7 ms·

Except color is a construction of your eye-brain derived from stimuli, surround, memories, etc. It's definitely not something you can plug into a three-value m

by subb 11mo ago

Except color is a construction of your eye-brain derived from stimuli, surround, memories, etc. It's definitely not something you can plug into a three-value model. Those are good stimuli encoding space, however. The distinction between brain-color and physical-color is what screws everyone up.

zeroq 11mo ago
fun fact: there's a guy with similar background to mine, with similar dedication to color, yet way more productive and he came out with this incredible piece of art: rebelle app As with most recent technological breakthroughs it uses math from 1931 paper to magically blend colors in ways that seems so realistic it's almost uncanny.
dahart 11mo ago
> It's definitely not something you can plug into a three-value model. What do you mean? And what is screwed up? We use 3 dimensions because most of us are trichromats, and because (un-coincidentally) most digital display devices have 3 primaries. The three-value models definitely are sufficient for many color tasks & goals. Three-value models work so well that outside of science and graphics research it’s hard to find good reasons to need more, especially for art & design work. It’d be more interesting to identify cases where a 3d color model or color space doesn’t work… what cases are you thinking of? 3D cone response is neither physical (spectral) color nor perceptual (“brain”) color, and it lands much closer to the physically-based side of things, but completely physically justifies using 3D models without needing to understand the brain or perception, does it not?
- IgorPartola 11mo ago
  I had experimented with some photo printing services and came across one professional level service that offered pigment inkjet printing (vs much more common dye inkjet printing). Their printers had 12 colors of ink vs the traditional 4. I did some test photos and visually they looked stunning.
  - wongarsu 11mo ago
    "You only need three colors" is a bit of a cheat, because it doesn't really work out in reality. You can use three colors to get a good color gamut (as your screen is doing right now), but to represent close to every color we can see you would need to choose a red and blue close to the edge of what we can perceive, which would make it very dim. And because human vision is weird you would need some negative red as well, which doesn't really exist. Printing instead uses colors that are in the range we can perceive well, and whenever you want a color that is beyond what a combination of the chosen CMYK tones can represent you just add more colors to widen your gamut. Also printed media arguably prints more information than just color (e.g. "metal" colors with different reflectivity, or "neon" colors that convert UV to visible light to appear unnaturally bright)
    - IgorPartola 11mo ago
      Which is interesting because I am printing digital photos which I edit on an RGB screen.
      - mceachen 11mo ago
        I paid for college in part by doing digital prepress. We had CMYK and 8 and 12 color separations. CMYK always has a dramatic color shift from any on-screen colorspace. Vivid green is really hard to get. Neons are (kinda obviously) impossible. And, hilariously/ironically (given how prevalent they are), all manor of skin tones are tough too. Photoshop and Illustrator let you work in CMYK, and is directionally correct. Ask your printer if they accept those natively.
  - dahart 11mo ago
    Have you looked at the actual ink colors? Printing is a very different story. They’re not using 12 primaries, they’re using multiple gradations of the same primary. I don’t know which ink set you used, but 5 different grayscale values is common in a 12-ink set. Here’s an example of a 12 ink set: https://www.amazon.com/Xeepton-Cartridge-Replacement-PFI4100-ImagePROGRAF/dp/B0FB2P7T4L/ https://www.amazon.com/Xeepton-Cartridge-Replacement-PFI4100... There’s only 1 extra color there: red. There are multiple blacks, multiple cyans, multiple yellows, and multiple magentas. The reason printers use more than 3 inks is for better tone in gradations, better gloss and consistency. It’s not because there’s anything wrong with 3D color models. It’s because they’re a different medium than TVs. Note that most color printers take 3D color models as input, even when they use more than 3 inks.
- subb 11mo ago
  They are very useful to encode stimuli, but stimuli is "not yet" color. When you have an image that is not just a patch of RGB value, a lot of things will influence what color you will compute based on the exact same RGB. Akiyoshi's color constancy demonstrations are good examples of this. The RGB model (and any three-values "perceptual" model) fails to predict the perceived color here. You are seeing different colors but the RGB values are the same. https://www.psy.ritsumei.ac.jp/akitaoka/marie-eyecolorconstancy2019.jpg https://www.psy.ritsumei.ac.jp/akitaoka/marie-eyecolorconsta...
  - dahart 11mo ago
    Here you’re talking about only perception, and not physical color. You could use 100 dimensional spectral colors, or even 1D grayscale values, and still have the same result. So this example doesn’t have any bearing on whether a 3D color space works well for humans or not. Do you have any other examples that suggest a 3D color space isn’t good enough? I still don’t understand what you meant.
    - subb 11mo ago
      Yes exactly. I'm intentionally using "color" as a perceptual thing, not as a physical thing. If we are talking about a color model, then it needs to model perception. As such, RGB, as a predictor of perception, can often fail because it doesn't account for much more than what hits the retina, not what happens after. For one, it lacks spatial context - placing the same RGB value with a different surround will feel different, like in the example above. But if you had a real color (as-in, perceptual) picker in Photoshop, you would get a different value. It's excellent at compressing the visible part of the EM spectrum, however. This is what I meant by stimuli encoding.
      - dahart 11mo ago
        Still not seeing why you claimed color is definitely not something you can plug into a 3D model. We can, and do, use 3D color models, of course. And some of them are designed to try to be closer to perceptual in nature, such as the LAB space like @zeroq mentioned at the top of this sub-thread. No well known perceptual color space I know of, and no color space in Photoshop, accounts for context/surround/background, so I don’t understand your claim about Photoshop immediately after talking about the surround problem, but FWIW everyone here knows that RGB is not a perceptual color space and doesn’t have a specification or standard, and everyone here knows that color spaces don’t solve all perceptual problems. I find it confusing to claim that cone response isn’t color yet, that’s going to get you in trouble in serious color discussions. Maybe better to just be careful and qualify that you’re talking about perception than say something that is highly contestable? The claim that a color model must model perception is also inaccurate. Whether to incorporate human perception is a choice that is a goal in some models. Having perceptual goals is absolutely not a requirement to designing a practical color model, that depends entirely on the design goals. It’s perfectly valid to have physical color models with no perceptual elements.

