Thread: Microsoft And Colour Management

Microsoft And Colour Management Starting with Windows 95, in versions of Windows preceding Vista, Microsoft introduced the Image Color Management (ICM) and later lCM2, colour models, which are ICC based. With Windows Vista, Microsoft, in coopera¬tion with Canon, introduced a new colour model called the Windows Colour System (WCS). Microsoft say the ICC approach (i.e. the system used by just about every company except Microsoft, including Adobe and Corel) is fundamentally flawed, that problems with previous colour management systems are due to not using a perceptually accurate colour model, and that Vista with WCS provides this necessary perceptual accuracy (see Article References 3).



Although by default WCS still uses sRGB (IEC 61966-2-1) as its reference colour space it does allow the use of other colour spaces, such as scRGB (IEC 61966-2-2 ). Colour accuracy is greater in scRGB because, although it uses identical color primaries and whitefblack points as the sRGB color space, it uses 16-bit floating point (half precision) linear values instead of the gamma compressed 8-bit integers used in sRGB. Microsoft call the colour engine used by WCS the Color Infrastructure and Translation Engine (CITE). It uses improved transform algorithms based on the CIECAM02 perceptual model to perform the colour calcu¬lations (see Article References 4).