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eeColor or similar technologies

post #1 of 33
2/17/12 at 12:15am
Thread Starter 
Have anyone used technologies like eeColor? Sounds like post processing methods to make colors more vibrant while correcting for things like skin tones while knowing where the primary and white-point of the display is at. Can't really put my finger on it!

http://www.entexpinc.com/truvue/pdf/eeColor2010.pdf
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post #2 of 33
2/17/12 at 12:44pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by 703 View Post

Have anyone used technologies like eeColor? Sounds like post processing methods to make colors more vibrant while correcting for things like skin tones while knowing where the primary and white-point of the display is at. Can't really put my finger on it!

http://www.entexpinc.com/truvue/pdf/eeColor2010.pdf

Look in the video components forum for that info.
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post #3 of 33
2/17/12 at 1:15pm
The eeColor is a box that has a 3D LUT (6 LUTs actually) in it.

You have to feed it calibration data to get it to work correctly.

It does just what you say, it can keep native oversaturated primaries to give a scene alot of "pop" while controlling the area of the gamut where flesh tones live so that you will still have natural looking people.

You could also use it simple to correct the entire gamut to get correct response from a display. But that would require a 3rd party app designed to calibrate the device to standards. Right now nothing takes advantages of the EE's full capability via the 3D LUT.
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post #4 of 33
2/17/12 at 6:39pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by sotti View Post


You could also use it simple to correct the entire gamut to get correct response from a display. But that would require a 3rd party app designed to calibrate the device to standards. Right now nothing takes advantages of the EE's full capability via the 3D LUT.

CalMAN 5? I've seen the ee box on several displays and don't care for the oversaturation. Why not use the 3D LUT holding capability to create LUTs for a few hundred or a few thousand color points like Light Illusion's LightSpace software?
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post #5 of 33
2/17/12 at 6:48pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by buzzard767 View Post

CalMAN 5? I've seen the ee box on several displays and don't care for the oversaturation. Why not use the 3D LUT holding capability to create LUTs for a few hundred or a few thousand color points like Light Illusion's LightSpace software?

That would be cool huh?
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post #6 of 33
2/17/12 at 6:55pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by sotti View Post

That would be cool huh?

Yes it would. Are you holding back, Joel?
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post #7 of 33
2/17/12 at 7:45pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by buzzard767 View Post

Yes it would. Are you holding back, Joel?

The ee has 262,144 points to calibrate actually.
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post #8 of 33
3/17/12 at 10:44am
262144 points means a 64 point cube.
That's unworkable for calibration unfortunately, for a number of reasons.

Not to list all the problems, but with the fastest probe it would take over 200 hours to profile...
No probe/display can remain stable that long.
More importantly, with colour samples so close together you will get data folding errors (probe resolution errors) which will introduce banding errors into the LUT.

As a result you need to profile with a smaller data set - and then interpolate between the measured points.

This actually means a better level of interpolation is desirable, rather than a lot of points.

We've done a lot of tests on this, and a 16 or 17 point cube is actually optimal.

This doesn't mean the eeColour box is bad, just pointing out that such huge cube sizes can actually not be a good thing.

We've still to have anyone use the eeColour with true 3D LUT data tough, as most of our customers use Pluto or Davio.

if anyone is to be at NAB next month I'll be there and happy to discuss calibration with anyone who fancies a coffee ;o)

Cheers,

Steve

Steve Shaw
LIGHT ILLUSION
steve@lightillusion.com
+44 (0)7765 400 908
www.lightillusion.com
Skype: shaw.clan

THE ART & SCIENCE OF DIGITAL IMAGING
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post #9 of 33
3/18/12 at 10:20am
I've used one (reviewed for Widescreen Review magazine... review should appear shortly) and did NOT find ANY sense of oversaturation on ANYTHING when used appropriately, especially with a calibrated panel or projector. The two factory supplied LUTS are for different conditions... the more "gentle" one is for dark room viewing, the other LUT is for a room with enough light to "soften" colors so it intensifies colors a little more... it's not intended for dark room viewing though. Much of what the eeColor unit does involves keeping "memory colors" looking correct under different conditions... "memory colors" are the the things we see every day or many days of our lives... Coke red, grass, fruits, fleshtones, flowers, sky, and on and on...

