THE NEWS IN PRINT

We’ve all been there. You’re stuck in the middle of a new design or layout with a shade on in mind that you would like to use as part of the design. The problem is you are struggling to convert the thoughts in your (rather drained) brain to the technical hex code that is understood by Photoshop. My goodness, at times I wish my computer was capable of directly taking the thoughts in my mind and translating into whatever code it needs.

Xerox has set out to make this real as revealed when they filed for a patent called ‘Natural Language Color Editing’. This technology will be able to decipher the words that come out of our mouth to readjust the colours in the graphic program. For example, I can say “Green a little lighter. Change the red to reddish brown, slightly darker. Yes, that’s what I wanted” and bingo, I have what I want.

Speaking at the 2007 Annual Meeting of the Inter-Society Color Council (ISCC), Geoffrey Woolfe, principal scientist in the Xerox Innovation Group introduced this concept.

“The innovative part of this is the mapping language,” Woolfe said. “At Xerox we’ve found that if you can connect the human dimension to the mathematical dimension, you get a lot of usability.”

Users can type “make the sky a deeper blue” or give a voice command “make the background carnation pink” and the software does the work. The invention, still in the research stage, creates “color language” by translating human descriptions of color into the precise numerical codes that machines use to print color documents.

“Today, especially in the office environment, there are many non-experts who know how they would like color to appear but have no idea how to manipulate the color to get what they want,” said Geoffrey Woolfe, principal scientist in the Xerox Innovation Group. “You shouldn’t have to be a color expert to make the sky a deeper blue or add a bit of yellow to a sunset.”

This development could lead to colour adjustments on office devices like colour printers and commercial printing machines without the hassle of tinkering with HEX codes or RGB. Or it could make printing very very stressful indeed!

via Xerox Corporation News Release

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 2nd, 2007 at 3:23 pm and is filed under Innovation, News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.