2006.09.27 13:31 "[Tiff] Horizontal prediction for 16bit data", by Joris Van Damme

2006.10.07 01:35 "Re: [Tiff] Inverting color space values in a TIFF file", by Joris Van Damme

Richard,

There's two important points to make.

Thinking further on my summary, I see I best ad a 2b) and a 3), for completeness sake, but I'll keep it short as likely I'm about to rightly be accused of spinning off-topic.

  1. The only other thing that matters is how to calculate... For this, I think I best refer to Bruce Lindbloom's site (http://www.brucelindbloom.com/). There's many places on the web where you can find similar formulaes, but some aren't totally correct. I must add though, each time I re-implement these formulae, I find myself struggling for a little time, and that certainly isn't only related to optimisation. It may be that I'm not very bright, or otherwise it's not completely trivial.

2b) Lots of mistakes are made by not taking gamut clipping into account, or at least not properly. If you do operations like the 'Negative' the way I defined it in the first mail, and you next convert from Lab back to sRGB, you'll note you get many values that are totally out of range. If you just clip these in sRGB, or your conversion algorithms are such that brute clipping is done at an earlier stage, you get not so pleasing results. (Personally, I think a lot of people that contest the value of Lab are in fact making this mistake.) You thus need to take gamut clipping into account while in Lab, or even stage earlier avoid going out of gamut through your definition of 'negative'. That is not easy, but it's feasible.

3) One last important thing to note about Lab, is that it separates the brightness (L) from the chromaticity (a* and b*), which comes in handy in many algorithms, like the proposed 'Brightness inversion'.

I should like to think that answers your question as to the basics of Lab. But really the point I tried to make in earlier mail is that 'inversion' is not trivial to define, and if defined in the intuitive way (numerical inversion of RGB values), is utterly useless. Beyond that, anything I say should be taken to be the comment of a color amateur, not a color engineer who would likely disagree with my ramblings.

I'll shut up now. ;-)

Best regards,

Joris Van Damme
info@awaresystems.be
http://www.awaresystems.be/
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