Much of what it does is VERY subtle... changes you wouldn't notice without pausing a scene and turning the eeColor processing on and off repeatedly to see what parts of the image are being changed. When watching a night scene in "The River" (TV show), detail in the jungle was SLIGHTLY improved... tree trunks, leaves, vines, etc in deep shadows has just a BIT more visible detail (and this was on a well-calibrated projector that was made even more perfect with a Lumagen Radiance processor). You'd probably never know that was happening if you just watched the scene 2 times... I didn't pick it up that way. It took the "pause" trick to figure it out. And re. fleshtones oversaturating... I never thought that was happening when using the proper mode. You could even find times when NOTHING was done to fleshtones... for example it didn't make Data's or vampire fleshtones look "normal"... they still look "off" as intended. And if there was a scene where two people were talking and the shot moved back and forth between the 2 people and they were lit with different light that made their fleshtones look "off", the eeColor processor moved both fleshtones towards a slightly more normal appearance even though the corrections to do so had to be different each time the camera cut from one face to the other.

The biggest "thing" about the eeColor processor is that when used CORRECTLY, the changes are subtle. People want to see something happening when they turn a processor on and off so demos tend to use the more aggressive processing LUT where differences are more obvious even if the lighting conditions aren't appropriate for that LUT. If used so that the changes are subtle (as intended), you begin questioning whether the cost of the product is justifiable, yet what it does do is definitely useful. So there's this dichotomy of expense vs. the amount of perceptual change.

The calibration-by-LUT capabilities of the eeColor processor will require that the owner have software and a meter to generate their own custom LUTs to suit their own preferred lighting conditions -- the factory LUTs are fine starting points, but the customization puts you one step closer to to getting the specific improvements YOUR system needs for different viewing conditions.

You also find fairly easily that eeColor processing doesn't paint entire scenes with the same brush... you may find only 1 or 2 or 3 elements in a scene look noticeably different with the processing enabled and if there are 2 or 3 things in the scene, they may be changed in different ways.

It's a very different sort of processing that many people seeing it for the first time without understanding that it does subtle ADAPTIVE processing just won't understand or appreciate. You need some background to understand what it does with the factory LUTs and custom LUT generation capability.
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post #10 of 33
3/18/12 at 12:20pm
My oversaturations were at levels less than 100%. The following is with the ee box set at "0" (left side of picture with unmolested signal) and "6". 100% was the same except for yellow where "6" boasted 100% to its proper spot but then oversaturated 25, 50, an 75% like it did in the other five colors.
LL
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post #11 of 33
3/20/12 at 4:15am
Thread Starter 
Quote:
Originally Posted by Doug Blackburn View Post

Much of what the eeColor unit does involves keeping "memory colors" looking correct under different conditions... "memory colors" are the the things we see every day or many days of our lives... Coke red, grass, fruits, fleshtones, flowers, sky, and on and on...

Very good explaination, looks like this type of processing is used to a varying degree these days. For example, I assume big panel OLED's that will be out later this year will HAVE to do something similar, to show off its wide gamut but keep memory colors intact. I wonder what this will do to external video processors which assumes some kind of xyY linearity, but in fact, the LUT that maybe is being used is no way linear!
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post #12 of 33
3/20/12 at 7:33am
Quote:
Originally Posted by 703 View Post

Very good explaination, looks like this type of processing is used to a varying degree these days. For example, I assume big panel OLED's that will be out later this year will HAVE to do something similar, to show off its wide gamut but keep memory colors intact. I wonder what this will do to external video processors which assumes some kind of xyY linearity, but in fact, the LUT that maybe is being used is no way linear!

This all depends if you use their off the shelf LUTs or if you calibrate the device.
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post #13 of 33
3/20/12 at 11:55am
Thread Starter 
Quote:
Originally Posted by sotti View Post

This all depends if you use their off the shelf LUTs or if you calibrate the device.

I guess what I'm saying is that you may not know if the LUT's are applied in the various picture modes, because a typical calibration normally doesn't check the saturation levels. So there are more chances of a pretty graph, but wrong overall colors.
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post #14 of 33
3/20/12 at 12:08pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by 703 View Post

I guess what I'm saying is that you may not know if the LUT's are applied in the various picture modes, because a typical calibration normally doesn't check the saturation levels. So there are more chances of a pretty graph, but wrong overall colors.

Yes, to get it right you need to calibrate the cube as a cube.
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post #15 of 33
3/21/12 at 4:04pm
To calibrate accurately, or with ANY sense of understanding, you must profile the display and then build a true 3D LUT - it is totally useless to use any sort of pre-baked LUT as that has not idea of your specific display at all.

If it helps, we have just released an update for LightSpace CMS that means you can profile and build 3D LUTs for half the cost of the full LightSpace CMS system.

Its called LightSpace CMS Quick Profile, and is for displays with good RGB channel separation (no, or limited cross-talk between channels).

See the Light Illusion website for more info.

