Supporting "Good Enough" Colour Reproduction in Non-Colour Managed Workflow
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Willamowski, Jutta
Roulland, Frederic
Martin, David B.
In this paper we propose a novel and coherent approach to control and adjust colour reproduction where strict end-to-end colour management cannot be achieved. We first recall the studies and findings that identified the need to reconsider colour management in certain workflows. We then present in detail the Print Mediator system, constituting a first attempt to implement this new approach.
 So I'm going to present this work on supporting good enough color reproduction in non-color managed workflows, which is work that we have done in the work practice technology area at the Zerox Research Center Europe, which is located in Grenoble in the French Alps. And before going into more details, I would like to introduce the context of this work. So the context is in fact digital production printing with non-color managed workflows. So the case we are addressing is the case that we observe in reality very often is that documents are designed by document designers in working in non-color managed workflows, non-color managed environments. So in fact what they do, they design their documents, they focus on the design, the look and feel and then the attempt that is pursued with the document, but they just design it on their screen with the colors that they see. Then when they have finished designing the document, they submit it to a print shop and then they expect in return still to receive a document printout that looks like what they see on their screen, which is naturally very difficult to obtain. So they send this print shop to the print shop and then on the print shop this document is not really print ready. There are lots of color specifications which are missing. The print shop operator doesn't know which adjustment he might make and also if he observes color problems, he doesn't know how to prioritize solving them. So the result is that in fact there is a certain number of iteration cycles between the document designer and the print shop operator before a satisfying printout can be obtained. So the outline of my talk is as follows. First of all I'm giving quickly some motivations for our work. Then in the second part I'm going to present the solution we are proposing which is called print mediator. I'm going to give some details about the functionality and the underlying concepts and then I'm going to walk you through an example of the usage of the system and finally I'm going to wrap up. So the motivations as I said very often it's observed that document designers do not really use ICC color management. So we have done some studies which are referenced in the paper. So one thing you could ask yourself is is it something that you could easily change but you will say you will see that it's quite complicated because why is color management not used? It's not used because it requires for example regular calibration of all the other screens all the environment you are using. It requires controlled environment controlled lightning and it also requires an end-to-end implementation of color management because if you do a mistake at a given step then it's difficult to recover from there. Furthermore also color management is very abstract and complex to understand for people who are not specialists in color theory and color science because it's abstract and complex rather than tangible and graspable for designers for example. So this mismatches with the designers concerns and their activities and their understanding of color and it makes it very difficult for them to grasp the effects of color management controls on their designs. So they don't really know how to use color management they would like to switch it off instead of using it properly. So what we think is instead of I mean color management is something that is that is really needed so what we would like to do is to complement color management technology and to facilitate and enable using color management introducing it at a later stage. So more precisely at the stage where the document is going to be submitted to a print shop. So what we want to do is also to support the collaborative solving of color reproduction issues between the document designers and the print shop operators and therefore we want to first of all make the designer aware of print limitations because if he has included in his document colors that simply the printer cannot print because they out of the gamut then it's it would be nice already to tell him this before so that he can change maybe the colors in the documents in a way that they can be printed properly. Second we also want to make the print shop operator aware of the concerns at intense and priorities of the designer because then he can easily take the decisions without necessarily going back to the designer and discuss with him so he can then decide on proper corrections independently and finally also we want to provide a high-level interface to underlying color processing components which makes it then more easy to interact with such components and to modify the colors in the documents properly. So the solution we're proposing as I said is called print mediator and it's it should come into play at the at the moment when the designer has finished the design and wants to submit it to the print shop. So what it does first it retrieves the settings from the print queue of the printer where the document should be printed and then processes the document accordingly to this print queue and presents the designer with a comparative soft proof presenting side-by-side the original document and a soft proof of the printed version. Second it provides the designer with annotation capabilities so that the designer can specify regions where color is problematic and also specify the kind of color he desires in the output. And finally also we want to provide integration of problem detection and correction components so provide in somehow a high-level interface to underlying color processing components which will be accessible through a graphical user interface and also through natural language descriptions for example of color differences between the two versions of the document. We'll see this later in when we go through the example. So to sum up the functional layers of the system are first of all the comparative soft proof the comparative soft proof which allows to visualize side-by-side the original document on