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Is Your Campus Color Smart?

1/17/2007

By David Nagel

We've all in our lives made the mistake of thinking of color as this fixed quantity—some sort of absolute that can be communicated, interpreted, and reproduced losslessly. The sky is blue. The tree is green. The car is red. I can write those words, and the colors materialize in your mind. But are the colors you 'see' in your mind the same as the ones I intended to communicate to you? In other words, do they match? Surely not.

And the same is true of electronic devices that convey and communicate color information.

In professions that rely on the accurate communication of colors, such as graphic design and print publishing, standards have been developed to help ease this problem. The sky isn't blue. It's Pantone DS 206-7 C. The tree is TOYO 2880. The car is Focaltone 2249. When we use these standards-based colors in documents and send them off to a printer, we know from looking at our swatch sheets just what to expect—assuming the folks at the print house know what they're doing and that our swatch booklets aren't old and faded.

Seems simple. Pantone blue is Pantone blue. Any two professional print houses will produce the same color given the same paper for the color to be printed on. But things get complicated in our everyday lives as we work with and attempt to communicate color, whether it be in the classroom working with students in specific disciplines where color consistency is critical (design and motion graphics, for example); in classes in which students view material on multiple displays; or in places like computer labs, media centers, digital publishing groups on campus, and the like. We're talking about problems that can actually become a burden to students (and staff) and potentially impact their performance. Problems that necessarily arise when working on digital devices.

Color and consistency
As most of you are fully aware, computer displays—both LCD and CRT—produce color using the RGB model: red, blue, green. And the various 'mixtures' of those three colors result in what we see on the screen. The mixtures are represented as numerical values ranging from 0 to 255. If red, green and blue are all at 0, the color you see on the screen is black (unless you're working in television, in which case what you see is black plus a bunch of static, but that's a whole separate issue).

So that solves everything, right? The sky is R 144, G 196, B 226. Go into Photoshop and mix up that color, and you know exactly the color of the sky as I envision it. Which is all well and good.

Except that this is almost certainly not the case. On your screen, that color might look pea green. Or lime green. Or light cyan. Or maybe even violet.

And so what do you think that means to a student? Or to your campus' media and publishing departments? In disciplines in which color consistency is critical, it means that students are seeing or presenting bad information. In situations where there are multiple displays in a facility, it means there will be miscommunication as students or faculty discuss the information they see on their screens. And in media departments, it means wasted money—particularly in deprtments with tight budgets, where soft proofing may be the only proofing option prior to print or other forms of public display.

See, while all computers have the ability to communicate color based on numeric RGB values, none of them display it the same way. CRTs don't display color the same way as an LCD. An LCD from one manufacturer doesn't display it the same way as an LCD from another manufacturer. An LCD from one manufacturer doesn't even display it the same way if that LCD is placed into computers from two different computer manufacturers. Same display, but the computer manufacturer will roll it out of the factory with different default settings.

And the trouble goes beyond even this.

The age of the screen matters. Ambient light and temperature matter. Brightness, contrast, and gamma matter. The way a student has treated a monitor matters. All of these factors and more contribute to the phenomenon that most of us barely perceive: No two computers display the same colors.

And so you can wind up with students on different computers perceiving elements of your lessons in very different ways. Not to mention, of course, the problems of headaches and vision issues that can arise from improperly maintained displays.

All right. Big problem. But is it one with a solution?

To a certain extent, yes, there is a solution. A couple solutions, really.

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