Does “Color Science” even matter?

Hi,

Yep. They do go hand in hand. Science and Engineering.

The term Engineer comes from the steam engine. A manually controlled power plant that loved to blow sky high if the guy running the engine wasn't paying close attention.

Science figured out that if one heated water in a closed vessel, one got steam that increases in power with increased temperature and pressure. And, scientists were also likely the first ones to figure out that the vessel blew sky high if they weren't careful.

The early engineers were the ones who figured out how to build that vessel so it didn't blow up. Much. Mostly. And then how to take that steam energy and make useful power out of it. And each new engine was designed to be better than the one that came before it. All the way from simple pistons to compound ones to turbines.

NASA is often referred to as Rocket Science. Nope. Engineering. Some Science, for sure, but lots of Engineering. Mostly Engineering.

And so, too, color. Kodak all the way for a long time. Film and then Digital. They had all sorts of different sensor silicon and CFA types and dyes. And post processing software and even printers. And not just color, but also monochrome for both film and digital. All engineered to do different jobs. It was all pretty comprehensive, actually. IR light, Visible light, UV light and mono and color for all those. Even different filters to go with them. Gone now. No one does all that any longer.

But what we do have now is built on top of what they did. Fuji in particular paid pretty good attention to what Kodak was doing. The first Fuji, the DS-5xx series, was up against the Kodak DCS 500 and 600 series in the marketplace. I noticed at the time that the second pass from Fuji was a whole lot different.

And so it always goes. Engineers pay attention to what other engineers do. I recall a Far Side comic we had around many places. It showed three guys around a fire holding meat and grimacing. The fourth guy is alone at another fire and has his meat on a stick. The caption is: Hey! Look what Zog do!

We had a guy in my area at IBM, known as Z (Zahorski). There's one in every R+D group. The guy with all those patents. Z was that guy. And so we stuck copies of that comic in all the labs and crossed out the OG in ZOG and left just the Z. Got the point across better than the old Think signs.

And, in the scheme of color, I am most decidedly a Technician. Not an Engineer, and probably will never get there. I certainly will never get to Scientist.

Stan