Scientists at the company have been tinkering with a new technology that makes adjusting colors in a document as easy as, well, describing it. For instance, users can type "make the sky a deeper blue" or alternately give a voice command "make the background carnation pink" and the software supposedly does the rest of work.

While still in the research stages, the invention essentially creates a "color language," according to Geoffrey Woolfe (pictured left), principal scientist in the Xerox Innovation Group, by translating human descriptions of color into the precise numerical codes that Xerox's machines can then use to print various color documents.

The discovery will be announced at the 2007 Annual Meeting of the Inter-Society Color Council (ISCC) where Woolfe is set to describe his work in a paper called "Natural Language Color Editing."

For his own part, Woolfe says he focused his research on common human descriptions of color. During that process, he found that common words used to distinguish different shades and colors could actually be mapped to the technical language of color created by engineers.

Woolfe's discovery theoretically means that color adjustments could be made on the fly in devices like color office printers and commercial presses without having to deal with the mathematics, Xerox says.

For instance, cardinal red on a printer or monitor is really just a set of mathematical coordinates that identify a specific region in a three-dimensional space, which is the gamut of all the colors that the device can display or print, according to Woolfe.

To make that color less orange, the color expert simply "distorts," or morphs that region to a new corresponding one in the gamut.

Of course, the ability to use common words to adjust color would likely have far-reaching implications. Both non-experts as well as graphic artists, printers, photographers, and other professionals who spend a significant amount of time fine tuning the colors in documents, could all add actual voice commands to the technology, letting them "tell" their computers to, say, "punch up the magenta" in a bouquet of flowers.

Conversely, office printers could also be commanded to print colors a certain way ("when printing green, make it more of a teal green"). The technology would also would have potential uses in digital printing, making it easier for print providers to communicate with their customers, for instance.

Personally, I have a feeling Xerox's competitors might be feeling a bit green after this announcement. Yup, the more envious shade of the color.