Why Desktop Color Still Sucks

By David Em

October 13, 2003

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When you display your digital images on a monitor, how do you know what you're looking at is an accurate representation of what you actually photographed or scanned? For most people, the answer is "You don't."

This is nearly criminal given that the last five years have ushered in a genuine revolution in desktop digital color. We now have stunning hi-res LCD panels, graphics cards that pack more silicon than the computers they're installed in, photo-quality printers, and digital cameras with more resolution than 35 mm film. But displaying consistent color on these sophisticated devices remains a dark art.

The Holy Grail of digital color is for everybody, not just dedicated color management professionals, to be able to work and play with color images easily and accurately across printing, video, web, and handheld devices. There are many color management schemes out there that attempt to do just this. All of them either fall short of the mark or require a significant enough investment of time and resources that they're impractical for most real people.

All the hardware and software to display digital color properly exists today. But it will take a commitment from the eight-hundred-pound gorillas of the industry such as Microsoft, Apple, and Hewlett Packard to implement a solution that really works, which so far they haven't done.

Why It's a Tough Problem

If "pretty much OK" color is Good Enough for you, read no further. Using default sRGB color or ICC (International Color Consortium) device profiles puts you in a reasonable ballpark that's probably at least as good as the 4" x 6" prints you get back from your local One Hour Photo. But if you want your digital images to be all that they can be, then Good Enough isn't nearly good enough.

Over the last couple years I've spoken to senior color experts from Epson, Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft, Xerox, Gretag-Macbeth, Pantone, and other players in the digital color arena. A consistent sentiment they've all expressed to me is that the more they learn about color, the less they seem to know.

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