one hand and the generated soft proof on the other hand. So this will enable the user to visually assess color differences between the two versions. The second layer introduces annotation capabilities and these annotation capabilities will enable the user to indicate problematic areas in the document. We select it with the mouse for example and then specify what is the problem. He will specify the problem and the requirements he has with respect to the printout. And then third we also integrate problem detection and correction components which will then allow to indicate automatically possible color problems because they will compare the underlying numeric values in the two versions and see where there are great differences and signal them to the user. We will also provide a natural language interface to color processing components and these natural language interface will allow to describe the symptoms that one might observe and explain the causes why these differences made a call. We will also then guide the user in applying color processing components to solve color problems. So I just talked about symptoms, causes and solutions so I just want to specify a bit more what we understand by this. So first of all what are the symptoms? Symptoms are in fact user perceived color changes between the original and the soft proof. These might be either changes of a particular color throughout the whole document or it might be changes observed on particular objects and possibly on particular objects and their relations. For example you might have the case that in the input document you have specified several objects and they seem to have the same color but once they are transformed and the soft proof is generated they will be mapped to another color. So objects that seem to be the same color will now be of different color so this is something that might be very annoying and this is something that you want to signal in this case is observed. Possible causes for these symptoms will depend on the type of object for example depends if it's an image or if it's a colored block it might not be the same kind of cause and also the color specification that was used for these objects. The possible causes might also be related to a relation between the gamut of the document and the gamut of the printer because some colors might be outside the gamut of the printer so they will be necessarily problematic. Examples can be for example missing profiles in which case the system will use some default settings which might not be the correct ones. It might be also varying spot color tables for example spot colors which are defined in one way in the designer or in environment and in another way on the printer so they will come out differently or it might be out of gamut colors. Possible two solutions to such problems will be adapted to the particular combinations of symptoms and causes. For example you might specify profiles if they are missing you might modify color specifications or you might for example also change the printer if the out of gamut color is really important then you might choose another printer which can print this color properly. Once you apply solutions also you have to consider possible side effects because if you modify colors of some objects within a document then this might have some other effects on the surrounding objects for example and you might throw up new problems bring up new problems that you also have to solve again. So let's just go through an example to illustrate how the system works. So here we have a document that has been designed and it's ready to be submitted to a print shop. So the designer will go to print mediator and ask for the comparative soft proof. So what you have now is on the left hand side you have the original document on the right hand side you have the soft proof generated according to the print queue settings. So you see that there are some color differences. You can already from here the user can already specify differences but he can also ask the system to visualize what he has what the system has automatically detected. So therefore the system will map both versions in the LAV color space and compute differences between these versions. So what you see here is these all these rectangle areas are different between the input document and the soft proof and they have been signaled by the system. So now you see this little icon in the top left of the rectangle which allows the designer or the user to interact. So here we click on this small rectangle you see on the top right and you see that here the system says that the filled graphics here will be print a little darker much more colorful and very slightly less red and more yellow and this is somehow the translation in natural language of the LAV color difference observed between these two versions. So we have we work with collaborate with some researchers in the US and United States who have developed a program for natural language translation of color differences. You also have information about the reason for of this difference is because you can see here that the system has found that the specified this object is specified through a spot color but the spot color is specified differently on the designer environment and on the printer so that's why it comes out differently here. Now this is the user can say has first to say does this problem matter because sometimes the color is different but it's not important so you can just ignore it and sometimes even if the color is not very different might be really important. So in our case this is the user has said this is really an important difference and in our case this is really important because it's a company color and this is really necessary to correct this problem therefore. And finally you can have if there are some correction components available these can be directly integrated and the user can then from here activate such a correction for example in our case you could either ask the system to automatically select the closest printer spot color or he could go through an interactive spot color selection. So in this case the system will replace the color of the object and update the view and the user can go on. So we have developed this first prototype of the print mediator system and we asked ourselves then some validation questions and started to do some experiments to validate it. So the questions we want to answer the following first of all is the system usable is the comparative soft proof a usable thing in uncontrolled