A New Representation for Device Color Gamuts

Introduction An important part of color reproduction is the rendering of colors onto display devices [1], where the colors may be spot colors (e.g., tints) or the colors of a digitized photograph. Display devices, such as monitors and printers, are capable of showing only a subset of all perceivable colors; this subset is called the device color gamut. Colors subjected to a reproduction system may not fall within the gamut of the target display device. In these cases, the colors cannot be exactly reproduced. If no corrective action is taken, the reproduction of graphics having out of gamut colors results in undesirable distortions of the tonal and color range of the graphic. When this occurs, some action is required, either notifying the user to modify the colors to fit within the gamut, or employing an algorithm to automatically compress the colors according to some predetermined strategy to fit within the gamut. In either case, a reliable technique is needed to determine whether or not a color lies inside a device gamut. When considering applications involving high resolution digitized images containing millions of colors, this gamut test must be very fast.