Investigating the Effect of Color Gamut Mapping Quantitatively and Visually

With the advent of various color management standards and tools, the print media industry has seen many advancements aimed towards quantitatively and qualitatively acceptable color reproduction. This research attempts to test one of the most fundamental and integral parts of a standard color management workflow, the profile. The gamut mapping techniques implemented by the ICC profiles created using different profiling application programs were tested for their congruity to the theoretical concepts, standards, and definitions documented by International Color Consortium (ICC). Once these profiling software applications were examined, the significance of the possible discrepancies were tested by establishing a visual assessment of pictorial images using these profiles. In short, this research assessed the implementations of the ICC color rendering intents in a standard or a commonly used color managed workflow, and then described the significance of these discrepancies in terms of interoperability. For this research, interoperability was defined the assessment of different ICC profiles in producing similar results, i.e., quantitatively and visually. In order to achieve the desired assessment, the two profiling applications were selected and each used to create an output profile using the same characterization data set. The two profiles were then compared for differences in the way they mapped real world colors. The results displayed that even though there were some significant quantitative color differences, visual subjective evaluation did not reflect any noticeable color differences and therefore concluded that the profiles were interoperable. These findings reveal that even though quantitative color differences may reflect significant color differences, subjective visual comparisons may not always reflect the same or agree with quantitative findings