Grey Balance in Cross Media Reproductions

Grey balance plays an important role in determining the device values needed to reproduce colours which appear achromatic throughout the tonal range. However, complete observer adaptation to the media white rarely occurs, and these designated device values can still appear non-neutral. This poses a problem for cross-media reproductions, where a mismatch in neutral colours is often the most noticeable difference between them. This paper presents two related experiments which investigate a means of gaining better visual agreement between reproductions which have different background colours or media whites. The first quantifies the degree of adjustment (the degree of media relative transform) needed to make an appearance match between grey patches on a white background and on background colours of various hues and colourfulness. It was found that the degree of adjustment was near-linearly related to the luminance of the patch itself, with lighter patches requiring greater adjustment towards the background colour. Neither the hue nor the chroma of the patch’s background had any significant effect on the underlying function. In the second experiment, this concept is applied to pictorial images on paper-coloured backgrounds. Three pixelwise rendering strategies were compared. In side-by-side viewing, the adaptive control of neutrals outperformed the media relative transform in all cases. Even for modest differences in paper colour (ΔEab of 3), images with significant neutral content benefited from the adaptive approach.