environments because as we said in the beginning users work in uncontrolled environments so if the system doesn't work then it's not very useful that's something that we really want to have. A second question is does the system sufficiently incite the user to the designers to specify color problems. A third question would be then the usefulness of annotations provided by the designer for the printer operators because if the printer operator do not know how to react on the annotations by the designers then it's also not very useful. And finally another question is then in the end what is the impact of the color corrections on the color quality of the printout because the aim is to reach much quicker a satisfying printout than before. So this is also something to verify. What we have done for the moment is that we have conducted a first experiment addressing the first question and this experiment involved 32 users with various profiles from designers to printers and also with various levels of understanding from the lay users to professional users. And we presented them with set of 12 documents with various characteristics and with various differences that occurred then and we tested the system on one side in controlled environment and on the other side in uncontrolled environment. So the outcome of these tests is in fact that the users perceived the differences in a coherent way. Never mind if they were designers or printers or never mind their level of experience or level of professionality. But the ways in which they describe the differences were more variable than what we expected but this is probably related to the fact that some are experts and some are lay users so they have much much more vocabulary with respect to color descriptions. And something that was highlighted by the experiment was that the user interaction design is really critical. So what we want to do is to present the user with detected differences but not to overwhelm him with thousands of differences and rather be able to filter out the ones that are really important. So to wrap up the problem that we have addressed is color reproduction in non-color managed workflows which is something that is not addressed by existing solutions like pre-flighting and soft proofing. In fact pre-flighting addresses rather the conformance of a document to a given standard and soft proofing really necessitates a controlled environment. So it doesn't address the same problems here. And the solution we have proposed is print mediator which is a system that mediates at two levels. First of all between the two workflow participants, the document designer and the print ship operator and second also between the human user and the underlying color infrastructure and the numerical representation of color. The current status is that we have developed a prototype and we have conducted a first validation experiment which seems encouraging. The next steps are to complete the validation and also to focus particularly on user interaction design. And that concludes the presentation. Thank you very much. I think there is time for one of two questions. Yes. It's PDF based. Yes. We developed it currently as a plugin. And we foresee to provide a web service for example that would be provided by the print shops because they have higher interest in in users submitting better documents so that they have easier work. Okay. Thank you again. You can.
 So I'm going to present this work on supporting good enough color reproduction  in non-color managed workflows, which is work that we have done in the work  practice technology area at the Zerox Research Center Europe, which is located  in Grenoble in the French Alps. And before going into more details, I would like  to introduce the context of this work. So the context is in fact digital  production printing with non-color managed workflows. So the case we are  addressing is the case that we observe in reality very often is that documents  are designed by document designers in working in non-color managed workflows,  non-color managed environments. So in fact what they do, they design their  documents, they focus on the design, the look and feel and then the attempt that  is pursued with the document, but they just design it on their screen with the  colors that they see. Then when they have finished designing the document, they  submit it to a print shop and then they expect in return still to receive a  document printout that looks like what they see on their screen, which is  naturally very difficult to obtain. So they send this print shop to the  print shop and then on the print shop this document is not really print ready.  There are lots of color specifications which are missing. The print shop operator  doesn't know which adjustment he might make and also if he observes color  problems, he doesn't know how to prioritize solving them. So the result is  that in fact there is a certain number of iteration cycles between the document  designer and the print shop operator before a satisfying printout can be  obtained. So the outline of my talk is as follows. First of all I'm giving  quickly some motivations for our work. Then in the second part I'm going to  present the solution we are proposing which is called print mediator. I'm  going to give some details about the functionality and the underlying concepts  and then I'm going to walk you through an example of the usage of the system  and finally I'm going to wrap up. So the motivations as I said very often it's  observed that document designers do not really use ICC color management. So we  have done some studies which are referenced in the paper. So one thing  you could ask yourself is is it something that you could easily change but you  will say you will see that it's quite complicated because why is color  management not used? It's not used because it requires for example  regular calibration of all the other screens all the environment you are  using. It requires controlled environment controlled lightning and it also  requires an end-to-end implementation of color management because if you do a  mistake at a given step then it's difficult to recover from there.  