Java 2D Graphics

8.5. Putting It All Together

Most of 2D's color handling is behind-the-scenes work. You'll hardly ever need to deal with CIEXYZ or sRGB conversions yourself. You can control 2D's color handling with a rendering hint (see Chapter 5). The name of the hint key is KEY_COLOR_RENDERING. It has three possible values:

VALUE_COLOR_RENDER_QUALITY

With this hint setting, the 2D API will do its very best to represent colors correctly. The API accomplishes this by attempting to find a color profile for your screen. Every color that is shown will be converted to a color space constructed from this profile. The way that profiles are located depends on the underlying operating system.

VALUE_COLOR_RENDER_SPEED

This hint value specifies that 2D should render things speedily, not worrying about a screen profile. This means that sRGB colors will be transferred directly to an RGB screen, even though this is not quite a correct match.

VALUE_COLOR_RENDER_DEFAULT

This hint value tells 2D to do whatever it usually does for color rendering.

Remember, rendering hints are only suggestions. Even if you tell 2D to use the VALUE_COLOR_RENDER_QUALITY hint, you still might not get colors that have been corrected for a particular screen, for either of these reasons:

• If the 2D implementation doesn't support the color rendering hint, no color correction will be done.

• If 2D can't find a color profile for your screen, it can't do color correction.

The initial release of Java 2 does not do any special processing ...