted more screen space to work in. I recently carried out a survey – you can find more details here – which showed that 38% of British office workers are already using two or more screens attached to their desktop computers.

Of course, in an ideal world one very large screen would be better than two smaller screens. But there is a problem with most flat-screen technology which is that the LED/LCD pixels emit light straight out but emit a lot less light at an angle to the screen. This means that you look at a large flat screen the light reaching your eye from the edges of the screen is a lot less. Not only that but, because you are looking at the screen at an angle, text and other fine details can be distorted at the edge. Curved displays get around this problem and I am hoping to replace my two flat screens soon with a single Samsung curved display.

With a curved display the distance from the eye to the screen is the same across the whole display and the angle of view is also constant. Not only does this solve the colour and acuity problems I just mentioned but it means that users need to need fewer eye and neck movements. Given that many of us spending longer using a display than we do actually sleeping this could have a big effect on user well-being.

Our survey also showed that about 60% of office workers think it is important that the office technology they use looks good. This can help to motivate them and help them to feel good about themselves. The new Samsung curved displays certainly will satisfy these people.

colour and brand identity

union-jewellery-boxes

Just read a really informative article by David Airey – an independent brand identity designer – about colour and brand identity. In his article David reiterates some ideas I heard from Laura Hussey in Design Week (and recently blogged about); that is that some companies such as Oxfam and The Guardian are rebranding with a rainbow colour palette. As David writes: “Multiple colours speak of choice, variety and diversity. Think Google, NBC, eBay, or MSN to name but a few that use more than two colours to express their breadth.”

However, David’s post goes further to describe some of his own work with Halcyon coffee and the use of a range of different colours: “The colours used within the brand and environment were derived from, and act as a subtle nod towards the diverse colour palette used during Britain’s great creative periods of the past — our Halcyon days, mixed with those we see around us today.” Definitely worth having a read of David’s article