Steve

Steve Shaw
LIGHT ILLUSION
steve@lightillusion.com
+44 (0)7765 400 908
www.lightillusion.com
Skype: shaw.clan

THE ART & SCIENCE OF DIGITAL IMAGING
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post #16 of 33
3/21/12 at 11:35pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by Doug Blackburn View Post

I've used one (reviewed for Widescreen Review magazine... review should appear shortly) and did NOT find ANY sense of oversaturation on ANYTHING when used appropriately, especially with a calibrated panel or projector. The two factory supplied LUTS are for different conditions... the more "gentle" one is for dark room viewing, the other LUT is for a room with enough light to "soften" colors so it intensifies colors a little more... it's not intended for dark room viewing though. Much of what the eeColor unit does involves keeping "memory colors" looking correct under different conditions... "memory colors" are the the things we see every day or many days of our lives... Coke red, grass, fruits, fleshtones, flowers, sky, and on and on...

Much of what it does is VERY subtle... changes you wouldn't notice without pausing a scene and turning the eeColor processing on and off repeatedly to see what parts of the image are being changed. When watching a night scene in "The River" (TV show), detail in the jungle was SLIGHTLY improved... tree trunks, leaves, vines, etc in deep shadows has just a BIT more visible detail (and this was on a well-calibrated projector that was made even more perfect with a Lumagen Radiance processor). You'd probably never know that was happening if you just watched the scene 2 times... I didn't pick it up that way. It took the "pause" trick to figure it out. And re. fleshtones oversaturating... I never thought that was happening when using the proper mode. You could even find times when NOTHING was done to fleshtones... for example it didn't make Data's or vampire fleshtones look "normal"... they still look "off" as intended. And if there was a scene where two people were talking and the shot moved back and forth between the 2 people and they were lit with different light that made their fleshtones look "off", the eeColor processor moved both fleshtones towards a slightly more normal appearance even though the corrections to do so had to be different each time the camera cut from one face to the other.

The biggest "thing" about the eeColor processor is that when used CORRECTLY, the changes are subtle. People want to see something happening when they turn a processor on and off so demos tend to use the more aggressive processing LUT where differences are more obvious even if the lighting conditions aren't appropriate for that LUT. If used so that the changes are subtle (as intended), you begin questioning whether the cost of the product is justifiable, yet what it does do is definitely useful. So there's this dichotomy of expense vs. the amount of perceptual change.

The calibration-by-LUT capabilities of the eeColor processor will require that the owner have software and a meter to generate their own custom LUTs to suit their own preferred lighting conditions -- the factory LUTs are fine starting points, but the customization puts you one step closer to to getting the specific improvements YOUR system needs for different viewing conditions.

You also find fairly easily that eeColor processing doesn't paint entire scenes with the same brush... you may find only 1 or 2 or 3 elements in a scene look noticeably different with the processing enabled and if there are 2 or 3 things in the scene, they may be changed in different ways.

It's a very different sort of processing that many people seeing it for the first time without understanding that it does subtle ADAPTIVE processing just won't understand or appreciate. You need some background to understand what it does with the factory LUTs and custom LUT generation capability.

So Doug you let the radiance do the white balance and left the eeColor in it default state?
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post #17 of 33
3/22/12 at 10:14am
Quote:
Originally Posted by avsform1 View Post

So Doug you let the radiance do the white balance and left the eeColor in it default state?

If the projector being reviewed required the Radiance processor, yes. But for reviews, much of the time I "zero" the processing in the Radiance so I can see the out-of-box and calibrated performance of the projector without the Radiance processor. I'm using a really good surround processor that's not 3D compatible so I use the Radiance for video source switching and when I want to see really perfect images from great projectors, I will fully calibrate with the Radiance and view that way, but that's not typical for reviews. Reviews focus on out-of-box and calibration using the projector's controls only.

So for most of the eeColor review, the projector was calibrated and the eeColor processor was using the the default LUTs that come loaded in it (presumably they presume a display that is well-calibrated). I went this way because Entertainment Experience (the manufacturer of the eeColor Processor) said their stand-alone LUT generator was going to be phased out to be replaced by specific eeColor LUT generation in CalMAN but the CalMAN LUT generation feature wasn't available at the time the review was completed (last month).

The more accurately calibrated the panel or projector is, the more useful the standard LUTs would be in the eeColor processor. But as pointed out in another post, if the LUT isn't generated for the specific display being used with the eeColor processor, the results you get won't be perfect/ideal.

And... so far... nobody (not Spectracal or Entertainment Experience) is saying that the eeColor Processor could or will be a complete replacement for a video processor with the capabilities of the Lumagen Radiance series processors, even with a custom LUT generated for your specific display.
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post #18 of 33
3/22/12 at 11:32am
Quote:
Originally Posted by Doug Blackburn View Post

And... so far... nobody (not Spectracal or Entertainment Experience) is saying that the eeColor Processor could or will be a complete replacement for a video processor with the capabilities of the Lumagen Radiance series processors, even with a custom LUT generated for your specific display.

