UCT Studio

Info UCT Studio is an image editing tool for digital photography. It is built upon a novel color model.

UCT Studio can be used to edit any kind of imaging data, but its benefits are especially evident with HDR (High Dynamic Range) images.

(...)

Info UCT Studio is an image editing tool for digital photography. It is built upon a novel color model.

UCT Studio can be used to edit any kind of imaging data, but its benefits are especially evident with HDR (High Dynamic Range) images.

UCT Studio Introduction

How is UCT Studio different from other imaging applications like Adobe Photoshop?: UCT Studio's algorithms and data representation are based on more advanced imaging science. Traditional imaging solutions use a model that was developed in 1950-60s for phosphor-based cathode ray tube (CRT) color TV displays. This model has significant limitations and was not suited for image editing purposes. For example it allows representation for only about half of all colors visible by human and in very narrow dynamic range of brightness. Today we see an abundance of displays that use very different color reproduction principles, and CRT isn't dominating type of device. As such it no longer makes sense to tie color coding to one particular device. More efficient scheme is to work in human-based (or scene-referred) model that covers completely full range of color and provides precise transformations in editing operations. When image needs to be displayed it is converted into color gamut of the display, most optimally fitting available visualization capabilities. From color management perspective such scheme is most optimal since no loss of color information can happen at intermediate representation or during editing.

UCM provides for uniform operation both in LDR (low dynamic range or traditional imaging) and HDR (high dynamic range). No other tool gives you full set of usable image editing operations for HDR image editing. Adobe Photoshop simply disables most of image adjustments in HDR mode (32 Bits/channel format) to avoid exposing these deficiencies of traditional imaging approach.

It may not be correct to compare UCT Studio with Photoshop side to side, since Photoshop is a different, more complex and more feature-rich tool. Still, for the application of digital photography editing, in many cases, UCT Studio may produce better result in much fewer number of clicks. The UCT Studio adjustments involve more intuitive manipulation of image look. For some adjustments done in UCT Studio it may be very hard or totally impossible to achieve the same result in Photoshop. At the same time certain corrections that could be done in Photoshop would be hard or impossible to repeat in UCT Studio.



What color management does UCT Studio support?: UCT Studio will understand any embedded color profile in any type of supported image formats. It will read and convert such image according to its color profile.
However when saving data into other than iBEF format, currently, UCT Studio will use standard sRGB profile. Support for embedding custom color profiles in file saving will be added to future versions.
Note that color data in iBEF format do not require a color profile, since it represents the visual data in full, unclipped color gamut.