The Poynton Color-Tech Issue

The current "official" Usenet ColorFAQ and GammaFAQ documents are published by Mr. Charles Poynton. Historically Usenet FAQs are considered to be objective and correct, up to the capabilities of the author. They are not considered to be intentinally misleading or hiding crucial information or having a hidden agenda. This is not the case with Mr. Poyntons documents.

READ: Chapter 15 from Mr. Poynton's False Gamma FAQ debugged.

The Main Goal of Mr Poynton's ColorFAQ and GammaFAQ

On his http://www.poynton.com/Poynton-color.html Mr. Poynton says:

"Permanent, easy solutions to many of the problems in tone and color reproduction in computing require assistance - even leadership - from the developers and manufacturers of hardware and software. Solving that problem is the primary goal of the Gamma FAQ and Color FAQ documents."

The above statement is the most important information when considering the competency of Mr Poynton's documents for digital photographic imaging. To translate the above in plain English: 


The main goal of the ColorFAQ and GammaFAQ is to support easy solutions for imaging.

However the above information is not found in either the ColorFAQ and GammaFAQ documents. Instead on them Mr. Poynton claims: 
 

In GammaFAQ: "Having a good understanding of the theory and practice of gamma will enable you to get good results when you create, process and display pictures."

In ColorFAQ: "This document clarifies aspects of colour specification and image coding that are important to computer graphics, image processing, video, and the transfer of digital images to print."
 

Easy solutions do not provide good results nor good quality. Easy solutions may be important to some, but not to all the people who are doing digital imaging.

I have prepared many pages, examples and studies that disprove most of Mr. Poynton's claims in respect with "good results" and "important image coding"and "more perceotional coding". I agree that Mr. Poynton's approach does indeed provide easy solutions for imaging. But in doing that the image quality is degraded badly.

The easy solution of Mr. Poynton's is to acquire and edit images in the native gamma space of CRT monitors, that is gamma space 2.5. What is easy in his solution is that one simple command, gamma compensation for the CRT, at the end of the image enhancement work-flow is not needed, and this benefit is there only in the case when the destination of the image is CRT.

For a user of a computer system any approach is easy if it requires none or only a little attention from the user. Such solutions are easily possible for digital imaging in a way that does not degrade image quality and at least in such way that an option is provided for the user. 

To conclude, Mr. Poynton's goal is to support permanent, easy solutions for the manufacturers of idigital imaging hardware and software. On the expense of the image quality.

To explore the various problems that the permanent and easy solutions generate please be sure to see the Comparison Gallery demonstrating many gamma space induced problems. Be sure to also evaluate the perceptual gamma space.

READ: Chapter 15 from Mr. Poynton's False Gamma FAQ debugged.