Color Management: Why Bother?

Color Management: Why Bother?

It’s normal to wish Color Management would simply go
away. So many of us have produced footage with After
Effects for years and devised our own systems to manage
color through each stage of production. We’ve assumed,
naively perhaps, that a pixel is a pixel and as long as we
control the RGB value of that pixel, we maintain control
over the appearance of the image.
The problem with this way of thinking is that it’s tied to the
monitor. The way a given RGB pixel looks on your monitor
is somewhat arbitrary—I’m typing this on a laptop, and I
know that its monitor has higher contrast than my desktop
monitors, one of which has a bluer cast than the other if
I don’t adjust them to match. Not only that, the way that
color operates on your monitor is nothing like the way it
works in the real world, or even in a camera. Not only is
the dynamic range far more limited, but also an arbitrary
gamma adjustment is required to make images look right.
Color itself is not arbitrary. Although color is a completely
human phenomenon—“color” as such does not
exist except in our vision system and that of other higher
primates—it is the result of measurable natural phenomena.
Because the qualities of a given color are measurable
to a large degree, a system is evolving to measure them,
and Adobe is attempting to spearhead the progress of that
system with its Color Management features.