For when you’re feeling blue

Scientists at Xerox are trying to make it far easier by inventing a technology that lets you tell your printer exactly how blue or red you are feeling. Users will be able to say “make the sky a deeper blue” or type the instruction “make the background carnation pink” and the software will do so, Xerox promises.

The patented invention is still being researched, with the aim of translating human descriptions of colour into the precise numerical codes that machines use to print colour documents.

“There are many non-experts who know how they would like colour to appear but have no idea of how to manipulate the colour to get what they want,” says Geoffrey Woolfe, a principal scientist with the Xerox Innovation group. “You shouldn’t have to be a colour expert to make the sky a deeper blue or add a bit of yellow to a sunset.”

Woolfe’s work means colour adjustments could be made on office printers or commercial presses without dealing with mathematics. And once you realise how colours are achieved, you will understand how difficult it is. Cardinal red on a printer or monitor, for example, is expressed by mathematical co ordinates to identify a specific region in a three-dimensional space housing all the colours the device can display.

To make the colour less orange, the colour expert distorts that region to a new region. The ability to use common words to adjust colour will benefit graphic artists, printers, photographers and others who spend time fine tuning the colours in documents.

Woolfe is mapping common words used to distinguish different shades to the technical language used by printers. “Colour is so prevalent that one shouldn’t have to be an expert to handle it.”