The purpose of this study is to improve the accuracy of soft proofing by increasing the amount of information rendered on screen. We present a workflow that extends traditional colorimetry beyond simple color appearance prediction to a higher dimensional representation, which includes gloss. The intention is to provide a full goniometric simulation of the spatial distribution of light reflected by a print (BRDF) based upon data gathered with simple and inexpensive instruments, glossmeters and spectrophotometers. The proposed workflow is essentially an extended version of standard color characterization models. Instead of providing a single output (CIE XYZ), the workflow estimates the entire distribution of reflected colors under all possible angles (BRDFs of CIE X, Y and Z). An empirical analysis of a large set of goniophotometer measurements has been used to unveil the key characteristics of prints' BRDFs. Finding an accurate mapping between these parameters and color and gloss measurements constitutes the main focus of this article. By using existing color and gloss characterization models, BRDFs of CIE X, Y and Z channels can be obtained from simple CMYK data using this workflow. Its overall accuracy is finally quantitatively assessed and judged to be of good quality.
Alexis Gatt, Raja Bala, Stephen Westland, Phil Green, "Increasing the Dimensionality of Soft Proofing: Gloss" in Proc. IS&T 14th Color and Imaging Conf., 2006, pp 78 - 83, https://doi.org/10.2352/CIC.2006.14.1.art00015