Each of these two approaches overcomes some major obstacles, however neither fully responds to the needs of today's color professionals for high quality, and fast response at an affordable price.
When retouching is complete, the script is typically passed to a more powerful, and expensive,
server and “executed.” That is, the actions contained in the script are applied to the high res image, which results in a high quality final image.
The
disadvantage of this approach is that the operator does not work with the actual image or at highly detailed levels (particularly for a magnified “close-up” of a portion).
As a result, it is not always possible to perform highly detailed retouching actions such as silhouetting and masking.
Moreover, unpleasant surprises may occur upon execution.
The
virtual image approach suffers two important shortcomings: first, large amounts of memory are required; and second, each effect is applied immediately to the entire image so that complex manipulation, such as large airbrushing, scaling and rotation, incur long
processing delays.
Due to the high amount of memory required for
processing, personal computers have proven very slow and marginally acceptable.
Moreover, even with larger mainframe systems, there is not always a good correlation between the monitor and the printed image since there is not always a way to visualize the final image on the
display device.
Thus, discrepancies can be introduced due to differences between screen resolution and print resolution.
Perhaps the greatest
disadvantage of known procedures stems from the image that is displayed on the monitor not being identical to the image that will eventually be printed, rendering the operator unable to see the work as it will actually appear in print.
Anomalies and discrepancies can therefore occur in the printed image.
Known procedures cannot resolve the fact that the image displayed on the operator's monitor screen is in most cases vastly less defined than the scanned image held in the computer's memory.
A second and perhaps equally important
disadvantage of known image processing techniques is that the
image editing effects are applied sequentially, i.e. step-by-step.
This incurs a severe degradation in the quality of the original image if many
image editing effects are applied to the same portion of an image.
If processing power is unavailable, then the time required to carry out the operation becomes unacceptably long, thus reducing the scope and sophistication of possible operations to be carried out on the image.
For example, airbrush strokes are currently extremely limited in size as a result of the extreme processing power needed to calculated image changes.
The irreversible nature of image processing using known procedures precludes the operator from easily implementing any second thoughts.
However, this requires a huge amount of memory (e.g., a single 8½″×11″×300
dots per inch (dpi) figure requires over 33 million bytes).
To sum up, current computerized image processing for obtaining a
high definition image suffers from the dual disadvantages of requiring extremely high processing power, a limitation of productivity and creativity for the operator due to the irreversibility of image editing steps, and the quality restrictions inherent in a pixel-based approach.