Furthermore also color management is very abstract and complex to understand  for people who are not specialists in color theory and color science because  it's abstract and complex rather than tangible and graspable for designers for  example. So this mismatches with the designers concerns and their activities  and their understanding of color and it makes it very difficult for them to  grasp the effects of color management controls on their designs. So they don't  really know how to use color management they would like to switch it off instead  of using it properly. So what we think is instead of I mean color management is  something that is that is really needed so what we would like to do is to  complement color management technology and to facilitate and enable using color  management introducing it at a later stage. So more precisely at the stage  where the document is going to be submitted to a print shop. So what we  want to do is also to support the collaborative solving of color reproduction  issues between the document designers and the print shop operators and therefore  we want to first of all make the designer aware of print limitations  because if he has included in his document colors that simply the  printer cannot print because they out of the gamut then it's it would be nice  already to tell him this before so that he can change maybe the colors in the  documents in a way that they can be printed properly. Second we also want  to make the print shop operator aware of the concerns at intense and priorities  of the designer because then he can easily take the decisions without  necessarily going back to the designer and discuss with him so he can then  decide on proper corrections independently and finally also we want to  provide a high-level interface to underlying color processing components  which makes it then more easy to interact with such components and to  modify the colors in the documents properly. So the solution we're proposing  as I said is called print mediator and it's it should come into play at the  at the moment when the designer has finished the design and wants to  submit it to the print shop. So what it does first it retrieves the settings  from the print queue of the printer where the document should be printed and  then processes the document accordingly to this print queue and presents the  designer with a comparative soft proof presenting side-by-side the original  document and a soft proof of the printed version. Second it provides the designer  with annotation capabilities so that the designer can specify regions  where color is problematic and also specify the kind of color he desires in  the output. And finally also we want to provide integration of problem  detection and correction components so provide in somehow a high-level  interface to underlying color processing components which will be  accessible through a graphical user interface and also through natural  language descriptions for example of color differences between the two  versions of the document. We'll see this later in when we go through the example.  So to sum up the functional layers of the system are first of all the  comparative soft proof the comparative soft proof which allows to visualize  side-by-side the original document on one hand and the generated soft proof on  the other hand. So this will enable the user to visually assess color  differences between the two versions. The second layer introduces annotation  capabilities and these annotation capabilities will enable the user to  indicate problematic areas in the document. We select it with the mouse for  example and then specify what is the problem. He will specify the problem  and the requirements he has with respect to the printout. And then third we also  integrate problem detection and correction components which will then  allow to indicate automatically possible color problems because they will  compare the underlying numeric values in the two versions and see where there  are great differences and signal them to the user. We will also provide a natural  language interface to color processing components and these natural language  interface will allow to describe the symptoms that one might observe and  explain the causes why these differences made a call. We will also then guide the  user in applying color processing components to solve color problems. So I  just talked about symptoms, causes and solutions so I just want to specify a bit  more what we understand by this. So first of all what are the symptoms?  Symptoms are in fact user perceived color changes between the original and the  soft proof. These might be either changes of a particular color throughout the  whole document or it might be changes observed on particular objects and  possibly on particular objects and their relations. For example you might have the  case that in the input document you have specified several objects and they seem  to have the same color but once they are transformed and the soft proof is  generated they will be mapped to another color. So objects that seem to be the  same color will now be of different color so this is something that might be  very annoying and this is something that you want to signal in this case is  observed. Possible causes for these symptoms will depend on the type of  object for example depends if it's an image or if it's a colored block it  might not be the same kind of cause and also the color specification that was  used for these objects. The possible causes might also be related to a  relation between the gamut of the document and the gamut of the printer  because some colors might be outside the gamut of the printer so they will be  necessarily problematic. Examples can be for example missing profiles in which  case the system will use some default settings which might not be the correct  ones. It might be also varying spot color tables for example spot colors which are  defined in one way in the designer or in environment and in another way on the  printer so they will come out differently or it might be out of gamut  colors. Possible two solutions to such problems will be adapted to the  particular combinations of symptoms and causes. For example you might specify  profiles if they are missing you might modify color specifications or you might  for example also change the printer if the out of gamut color is really important  then you might choose another printer which can print this color properly.  