The Color Imaging Conference just ended. This year it took place in San Diego CA and once again a good event! For the fourth time in a row I did join this event as a co-chair, this time for the short course session that usually takes place the whole day before the conference program.

What did we learn this year?

After attending many of this conference editions it’s easy to think that the field doesn’t move fast enough. But it’s not true, it’s going forward and it’s always a good exercise to de-construct or re-build the reasoning behind the presentations given by the different researchers and scientists.

Wide gamut vs hdr display

What I keep in my head this year are the discussions about display. I could join a particularly interesting course about color grading, post-production where attention was put on the following point: what are we talking about when we talk about wide gamut and hdr display? The question actually came during the course.

The movie industry and especially the production and post-production parts offer a live laboratory to observe where the applied color science is going. It’s a battle where people try to bring the most realistic experience to the spectators in cinema theater or at home.

The workflow developed for each movie is often on the verge of what is existing as often a unified commercial solution is not there yet, so you have to build it: one want to have more color and extend the gamut, one want to have an higher fps, another want to have a bigger dynamic of intensity, you see the challenges here.

Personalized display

Display is obviously a very hot topic of these days. The understanding we have now of how the human visual system works, human color perception, the possibility to evaluate one’s vision ability depending of your age, gender and many more factors is a golden mine.

This means that each display content can be optimized to each viewer. In some configuration it can be super important. If you take the car industry where displays are more and more present to help the driver, optimizing the displayed images such that the driver can get the most important information is essential for its safety and the people around.