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The motivation for the working space, one of them anyway,
was Adobe's decision to port Photoshop to Windows. Anyone
who has spent time working with both platforms knows an image made
for the PC looks dim on a Macintosh monitor, and similarly an image
produced on a Macintosh looks bright and washed out on a PC monitor.
Why the difference between PC and Macintosh? The reasons
are buried in the lore surrounding the history of QuickDraw, the
Macintosh graphics software used to draw smoother lines.
Specifically, the story goes, with two bits of grayscale, gamma
1.8 can draw a smoother line than gamma 2.2 can. So
they tweaked the Macintosh analog electronics and the rest is history.
As Windows became more and more a contender, it became clear
that solving the problem of light and dark images between platforms
was a necessity. The solution was both easy and boring: display
a brighter image on the PC. "Heck!," said the developers,
"Anyone can do that.
It's too easy."
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And so it came to be that the specific problem was dealt
with by inventing, then solving, a larger more general problem that
was much more interesting and cool than getting the Mac and PC to
display alike. That general problem was the existence of multiple
interpretations for the same RGB color values.
Put simply, your working space is a set of colors that represent
an artificial, ideal tele-tubby color space where life is perfect,
everything is always fun, and most especially all colors match
all of the time. The concept of a working space would
allow us to live in that perfect world, oblivious to the vagaries
of our monitors, or scanners, or printers.
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