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Fuji Photo Film Co., Ltd. announces its strategy for a new generation of colour management and image intelligence technologies for digital image workflow.

For many years FUJIFILM has been developing colour management solution for a wide range of applications. Last year FUJIFILM released a range of colour software applications, under the umbrella ColourKit Profiler Suite. This provides a complete set of tools for the creation, manipulation and processing of ICC colour profiles for RGB printing devices, CMYK printing devices and both CRT and LCD monitors.

For the graphic arts industry, FUJIFILM offers a wide range of proofing and RIP products today that provide colour management for PostScript and PDF documents. These products generate contract proofs that emulate the final printed product, colour managed ROOM (Rip Once Output Many) proofing and also ICC calibration of printing presses. In the photographic industry there are many digital printing applications that manage the printing of digital RGB images to FUJIFILM Pictrography printers and Frontier digital minilabs.

FUJIFILM has vast experience in managing colour for digital output. It also has great expertise in applying intelligent processing to RGB images, through its continual development of professional scanners and digital minilab products.

At drupa 2004, FUJIFILM is announcing its next generation of digital image workflow applications. These new products will not only continue to provide optimum accuracy in colour management, but also benefit from a wide range of established FUJIFILM image intelligence technologies. This will result in products that work across the current boundaries that exist between the photographic and graphic arts industries and provide a core FUJIFILM digital image technology that spans across all of FUJIFILM’ imaging products. This will include digital cameras, digital printers, minilabs, conventional presses and print on demand press systems.

The ever growing use of digital cameras by professional photographers has dramatically increased the amount of RGB images being used in design applications. “When images were mostly obtained from scanners, there was always the option to scan direct to CMYK, although RGB output was an option. The management of this was always complex and the majority of scans were still produced as CMYK images”, says Andy Cook, Managing Director of FUJIFILM Electronic Imaging Ltd. "Now that a large amount of images used in design are RGB images from digital cameras, colour management without the assistance of Intelligent Image enhancement is not enough to provide consistent high quality output from a wide range of digital image sources. With more and more RGB images appearing in page layout applications such as Quark Xpress™ and Adobe® InDesign®, not only is there a need to manage RGB images prior to page layout, but intelligent processing is required for RGB images that make their way into PDF files for print”.

FUJIFILM’s new range of products will be an amalgamation of existing technologies and the introduction of new technologies developed in close co-operation between European and Japanese R&D teams, that will create a true multi purpose RGB digital master.There will be no need for the creators of digital images to have any knowledge of the intended use of these images, the unique set of FUJIFILM imaging technologies will guarantee optimal image quality wherever the image will be used in the future. The separate images, or the creative designs that contain images, can be prepared for a specific use through the application of two main types of image processing: Intelligent image processing and Image dependent image processing

These are unique FUJIFILM technologies that take care of issues such as converting from one colour space to another via dynamic colour gamut mapping, automatically adjusting the range of digital images and the application of sharpness profiling. FUJIFILM’s Sharpness Profiling feature allows the sharpness characteristics of the scanner or digital camera to be recorded in a supplementary profile attached to the image. This enables image sharpening to be optimised for the specific scaling and output process selected at the point of delivery.

This allows for each image to be individually analysed to obtain optimum image enhancement. For example, automatic face recognition software will allow for skin tones to be optimised in local areas of the image and alternative processing applied elsewhere to give an automatic pleasing image. Unlike using scanning as a source for creating digital images, digital cameras leave no intermediate ‘original’ that can be referred to in assessing how true the digital output is to the original scene, so the objective is not to create an accurate copy, but to produce a visually pleasing result every time.

This approach allows FUJIFILM to provide products that make the repurposing of RGB images a reality by overcoming many of the shortcomings or obstacles that exist today.For print specific workflows, it also means that FUJIFILM can offer much more than just colour management of PDF ⁄ X3 documents, it can also apply its image intelligence to provide optimised results to all RGB content.

A range of FUJIFILM colour management and image intelligence technologies will be demonstrated at the FUJIFILM Booth at drupa 2004.

ENDS