4 ms·

I agree on your overall point. However in the case of Instagram, it was on iPhone years before Android, and iPhones generally have always had very good color ac

by npunt 9y ago

I agree on your overall point. However in the case of Instagram, it was on iPhone years before Android, and iPhones generally have always had very good color accuracy. The early cameras, however, were crap, and filters helped immensely there. Garbage in, filtered garbage out.

jacobolus 9y ago
Early iPhones and iPod Touches (for the first 3–4 years) had much smaller color gamut than the recent ones, not matching any standard. They also did no color management whatsoever, with the result that colors and color relationships of basically all content were always fairly dramatically wrong [at least to my eyes, as an amateur photographer and amateur graphic designer who cares a lot about precise color rendering]. Some app authors and content producers put in the effort to understand and specifically target the iPhone display, e.g. by gamut mapping their images beforehand. But I would guess that “some” to be significantly less than 1%. (Though I suppose you might consider the exaggerated-color Instagram filters we’re discussing here to be one sort of gamut mapping, targeting the relatively muted display.) At some point Apple started making all of their devices very precisely hit the sRGB spec, so even though iOS still did no active color management, that made things a lot better, at the expense of making it impossible to accurately target colors at all iPhones for a while because different models had different gamuts. If you go look up the historical tech specs and display teardowns for different iPhone generations, I’m sure you can figure out exactly which version was the first to be close to sRGB. [More recently, I believe they now also do some color management, though I haven’t really investigated this in a few years.] The first couple iPad mini versions also had a smaller-than-sRGB color gamut and no color management (I have one of these). I’m not sure about the earliest full-sized iPads. Of course, this is all still better than Android where there is extreme fragmentation and every display looks slightly different.
- npunt 9y ago
  Instagram launched several months after the iPhone 4, which had a pretty great display: http://www.displaymate.com/iPhone_4_ShootOut.htm http://www.displaymate.com/iPhone_4_ShootOut.htm It wasn't perfect nor did it hit sRGB, but still pretty darn good for photos. As you say, they didn't color manage but they did a great job factory calibrating and selecting panels, and thus the lack of color management wasn't really an issue in practice, at least when designing apps. About 2 years after Instagram launched, the iPhone 5 came out which had sRGB. The point still stands that the displays weren't the reason insta photos were filtered - it was driven by camera limitations and the culture / artistic sensibilities that Instagram imbued in the product.
  - jacobolus 9y ago
    That link of yours shows that the iPhone 4 had substantially less saturated reds and blues than sRGB. http://www.displaymate.com/iPhone_4_ShootOut_files/image009.jpg http://www.displaymate.com/iPhone_4_ShootOut_files/image009.... Earlier iPhones were an even smaller gamut. http://www.displaymate.com/iPhone_3GS_ShootOut_files/image007.jpg http://www.displaymate.com/iPhone_3GS_ShootOut_files/image00... More than just desaturating images that aren’t gamut mapped, however, these iPhones substantially distort color relationships. They were historically great displays for mobile devices, but they would have been a lot better with some color management involved.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - comex 9y ago
      That said, even when iOS didn’t do active color management (for performance reasons), there were some attempts to simulate it: > Your content is matched to the sRGB color space on the authoring platform. This matching is not performed dynamically on the iOS device. Instead, it happens during authoring on your Mac OS X desktop. [..] > Targeted color management may also occur when you sync content to your mobile device. In fact, iTunes running on the desktop provides color management to the iOS targeted color space when you sync content from iPhoto to your iOS device. https://developer.apple.com/library/content/technotes/tn2313/_index.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/DTS40014694-CH1-TARGETEDCOLORMGMT https://developer.apple.com/library/content/technotes/tn2313... (As you noted, there have also been more recent developments. Since last year there have been iOS devices which support the DCI-P3 gamut and use active color management; some of those devices also support “True Tone”, which adjusts the color mapping based on ambient light.)

by npunt 9y ago

jacobolus 9y ago

Early iPhones and iPod Touches (for the first 3–4 years) had much smaller color gamut than the recent ones, not matching any standard. They also did no color management whatsoever, with the result that colors and color relationships of basically all content were always fairly dramatically wrong [at least to my eyes, as an amateur photographer and amateur graphic designer who cares a lot about precise color rendering]. Some app authors and content producers put in the effort to understand and specifically target the iPhone display, e.g. by gamut mapping their images beforehand. But I would guess that “some” to be significantly less than 1%. (Though I suppose you might consider the exaggerated-color Instagram filters we’re discussing here to be one sort of gamut mapping, targeting the relatively muted display.) At some point Apple started making all of their devices very precisely hit the sRGB spec, so even though iOS still did no active color management, that made things a lot better, at the expense of making it impossible to accurately target colors at all iPhones for a while because different models had different gamuts. If you go look up the historical tech specs and display teardowns for different iPhone generations, I’m sure you can figure out exactly which version was the first to be close to sRGB. [More recently, I believe they now also do some color management, though I haven’t really investigated this in a few years.] The first couple iPad mini versions also had a smaller-than-sRGB color gamut and no color management (I have one of these). I’m not sure about the earliest full-sized iPads. Of course, this is all still better than Android where there is extreme fragmentation and every display looks slightly different.

npunt 9y ago
Instagram launched several months after the iPhone 4, which had a pretty great display: http://www.displaymate.com/iPhone_4_ShootOut.htm http://www.displaymate.com/iPhone_4_ShootOut.htm It wasn't perfect nor did it hit sRGB, but still pretty darn good for photos. As you say, they didn't color manage but they did a great job factory calibrating and selecting panels, and thus the lack of color management wasn't really an issue in practice, at least when designing apps. About 2 years after Instagram launched, the iPhone 5 came out which had sRGB. The point still stands that the displays weren't the reason insta photos were filtered - it was driven by camera limitations and the culture / artistic sensibilities that Instagram imbued in the product.
- jacobolus 9y ago
  That link of yours shows that the iPhone 4 had substantially less saturated reds and blues than sRGB. http://www.displaymate.com/iPhone_4_ShootOut_files/image009.jpg http://www.displaymate.com/iPhone_4_ShootOut_files/image009.... Earlier iPhones were an even smaller gamut. http://www.displaymate.com/iPhone_3GS_ShootOut_files/image007.jpg http://www.displaymate.com/iPhone_3GS_ShootOut_files/image00... More than just desaturating images that aren’t gamut mapped, however, these iPhones substantially distort color relationships. They were historically great displays for mobile devices, but they would have been a lot better with some color management involved.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - comex 9y ago
    That said, even when iOS didn’t do active color management (for performance reasons), there were some attempts to simulate it: > Your content is matched to the sRGB color space on the authoring platform. This matching is not performed dynamically on the iOS device. Instead, it happens during authoring on your Mac OS X desktop. [..] > Targeted color management may also occur when you sync content to your mobile device. In fact, iTunes running on the desktop provides color management to the iOS targeted color space when you sync content from iPhoto to your iOS device. https://developer.apple.com/library/content/technotes/tn2313/_index.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/DTS40014694-CH1-TARGETEDCOLORMGMT https://developer.apple.com/library/content/technotes/tn2313... (As you noted, there have also been more recent developments. Since last year there have been iOS devices which support the DCI-P3 gamut and use active color management; some of those devices also support “True Tone”, which adjusts the color mapping based on ambient light.)