Maxwell Technologies

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Revision as of 05:18, 25 January 2008

CHROMiX Maxwell draws on a wide range of technologies. This page summarizes those technologies for those interested in Maxwell's underpinnings or who are working on supporting Maxwell through API communications. Most technologies below are not of CHROMiX construction but a few are.

Maxwell Technologies

Color Science

Spectral Data

Colorimetric Data

At this time, XYZ and Lab values in Maxwell are calculated for D50 and 2 degree observer. Emissive colors for displays and illuminants may be based on a non-D50 white point but will be adapted to D50 for color differencing equations in most cases.

Maxwell has the ability to specify and adapt to/from varying white points and we will be exposing more of these capabilities in future upgrades.

Densitometric Data

Color Differencing

Communications

Email

Web Communications

• Maxwell uses HTTP and HTTPS for all web browser and API communications. HTTP(S) was chosen to allow easy communication through corporate firewalls, proxy servers and other security systems. All CHROMiX applications that communicate with Maxwell do so through HTTP(S).

Data Structures & Formats

Color FIle Formats

CGATS 

ASCII-based color measurement files

CXF 

Color eXchange Format

JSON

Meta Data Handling

CHROMiX SmartTarget™

CHROMiX SmartTarget is patent-pending technology that allows the automatic reconcilliation of color patches between color targets containing different sets of patches in any order.

For SmartTarget to function properly, all measurement files should contain BOTH device values and color or spectral values for each patch. X-Rite ProfileMaker's MeasureTool and ColorPort both create color files of this type by default so if you are using these tools you should have no problems.

SmartTarget aids in the uploading / importing of colors as well as the rapid and reliable extraction of color values from the repository.

• When uploading and importing color, Maxwell will accept color targets of any size and with patches in any order.
• When reporting, Maxwell will automatically reconcile any sample color set with your chosen reference set. For instance, if you choose the GRACoL 2006 or FOGRA 39 color references, they are both composed of 1617 color patches as described by the IT8/7-4 color target standard. Any sample color set wil be compared with these selected references when reporting and all color patches shared by both targets will be used to calculate report values. No configuration of target informtion is necessary for this function. This allows many different target types and orders to be compared in the same report. Old press runs from ten years ago with a small target can be easily compared todays runs with larger targets.
• SmartTarget allows the rapid extraction of known patches or patch types from any color set. This allows rapid summary reports which show, for instance, paper white, CMYK, RGB, 300% and 400% patches to be summarized for any target that contains them. Patch types include single ink patches, for instance, so all the Cyan, Magenta, Yellow or Black ONLY patches can be quickly extracted to calculate TVI (dot gain) and other values for tolerancing and graphing. No prior configuration of Maxwell is required.

Dates and Times

• Maxwell is international time aware and stores all dates in UTC form. Unless translated explicitly by Maxwell through an API or the web interface, all times will be in UTC (GMT).
• For the web interface, Maxwell automatically detects the time zone configured in the user's web browser - which typically is directly drawn from the user's operating system settings. All dates in Maxwell's web interface are displayed in the user's local time zone unless otherwise directed by the user.