Several Considerations with respect to the future of Digital Photography and Photographic Printing

摘要

Digital cameras are no longer exotic gadgets being used by a privileged group of early adopters. More and more people realize that there are obvious advantages to the digital solution over the conventional film-based workflow. Claiming that prints on paper are no longer necessary in the digital workflow, however, would be similar to reviving the myth of the paperless office. Often, people still like to share their memories on paper and this for a variety of reasons. There are still some hurdles to be taken in order to make the digital dream come true. In this paper, we will give a survey of the different workflows in digital photography. The local, semi-local and Internet solutions will be discussed as well as the preferred output systems for each of these solutions. When discussing output systems, we immediately think of appropriate color management solutions. In the second part of this paper, we will discuss the major color management issues appearing in digital photography. A clear separation between the image acquisition and the image rendering phases will be made. After a quick survey of the different image restoration and enhancement techniques, we will make some reflections on the ideal color exchange space; the enhanced image should be delivered in this exchange space and, from there, the standard color management transformations can be applied to transfer the image from this exchange space to the native color space of the output device. We will also discuss some color gamut characteristics and color management problems of different types of photographic printers that can occur during this conversion process.