Yeah it's not a video processor, only a calibration device. No de-noise, scaling or anything like that.
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post #19 of 33
3/22/12 at 2:43pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by sotti View Post

Yeah it's not a video processor, only a calibration device. No de-noise, scaling or anything like that.

Would the "eeColor Image Processor" be best described as a LUT holding device?

Quote:
Originally Posted by Light Illusion View Post

To calibrate accurately, or with ANY sense of understanding, you must profile the display and then build a true 3D LUT

Will CalMAN include profiling the display?

Thanks, Joel.
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post #20 of 33
3/22/12 at 4:11pm
I would say yes to the first, and for the second - LightSpace CMS will do that already, starting with the new low-cost LightSpace CMS Quick Profiling version.

The really difficult part od full 3D profiling is the maths required to take a profile and then accurately convert it into a calibration LUT.

This is very different to using traditional calibration tools, and requires a very hight level of colour mathematics understanding.

We are lucky to have a very, very good colour scientist as our specialist for this ;o)


Steve Shaw
LIGHT ILLUSION
steve@lightillusion.com
+44 (0)7765 400 908
www.lightillusion.com
Skype: shaw.clan

THE ART & SCIENCE OF DIGITAL IMAGING
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post #21 of 33
3/22/12 at 5:21pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by buzzard767 View Post

Would the "eeColor Image Processor" be best described as a LUT holding device?



Will CalMAN include profiling the display?

Thanks, Joel.

My day today:



LL
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post #22 of 33
3/22/12 at 10:05pm
Thread Starter 
So does CalMAN5 allow provide CMS calibration via RGB controls with "RGB mixture assist" ?
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post #23 of 33
3/22/12 at 10:12pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by 703 View Post

So does CalMAN5 allow provide CMS calibration via RGB controls with "RGB mixture assist" ?

If you're going to calibrate a 3d cube, you really only want it to be automated.

The ability to see the lut values, are more helpful for debugging than actually trying to calibrate, but you could use them to calibrate if you wanted to spend a really long time working with them.
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post #24 of 33
3/23/12 at 2:26am
1D controls for a 3D LUT?

Interesting, but essentially not really much use.
We actually implemented this a few years back, but never released it is the results are almost impossible to manage accurately.

Fun though ;o)

For real Cube based calibration you need it fully automated across all the points within the cube, as Joel correctly says.

The results will depend on the accuracy of the 'colour engine' being used. This is they key component.
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post #25 of 33
3/23/12 at 8:25am
Quote:
Originally Posted by Light Illusion View Post

1D controls for a 3D LUT?

Interesting, but essentially not really much use.
We actually implemented this a few years back, but never released it is the results are almost impossible to manage accurately.

Fun though ;o)

You can slice the cube up into to adjust any of it manually, but yeah it doesn't really work as a calibration interface. It was an easy thing to add since we already had the UI for the 1-D ramps.
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post #26 of 33
3/23/12 at 9:23am
I will be good to have another true calibration system on the market!

Will you be showing it at NAB?

I'll come see you, Derek and LA for a chat ;o)
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post #27 of 33
3/23/12 at 9:26am
Quote:
Originally Posted by Light Illusion View Post

I will be good to have another true calibration system on the market!

Will you be showing it at NAB?

I'll come see you, Derek and LA for a chat ;o)

Yes LA and myself will be at NAB showing CalMAN 5 Studio.
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post #28 of 33
3/23/12 at 2:36pm
Kool - we should do a beer or two ;o)
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post #29 of 33
4/24/12 at 2:16am
Just before the NAB show we implemented 3D LUT support for the eeColor box via LightSpace CMS.

Working with Ted at eeColor we have proven the workflow and tested the implementation.

This now provides for LightSpace CMS Quick Profile, the fastest and most accurate true 3D LUT based profiling and generation system available, to generate fully accurate 3D calibration LUTs for direct display calibration, using professional film and TV industry proven technology.

We are working with one of this forum's members to test further - more information to follow ;o)
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post #30 of 33
4/24/12 at 2:25am
Quote:
Originally Posted by Light Illusion View Post

Just before the NAB show we implemented 3D LUT support for the eeColor box via LightSpace CMS.

Working with Ted at eeColor we have proven the workflow and tested the implementation.

This now provides for LightSpace CMS Quick Profile, the fastest and most accurate true 3D LUT based profiling and generation system available, to generate fully accurate 3D calibration LUTs for direct display calibration, using professional film and TV industry proven technology.

We are working with one of this forum's members to test further - more information to follow ;o)

Great News

BTW, the Customer List is huge
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