All About Colour – Gamuts & the Colour Response of Cameras

Due to the Covid-19 pandemic the Imaging Science Group were unable to organise Good Picture symposia for 2020 and 2021.  The group’s committee recognise this is as disappointing for would be attendees as it is for the committee and have made available some past presentations in their archive. However, there is no substitute for the real thing! To address this the Imaging Science Group held a series of mini e-symposia, where guest speakers from previous Good Picture symposia reprised, via Zoom webinars, some of their previous presentations, updated where appropriate.

The third of these free mini e-symposia was All About Colour –  Gamuts & the Colour Response of Cameras where we had two lectures by committee members of the Imaging Science Group sharing with us, how having knowledge of the colour response of our equipment and consumables would help us avoid unpleasant colour surprises! With assistance of our colleagues in the Digital Imaging Group we have recorded the lectures and you can view them here.

Lecture 1 - Dr Tony Kaye ASIS FRPS: A Survey of Colour Gamuts (Independent Imaging Consultant)

The internet contains much information over the choice of colour spaces. Some articles advocate wide gamut spaces, others stick with sRGB. In this talk we will examine the gamut that various devices can reproduce and compare them to the gamut of a number of popular colour spaces. This talk will help enable photographers to choose what are the most appropriate colour spaces for their work.

Lecture 2 - Dr Alan Hodgson ASIS HonFRPS: Characterising the Colour Response of Cameras (Alan Hodgson Consulting Ltd.)

A century ago Mees and Wratten released their paper describing an instrument to characterise the spectral response of photographic films and plates. This talk will show how to build a version for the digital age out of scrap materials and use it to test the performance of modern cameras for IR and UV photography. Building your own photographic instrumentation is easier and cheaper than you may think.