
What Is Color Management? - PascLeRasc
https://partnerhelp.netflixstudios.com/hc/en-us/articles/360025502033-What-is-Color-Management-
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ucarion
A more accessible blog post, also from Netflix, mentioned in the article:
[https://netflixtechblog.com/protecting-a-storys-future-
with-...](https://netflixtechblog.com/protecting-a-storys-future-with-history-
and-science-e21a9fb54988)

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KineticLensman
Interesting to read this to see the Netflix perspective. My intro to colour
management came from digital photography approx ten years ago, where the goal
was 'ensure that colours in printed pictures look the same when printed as
they do on the screen'.

Printing introduces an additional complexity to the already complex situation
described in the OP. Specifically printers have different primary colours
(cyan, magenta and yellow) to screens (red, green and blue) and colour is
subtractive, so that adding all the colours makes darker results, unlike
screens, where increasing the red, green and blue ultimately makes white
(actually printers have to add black - the 'Key' in CMYK - to get true black).
The colour management and calibration issues are conceptually similar, though.

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jedimastert
Fun color-theory fact for those not familiar: the print primary colors are the
inverse of the light primary colors.

Cyan is white without red (#00FFFF), magenta is white without green (#FF00FF),
and yellow is white without blue (#FFFF00). We use these colors because
pigment absorbs different wavelengths of light, so we start with white and
absorb (i.e.subtract) different amounts of red, green, and blue (the
components of human eye-sight) instead of starting with black and adding them!

As an added bonus fact, black is all of the pigments at the same time, so we
can just add black ink to the lowest of all three numbers then add up as
needed. The actual math is _waaaaaay_ more complicated because sight, pigment,
and light are are bananas more complicated, but that's the gist.

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rhklein
I recently found this guide on the fundamentals of color management very
helpful. [https://hg2dc.com/](https://hg2dc.com/)

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whatshisface
What would it be like if our monitors had ambient light sensors so that they
could calibrate their color balance to the surrounding room? The human eye
tends to "calibrate" itself based on the average of the scene it's observing,
so if you really wanted images to look the same on every display you would
have to take that into account.

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closeparen
Professional productions can afford to simply work in dark rooms.

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yumcimil
They have to calibrate for ambient light still. At least, that's true for
radiology.

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marcusjt
I'm a dark room lit only by other people's monitors, with each potentially
having different scenes onscreen from moment to moment and thus ambient light
varying all the time, that's a difficult/impossible thing to calibrate for
manually and if automatically recalibrated by a monitor with ambient light
sensors could potentially cause a vicious circle of autorecalibrations around
the room

