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April 30, 2007 – Making your prints appear how you’d like may soon be as easy as telling your computer what to do—literally. A Xerox engineer likes talking color so much so that he wants computers and printers to understand what we’re saying when we want "more pink" flowers or "greener" trees. Geoffrey Woolfe, principal scientist in the Xerox Innovation Group, announced the group’s invention today at the 2007 Annual Meeting of the Inter-Society Color Council (ISCC).
They have created a program that allows computers to understand what he—and we—are talking about when we want a sky a "deeper blue" or someone’s skin "less yellow." With color terms based upon the NBS-ISCC (National Bureau of Standards) color dictionary and using the device-independent CIELab color space, these innovators at Xerox hope this technology will help those less schooled in color correction and management to easily correct their images to their own liking.
By using a common language of color and mapping it to the technical descriptions, easy communication of color corrections between user and monitor and/or printer are possible. The research is still in early stages, but the hope is to link voice-activated commands to this technology. More details can be found at Xerox’s Innovation web page, with a link to a PDF of Mr. Woolfe’s paper that he presented the the ISCC conference..
The image below left was transformed by the Xerox Innovation lab using natural language color adjustment to make it appear 'very-strongly more saturated.' The result is the image below right. An image mask was created to correspond to that specific command. (Images courtesy of Xerox Innovation Group.)