Digital Color Management: Encoding Solutions, 2nd Edition

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A Unified Paradigm: Implementation

In this chapter, a number of alternative implementations of the Unified Paradigm will be discussed in a context based on one of several possible overall system architectures. The example architecture is straightforward and common to many existing color-management systems. However, while it can support the implementation of the Unified Paradigm, no architecture alone can create a Unified Paradigm system. As discussed in previous chapters, the properties and functionality of the Unified Paradigm result from its underlying philosophy and its methodology of representing color.

General architecture and components

The architecture that will be used in this chapter incorporates two basic components. The first component, a profile, contains a digital signal processing transform (or a collection of transforms) plus additional information concerning the transform(s), the device, and the data. Input profiles and output profiles provide the information necessary to convert device color values to and from values expressed in terms of a defined color encoding specification (CES). In any practical implementation, detailed format standards for these profiles must be available so that profiles from different providers can be used interchangeably. The second basic component, a color-management module (CMM), is a digital signal processing “engine” for performing the actual processing of image data through profiles. A CMM also may perform other computational ...