Chromatic adaptation in colour management

Abstract

Chromatic adaptation transforms are used to predict corresponding colours viewed under a different adapting illuminant. In colour management it is often necessary to apply such a transform in order to achieve a corresponding-colour match on a reproduction medium. A linear version of the Bradford CAT has been standardized for this purpose, due to its advantages of computational simplicity and invertibility. Despite being in use in colour management since 2001 the performance of this linear Bradford transform has had limited evaluation. In this paper it is tested for the first time on a comprehensive corresponding-colour data set, and it is shown that the performance is not significantly different from the original Bradford transform, and is a little better than the more recent CAT16 transform. Other issues related to the use of chromatic adaptation in colour management workflows are also discussed.