Color Imaging XIV: Displaying, Processing, Hardcopy, and Applications, San Jose, CA, USA, January 20-22, 2009

s from Session “The dark side of color” Alessandro Rizzi*, Reiner Eschbach, Stephen Hoskins, Garrett M. Johnson, John McCann, Nathan Moroney, Sabine Süsstrunk , Stephen Westland a DTI – Università degli Studi di Milano, Italy b Xerox Corp., USA c University of the West of England, UK d Apple, USA e McCann Imaging, USA f HPLabs, USA g EPFL, CH h University of Derby, UK As part of the "Color Imaging XIV: Displaying, Hardcopy, Processing, and Applications" conference, a novel special session entitled, "Dark Side of Color" has been presented at Electronic Imaging 2009. This session aims at introducing innovative thinking, and discussion from experts working in a wide range of disciplines related with color, to foster ideas and stimulate about open issues and common misunderstanding in color science and technology. It is composed by a limited number of invited short presentations that are presented as summaries in this paper together with an overall description of the session point of view. What is the dark side of color ? Color is a very complex phenomenon that cannot be explained with only physics principles. The human vision system is what transforms the physical stimuli into the colors we see. Color related topics are sometime taught and communicated without presenting their inner complexity, their limits and the simplifications that sometime are at their base. A-critically following pre-defined "recipes" can lead to the risk of loosing the overall framework and consequently a complete understanding of the chosen technique. Classic colorimetric methods, specifically designed to deal with color in aperture mode (isolated, out of visual context), have become dominant in digital color science and technology. Their use has been extended to deal with a great variety of situations in which color is considered inside a visual context, thus outside its initial scope. Color science is facing this transitional evolution in order to deal with color in context and appearance, but without substantial changes in their original foundation. There is a need for widening the scientific debate and discuss about paradigms. This can be achieved by, for example, new questions, different attention for details; information in the margins that so far are often discounted or overlooked. These aspects are what we consider to be the "dark side of color". The invited speakers of this section have been asked to stimulate ideas and discussions on the needs and the characteristics of possible alternative approaches and/or point of view. This session aims at suggesting paradigm shifts, lateral thinking and bottom up experimentation by re-addressing the current state of the evolving situation in color in sciences, arts and technologies. Following these principles, every speaker has choosen a topic of his/her preference and presents open issues and problems in a short 10-minute presentation. The presentation abstracts are reported in the following sections to give the reader a glance on the discussed topics. We would like to stress that basically no answers are expected to arise from the presentations of this session, but more likely questions and perspective shifts.