You ever wonder...

You ever wonder where the now familiar terms and functions such as (WB) White balance, Custom White Balance,

RAW, sRGB, RGB, Histogram, 16/14 Bit, Color Space, Picture Style, Photoshop come from ? I mean these things

were unheard of 15 years ago, now almost every DSLR is equiped with these functions. Did photographers play a

part in this, or is there some kind of secret "Scientific Cumunity" behind all of it ? This sure happened kind of

fast.

<p>Some of those color-related concepts have been around for some time.<br>

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_model</p>

<p> </p>

<p>Yeah, wondered about it, but not enough to consider it a work of a secret community ;-).<br>

Some of those you list are easy. 16 and 14 bit are not terms, but a value and a term. The term 'bit' (binary digit) is quite old. The meaning of the value as the amount of bits used per pixel to store a colour value, is pretty straightforward. Not some marketing scheme to obscure something simple as hi-tech blabla.<br>

Picture Style is a marketing name. It is a marketing scheme to obscure something simple as high tech talk.<br>

Photoshop is a product name, and probably trademarked and all that. But Adobe would be too dumb to be true if they opposed the wide-spread use of 'photoshop' as equivalent to 'bitmap editor'. So, most certainly a name brewed in some lab full of progamming geeks and a few marketing boys.</p>

<p>I think the real point might be more the amount of people sheepishly repeating some of these terms without knowing what they actually mean or do.</p>

<p>According to the Oxford English Dictionary, <em>histogram</em> showed up as early as 1891 (119 years ago -- somewhat more than 15.)</p>

<p>A histogram is just a kind of graph, so it has nothing to do with photography other than it's being used to show exposure info.</p>

<p>I certainly was learning about histograms, RGB, and bits, upwards of 25 years ago, long before I heard about digital cameras.</p>

<p>Although probably not long before I read about slicing a memory chip in two to expose the circuitry, and then connecting it up as a matrix of light sensing points for digital character recognition.<br>

I doubt if I had any inkling of how that would mature in photographic equipment.</p>

<p>When we first had word processors, a lecturer complained to me about having to learn all this silly new computer jargon, all about fonts and galleries, and upper and lower case and so on. So as I told him, we had to learn that too, since it wasn't computing terminology, but it was probably in the printing industry since a fellow called Caxton, around about AD 1480.</p>

 

<p>A lot of that stuff-- white balance, color space, histograms, etc-- goes back decades, but the application was color television, not still photography.</p>

<p>Well we did have tungsten and daylight balanced films. Not to metion color temp meters and color correction filters to use over flashes or lenses when required.</p>

<p>I think a lot of that came from the professional video (hardware) community which many of the advances in early digital stills borrowed from.</p>

<p>I learned most of that in my high school audio visual classes working with video. I graduated 24 years ago.</p>

<p>Photography has always been a gear/technology oriented activity. From any year in the 20th century it would be possible to list technology aspects that were not commonly known a decade or two before.</p>

<p>As said above histogram is from maths, and I, for one, first encountered a lot of the white balance stuff in video. Does anyone else remember the old 1970's Tektronix colour monitors - a full 8 colours - and their RGB colourspace etc? So I think a lot of the digital colour jargon goes back to the first attempts to digitize colour in the 1970's or maybe a bit earlier. I think everything digital was black and white before that - or punch cards if you go back still further. </p>

<p>The Secret Scientific Community knows who you are and we WILL keep tabs on you for having exposed our secret.....Hahahaha :-)</p>

<p>Well, RAW is actually from just plain old "raw" it dosen't stand for anything. All it is is describing a file as being raw, in that it is "unprocessed" because you can't print it like that. You have to open it up and convert it to a printable format.</p>

<p>On a related note, if you were wondering where the acronym DNG came from, it stands for "Digital Negative" in an<br>

attempt to make a universal raw file format.</p>

<p>Photoshop is just the name of a program, it's common use to refer to anything that's been post-worked is similar to the Xerox naming back in the 80's</p>

<p>The terminology might not have been identical, but read up on the history of color photography, particularly the evolution of Technicolor (in all its many incarnations).</p>

<p><em> I mean these things were unheard of 15 years ago...</em></p>

<p>Not really... RGB has been around for A LONG Time as hss Photoshop (20 years now).</p>

<p>15 years? Really? White Balance was around in the '70s, if not earlier... many more too.</p>

<p>What's the OP's premise again? Oh.... RAW files.</p>

There's no mystery about where most of these terms came from. A few minutes of research with a web search engine will reveal their origins. Most of the terms have been around far longer than fifteen years.

"histogram showed up as early as 1891 " -- Amazing was it used in photography ?

 

"White Balance was around in the '70s" -- Amazing never knew we had digital TV's back then ?

 

"16 and 14 bit are not terms, but a value and a term. The term 'bit' (binary digit) is quite old. " -- I remember working with an old 8 bit computer, oops I guess I dated myself.

 

"Photoshop" -- The first I heard of it, it was called CS7.

