Photography - why device independent color?

isw wrote:
In article ,
Martin Brown wrote:

On 24/01/2014 23:47, Eric Stevens wrote:
On Fri, 24 Jan 2014 12:13:47 -0500, nospam
wrote:

In article , Dale
wrote:

what is needed is a colour managed workflow, with the image and each
device along the way having a profile.

that's how you get the profiles

no, you get the profiles by running the appropriate profiling software.

what the software does internally doesn't matter. users do not need to
understand all the math behind it to be able to use it.

what matters is does the user get what they expect, and the answer is
yes.

You are missing the point of Dale's original comment:

"you need to convert the device colors through device independent
color space like XYZ,CIELAB,CIELUV".

But that is clearly not true!

It is a lot more convenient to convert to a device independent colour
space and from there to whatever output medium you want to use because
the number of profiles need for N different image sources and M
destinations is limited to N+M colour profiles.

But you could with a *lot* more work compute direct colour profiles for
every possible combination of source and destination N*M. In the early
days when N was about 3 and M was about 4 that was what happened.

It may still make a lot more sense to store the original image in the
colour space where it was measured and only ever compute the device
independent form as a hidden step on the way to the output device.

What do you do years later, when all information about the creating
device's characteristics are long gone, and all you have is an image
file?

You know about embedded profiles, right?

BugBear