Dumbing Down the Discussion: Style Trumps Substance

Implications: This is an interesting and attention-grabbing invention, but the real implications are more strongly in the area of branding and PR rather than real-world user advantages.  In my opinion, this development has no real significance for the end user and should be neither presented nor understood as such.

Analysis: Full disclosure:  I work for a competing company, so my analysis may be influenced by this fact.  Nonetheless, my experience with color science and color management leads me to believe that the approach described has no potential as a serious breakthrough.

The idea of voice-activated color adjustment sounds attractive enough, and yes, there is a need for interactive, intuitive and user-friendly color adjustment tools.  Especially as more and more users are confronted with photos and graphic images that would benefit from some adjustment, almost any improved system support to ease that step would be greatly appreciated.

Nonetheless, the article mentions some key limitations which I would like to elaborate: 

1)  A digital photo or even a computer-generated graphic image is given its rich and realistic look by the wide spectrum of colors which are displayed.  Manufacturers of both monitors and printers proudly state their products' color gamuts in the millions.  Even what appears to be a pure blue sky is actually a subtle mixture of thousands of shades, so any attempt to adjust that appearance is most likely being applied to all of those shades.  You might as well just have a little interactive slider panel or line graph or comparison spots to adjust that color or a group of colors, and such tools already exist today.

2)  Color management will always be a critical area to coordinate display and output devices.  Computer monitors work with light using the RGB system, while printing devices work with ink or toner using the CMYK system (or variations thereof).  So every system configuration relies on the best possible translation routines to convert the displayed image into the printed image.  Professional graphics workers have dedicated workstations with calibrated display and output devices, normed lighting and sophisticated color management tools to ensure that display and output match closely.  The casual user, however, will always be confronted with output variations that may never be eliminated completely.  The typical consumer experiences differences between display and output that they simply have to live with.  Vendors will always be working to improve this area as well, but the system described will not help.

3)  As mentioned, several tools are already available to make simple (but effective) adjustments.  It is not difficult to find free or very low-priced programs which use a simple slider to adjust image darkness, contrast and each of the core colors interactively.  For photo enthusiasts, there are excellent tools to crop, rotate, hide/add images and remove red eyes. Now if the user really wants to make more fine adjustments, such as changing the hue of one portion smoothly without changing the overall picture, he/she has no choice but to get involved in a more advanced image manipulation program.  There is no shortcut, although this seems to be the implication of this announcement.

To summarize, this development appears to have very limited practical use.  It would be most effective for simpler business graphics as opposed to full-color images.  Yet the tools to achieve these adjustments are already commonly available.  Also, the advantage of using voice recognition to achieve this purpose is unclear, except that it seems to be a clever idea to some journalists.  In fact, it is hard to envision how many casual users would be comfortable using a voice-activated system for this purpose.

If people want to develop more than the most basic color adjustment capabilities, then it will be more important to increase their user skill levels rather than to utilize a new way to input instructions which are by definition vague and simplistic.  This development does not appear to further this purpose.