What Your Customers See
By Charlie Cho
Even before the Web, accurate color reproduction had long been a goal of the graphics and imaging industries. The e-commerce industry served as the catalyst for bringing accurate color display to the Internet user's browser. Various studies and surveys by market research firms indicate that discrepancies between what the customer sees and the actual product sold account for a large percentage of e-commerce returns, undermining consumer confidence in online commerce. Faithful color reproduction would be a boon to the Web overall, benefitting academic and artistic endeavors in addition to commercial ventures.
Inherent Problems in Color Rendering
Every input and output device has peculiarities in how it perceives or displays color. Different monitors, video cards, even room lighting, cause colors to be perceived differently. A certain monitor may emphasize blue hues more, or a particular scanner might produce greenish scans. Variations also occur between different units of the same product.
The solution, then, is to calibrate each individual device and create a profile of its color characteristics. The International Color Consortium (ICC) profile specification provides an open standard for sharing color profiles across applications and platforms, and is already in widespread use among graphics professionals. Color engines like Apple's ColorSync account for the profiles of the image source and the target device, and adjust the colors so they display accurately.