 

 

"DNG -- I wonder how come this never caught on. I still have a DNG folder on my Desktop

 

I heard of RGB before when I took an 8 month printing course after High-school, but sRGB is new to

me !

 

 

"I think a lot of that came from the professional video (hardware) community" -- Ah Video that explains it I remember those shaky 16mm clips my Dad use to take on weekends.

 

Now if Photoshop has been around for 20 years or more, they must have preceded Digital cameras. Phtoshop must have been waiting in the wings like a faithful husband to be, until his bride(Digital cameras) grew up and filled out a little.

Color science has been around a pretty long time—well before the 70s. We still base almost all of our

colorimetry on the CIE color matching standards formalized in 1931 based on a small sample of viewers in

experiments in the 20s. Before that Albert Munsell

came up with a pretty good system of describing colors numerically that is still used in many fields today

—soil scientists still carry Munsell color charts and paints are still described in terms of hue, value, and

chroma. It only seems recent because only recently has the average hobbiest been asked to take control

of color in any technical way. It's a <a href="http://www.photo-mark.com/notes/2010/apr/09/notes-

saturation/">favorite subject</a> of <a href="http://www.photo-mark.com/notes/2010/jan/22/some-notes-

color/">mine</a>

 

<blockquote>

<p>"histogram showed up as early as 1891 " -- Amazing was it used in photography ?</p>

</blockquote>

<p>Probably not, but then you didn't have the computer on a chip to look at the image, and produce the histogram in real time, did you! I'm sure someone could have produced one, but it would have taken a little time...</p>

<blockquote>

<p>"White Balance was around in the '70s" -- Amazing never knew we had digital TV's back then ?</p>

</blockquote>

<p>Nothing to do with digital! Color TV cameras used to have three scanners that saw the image from the lens, one for each color, red, green & blue. White balance is simply adjusting the output of the three scanners so that whites look white, and don't have some color cast. Color balance is also used for film! I forget the exact names, but there was an Ektachrome color balanced for daylight lit scenes, and another for tungsten (indoor/studio) lighting!</p>

<p>This is needed for films and digital image sensors. Our brains are very adjustable, and keep us always seeing the same colors, almost regardless of the actual color of the incident light. A white sheet of paper will look white to us under daylight, tungsten, or fluorescent lighting, while a digital camera that isn't adjusted for white balance would record three different shades of "white".</p>

<blockquote>

<p>"Photoshop" -- The first I heard of it, it was called CS7.</p>

</blockquote>

<p>Your name isn't Benjamin Button, is it? :-) Photoshop <a href="http://www.photoshop20anniversary.com/">has been around for 20 years</a>! The newest version is CS5, which followed CS, CS1, CS2, CS3 & CS4... (and there were lots of others before CS...) I've been using it for over 15 years (that's dating myself...)</p>

<blockquote>

<p>"DNG -- I wonder how come this never caught on. I still have a DNG folder on my Desktop</p>

</blockquote>

<p>Probably hasn't caught on widely, as it is an Adobe specification. Sometimes, these things catch on, sometimes they don't. Manufacturers of cameras also want you to use their own products to do the heavy lifting for RAW conversions...</p>

<blockquote>

<p>I heard of RGB before when I took an 8 month printing course after High-school, but sRGB is new to me !</p>

</blockquote>

<p>Just another, newer spec, that's all...</p>

<blockquote>

<p>"I think a lot of that came from the professional video (hardware) community" -- Ah Video that explains it I remember those shaky 16mm clips my Dad use to take on weekends.</p>

</blockquote>

<p>No, Video as in Television, tapes, etc. 16mm is good old-fashioned silver-based film...</p>

<blockquote>

<p>Now if Photoshop has been around for 20 years or more, they must have preceded Digital cameras. Phtoshop must have been waiting in the wings like a faithful husband to be, until his bride(Digital cameras) grew up and filled out a little.</p>

</blockquote>

<p>Just because they didn't have digital <em>cameras </em>back in 1990 (they did, but they were extraordinarily expensive, some almost $10,000 per megapixel!), doesn't mean there weren't digital <em>images</em>! Way back then, you scanned your 8x10, or 35mm frame (or any other size, for that matter) on a flatbed or film or drum scanner (the scanning could cost hundreds of dollars for larger images), then brought it into the computer, and used Photoshop to, well, "Photoshop" it. Magazines and newspapers have been using a digital workflow for years. Today it's all digital, but years ago it would have started with a print, negative or slide, and a scanner.</p>

<p>Long before digital cameras were cheap, and in the mainstream of society, a "key" performance indicator for any new Macintosh was how fast it could do a Gaussian Blur in Photoshop on a 20MB image!</p>

 

<p>Wow, Harry -- I had no idea you were <strong>THAT</strong> misinformed (just one thing you wrote that makes me bang my head.... YOU SHOULD know better!):</p>

<p><em>"Now if Photoshop has been around for 20 years or more, they must have preceded Digital cameras. Phtoshop must have been waiting in the wings like a faithful husband to be, until his bride(Digital cameras) grew up and filled out a little."</em></p>

<p>What is it you DO know?</p>