Re: color orange

Anne,

Re the color mismatch between your display and printer...

I'm starting to get a bit off-topic for this list here but since color
mismatch makes it that much more difficult to accommodate people with
disabilities, I'll stay on-list here.  For more details, we should probably
take it off-line.

You have to take special precautions to make colors on a display match what
you print.  In fact, color will look different on different displays,
depending on what operating system you're using (e.g. Mac, Windows, Unix),
what type of monitor (e.g. LCD vs CRT), and what video card you're using.
With LCD's it even depends on the angle with which you view the screen.
These variations make it that much harder to figure out what colors are
good for people with vision impairments. Also, color anomolies may possibly
make it harder for people with cognitive impairments, although I don't know
if this is a significant effect. Plus of course color mismatches affect
everyone, disabled or not, as inconveniences or worse.


To address this variability the International Color Consoritium
(http://www.icc.org)has defined a standard for "color profiles" which
describe the color characteristics of various printers and displays.
Software can use these colors to match colors on different devices.

In Apple computers, color matching is done via "ColorSync"
http://www.apple.com/colorsync/

In the Microsoft world, Image Color Management (ICM) is used for color
matching http://www.microsoft.com/HWDEV/devdes/icmwp.htm

Kodak provides the Kodak Color Management System KCMS which has been
integrated into Sun's Solaris
http://www.sun.com/software/white-papers/wp-kcms/

I expect that most operating systems have some such facility by now.

Some displays provide the feature via hardware and/or software.  For
printers, it needs to be in the driver.  Sometimes you have to download a
new driver.

If your display or system doesn't have color calibration built in, one
popular software add-on for color calibration is Colorific
http://www.colorific.com/products/colorific/welcome.html#match

For more details on color matching, there's a nice tutorial by a maker of
high-end color calibrated displays, Barco http://www.barco-usa.com/color.htm

Of course I'm not necessarily endorsing these products over any other color
calibration products.  It's just information that comes to hand.

Len


.  At 12:20 PM 8/25/99 -0400, Anne Pemberton wrote:
>Len,
>
>	Thanks for an informative explanation of things I sorta understood but not
>really. In working with both screen and print with children's art
>(illustrating the meanings of their new words), I have also run into the
>problem with colors that aren't "true" when printed. A perfect "turquoise"
>was on the screen, but the print out was a muddy "antique" blue streaked
>with a bit of green. It did not improve much when it was scanned, smoothed
>and printed on a "better" color printer. From your note, I suspect my
>problem is the reverse of the orange problem. 
>
>	Thanks again for your explanation,
>
>				Anne
>
>

-------
Leonard R. Kasday, Ph.D.
Universal Design Engineer, Institute on Disabilities/UAP, and
Adjunct Professor, Electrical Engineering
Temple University

Ritter Hall Annex, Room 423, Philadelphia, PA 19122
kasday@acm.org        
(215) 204-2247 (voice)
(800) 750-7428 (TTY)

Received on Thursday, 26 August 1999 09:15:52 UTC