Once you apply solutions also you have to consider possible side effects  because if you modify colors of some objects within a document then this  might have some other effects on the surrounding objects for example and you  might throw up new problems bring up new problems that you also have to solve  again. So let's just go through an example to illustrate how the system  works. So here we have a document that has been designed and it's ready to be  submitted to a print shop. So the designer will go to print mediator and ask for  the comparative soft proof. So what you have now is on the left hand side you  have the original document on the right hand side you have the soft proof  generated according to the print queue settings. So you see that there are some  color differences. You can already from here the user can already specify  differences but he can also ask the system to visualize what he has what the  system has automatically detected. So therefore the system will map both  versions in the LAV color space and compute differences between these  versions. So what you see here is these all these rectangle areas are different  between the input document and the soft proof and they have been signaled by the  system. So now you see this little icon in the top left of the rectangle which  allows the designer or the user to interact. So here we click on this  small rectangle you see on the top right and you see that here the system  says that the filled graphics here will be print a little darker much more  colorful and very slightly less red and more yellow and this is somehow the  translation in natural language of the LAV color difference observed between  these two versions. So we have we work with collaborate with some researchers  in the US and United States who have developed a program for natural  language translation of color differences. You also have information about the  reason for of this difference is because you can see here that the system has  found that the specified this object is specified through a spot color but the  spot color is specified differently on the designer environment and on the  printer so that's why it comes out differently here. Now this is the user  can say has first to say does this problem matter because sometimes the  color is different but it's not important so you can just ignore it and  sometimes even if the color is not very different might be really important. So  in our case this is the user has said this is really an important difference  and in our case this is really important because it's a company color and this  is really necessary to correct this problem therefore. And finally you can  have if there are some correction components available these can be  directly integrated and the user can then from here activate such a correction  for example in our case you could either ask the system to automatically select  the closest printer spot color or he could go through an interactive spot  color selection. So in this case the system will replace the color of the  object and update the view and the user can go on. So we have developed this  first prototype of the print mediator system and we asked ourselves then some  validation questions and started to do some experiments to validate it. So the  questions we want to answer the following first of all is the system  usable is the comparative soft proof a usable thing in uncontrolled  environments because as we said in the beginning users work in uncontrolled  environments so if the system doesn't work then it's not very useful that's  something that we really want to have. A second question is does the system  sufficiently incite the user to the designers to specify color problems. A  third question would be then the usefulness of annotations provided by  the designer for the printer operators because if the printer operator do not  know how to react on the annotations by the designers then it's also not very  useful. And finally another question is then in the end what is the impact of the  color corrections on the color quality of the printout because the aim is to  reach much quicker a satisfying printout than before. So this is also something  to verify. What we have done for the moment is that we have conducted a first  experiment addressing the first question and this experiment involved 32 users  with various profiles from designers to printers and also with various levels of  understanding from the lay users to professional users. And we presented them  with set of 12 documents with various characteristics and with various  differences that occurred then and we tested the system on one side in  controlled environment and on the other side in uncontrolled environment. So the  outcome of these tests is in fact that the users perceived the differences in a  coherent way. Never mind if they were designers or printers or never mind their  level of experience or level of professionality. But the ways in which  they describe the differences were more variable than what we expected but  this is probably related to the fact that some are experts and some are lay  users so they have much much more vocabulary with respect to color  descriptions. And something that was highlighted by the experiment was that  the user interaction design is really critical. So what we want to do is to  present the user with detected differences but not to overwhelm him with  thousands of differences and rather be able to filter out the ones that are  really important. So to wrap up the problem that we have addressed is color  reproduction in non-color managed workflows which is something that is not  addressed by existing solutions like pre-flighting and soft proofing. In fact  pre-flighting addresses rather the conformance of a document to a given  standard and soft proofing really necessitates a controlled environment.  So it doesn't address the same problems here. And the solution we have proposed  is print mediator which is a system that mediates at two levels. First of all  between the two workflow participants, the document designer and the print ship  operator and second also between the human user and the underlying color  infrastructure and the numerical representation of color. The current  status is that we have developed a prototype and we have conducted a first  validation experiment which seems encouraging. The next steps are to  complete the validation and also to focus particularly on user interaction  design. And that concludes the presentation.  Thank you very much. I think there is time for one of two questions.  Yes.  It's PDF based. Yes. We developed it currently as a plugin. And we foresee to  provide a web service for example that would be provided by the print shops  because they have higher interest in in users submitting better documents so  that they have easier work.  Okay. Thank you again. You can.
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