6P Color, the color science technology company that innovated the multi-primary color system, recently pivoted its focus to provide color management tools for display manufacturers to reproduce colors the way they are intended at the source. The new C-suite leadership brought in four months ago is transitioning the company to this new direction. During CES, the ETC team met with 6P Color CTO Matthew Brantley; Board Member Steven Poster, ASC; and Lead Product Manager Kennen Dietz. They explained their tech could deliver immediate improvements by addressing the shortcoming in current displays of not fully representing the color space of an image source in the displays’ native gamuts.

Previously in 2021, ETCentric reported that 6P was in talks with manufacturers to implement their just proposed multi-primary color system, which began as a research project at Baylor University’s Film and Digital Media Department. 6P Color’s initiative back then was for the industry’s adoption of a four primary color system that adds a cyan primary to RGB-based displays.

Then 6P Color realized there was a gap in existing displays’ capabilities for mapping a color space to the display’s color gamut. The color space input was often not fully utilized. As a result, the display’s output colors would not be accurate to the image source’s intended colors. However, Brantley says 6P Color’s technologies has a solution to bridge this gap.

He describes their color management solution consists of three cores: (1) a Full Color Range (FCR) encoding scheme, which represents 100 percent of the colors that humans can see, and proprietary metadata; (2) the color engine residing on the display device that ingests the FCR encoding and metadata to map them onto the display’s native capabilities; and (3) the digital twin profile that stores pre-measured hardware characteristics of a display to facilitate a mapping that preserves the source’s render intent.

6P Color is currently conducting closed beta testing with select partners. And they are working with NASA on a unique display for a visitor experience to show space images the way that astronauts see them. Their goal is to have a licensing model for deploying the color engine on displays. Future expansions include print devices, like inkjet printers.

The ideal end-to-end process for 6P Color’s system would also involve source content mastered with FCR information. Though, their color management can also project FCR encoding from other color spaces.

Through efforts spearheaded by Poster, 6P Color is bringing awareness of its color management system to studios and content creators about adding FCR to production workflows. They have also been working with Assimilate Scratch for a native FCR color grading workflow.