Real World Color Management, Second Edition

3. Color Management: How It Works

For 1400 years, reading Egyptian hieroglyphics was a lost art. In 1799, a chance discovery by a soldier in Napoleon’s conquering army changed all that. The Rosetta stone, as his find was named, allowed the brilliant French linguist Jean François Champollion to unlock the secret of hieroglyphics because it contained the same text in three different scripts, hieroglyphics, demotic script, and Greek, the last two of which were already known.

Depending on your background and training, RGB or CMYK numbers may seem about as comprehensible as Egyptian hieroglyphics: fortunately, thanks to the work of the CIE that we introduced in Chapter 1, color management is able to use the perceptually based CIE LAB and CIE XYZ color ...