Senior Project - PRISM

IBM's Printing Systems Division is located in Boulder, Colorado and has been developing innovative printing solutions for more than 40 years. As a result of printers having limited ranges of colors, software is required to transform and analyze the relationship between device independent and device dependent color spaces. This software can be used, for instance, to show that a color space for one device is bigger or smaller than that of another device.

A device dependent color space has restricted colors which don't necessarily map to other color spaces for different devices. Device dependent color spaces include RGB (typically display devices) and CMYK (typically printers). Device independent color spaces include CIELab and CIELCH, which are able to represent all possible colors, including the color space of the human eye.

The problem this project helps to solve is that whenever a user prints an image, it rarely shows up exactly the way it does on a monitor. This happens because colors are displayed differently on monitors and printers. As a result of these color inconsistencies, software needs to be created to display which colors can be created on different devices, and then effectively map colors outside the color space of a device to the nearest neighbor inside the color space of the device. This will, in turn, enable users to see how their images will show up on different devices.

The solution is an application built using the FOX Toolkit along with OpenGL to create a 3D interface to view and manipulate color spaces. The software allows the user to create slices, overlays, masked images, and histograms of color spaces as well as to map points based on mapping tables and determine the tetrahedral neighbor of specified points.