by subb 11mo ago

zeroq 11mo ago

fun fact: there's a guy with similar background to mine, with similar dedication to color, yet way more productive and he came out with this incredible piece of art: rebelle app As with most recent technological breakthroughs it uses math from 1931 paper to magically blend colors in ways that seems so realistic it's almost uncanny.

dahart 11mo ago

> It's definitely not something you can plug into a three-value model. What do you mean? And what is screwed up? We use 3 dimensions because most of us are trichromats, and because (un-coincidentally) most digital display devices have 3 primaries. The three-value models definitely are sufficient for many color tasks & goals. Three-value models work so well that outside of science and graphics research it’s hard to find good reasons to need more, especially for art & design work. It’d be more interesting to identify cases where a 3d color model or color space doesn’t work… what cases are you thinking of? 3D cone response is neither physical (spectral) color nor perceptual (“brain”) color, and it lands much closer to the physically-based side of things, but completely physically justifies using 3D models without needing to understand the brain or perception, does it not?

IgorPartola 11mo ago
I had experimented with some photo printing services and came across one professional level service that offered pigment inkjet printing (vs much more common dye inkjet printing). Their printers had 12 colors of ink vs the traditional 4. I did some test photos and visually they looked stunning.
- wongarsu 11mo ago
  "You only need three colors" is a bit of a cheat, because it doesn't really work out in reality. You can use three colors to get a good color gamut (as your screen is doing right now), but to represent close to every color we can see you would need to choose a red and blue close to the edge of what we can perceive, which would make it very dim. And because human vision is weird you would need some negative red as well, which doesn't really exist. Printing instead uses colors that are in the range we can perceive well, and whenever you want a color that is beyond what a combination of the chosen CMYK tones can represent you just add more colors to widen your gamut. Also printed media arguably prints more information than just color (e.g. "metal" colors with different reflectivity, or "neon" colors that convert UV to visible light to appear unnaturally bright)
  - IgorPartola 11mo ago
    Which is interesting because I am printing digital photos which I edit on an RGB screen.
    - mceachen 11mo ago
      I paid for college in part by doing digital prepress. We had CMYK and 8 and 12 color separations. CMYK always has a dramatic color shift from any on-screen colorspace. Vivid green is really hard to get. Neons are (kinda obviously) impossible. And, hilariously/ironically (given how prevalent they are), all manor of skin tones are tough too. Photoshop and Illustrator let you work in CMYK, and is directionally correct. Ask your printer if they accept those natively.
- dahart 11mo ago
  Have you looked at the actual ink colors? Printing is a very different story. They’re not using 12 primaries, they’re using multiple gradations of the same primary. I don’t know which ink set you used, but 5 different grayscale values is common in a 12-ink set. Here’s an example of a 12 ink set: https://www.amazon.com/Xeepton-Cartridge-Replacement-PFI4100-ImagePROGRAF/dp/B0FB2P7T4L/ https://www.amazon.com/Xeepton-Cartridge-Replacement-PFI4100... There’s only 1 extra color there: red. There are multiple blacks, multiple cyans, multiple yellows, and multiple magentas. The reason printers use more than 3 inks is for better tone in gradations, better gloss and consistency. It’s not because there’s anything wrong with 3D color models. It’s because they’re a different medium than TVs. Note that most color printers take 3D color models as input, even when they use more than 3 inks.
subb 11mo ago
They are very useful to encode stimuli, but stimuli is "not yet" color. When you have an image that is not just a patch of RGB value, a lot of things will influence what color you will compute based on the exact same RGB. Akiyoshi's color constancy demonstrations are good examples of this. The RGB model (and any three-values "perceptual" model) fails to predict the perceived color here. You are seeing different colors but the RGB values are the same. https://www.psy.ritsumei.ac.jp/akitaoka/marie-eyecolorconstancy2019.jpg https://www.psy.ritsumei.ac.jp/akitaoka/marie-eyecolorconsta...
- dahart 11mo ago
  Here you’re talking about only perception, and not physical color. You could use 100 dimensional spectral colors, or even 1D grayscale values, and still have the same result. So this example doesn’t have any bearing on whether a 3D color space works well for humans or not. Do you have any other examples that suggest a 3D color space isn’t good enough? I still don’t understand what you meant.
  - subb 11mo ago
    Yes exactly. I'm intentionally using "color" as a perceptual thing, not as a physical thing. If we are talking about a color model, then it needs to model perception. As such, RGB, as a predictor of perception, can often fail because it doesn't account for much more than what hits the retina, not what happens after. For one, it lacks spatial context - placing the same RGB value with a different surround will feel different, like in the example above. But if you had a real color (as-in, perceptual) picker in Photoshop, you would get a different value. It's excellent at compressing the visible part of the EM spectrum, however. This is what I meant by stimuli encoding.
    - dahart 11mo ago
      Still not seeing why you claimed color is definitely not something you can plug into a 3D model. We can, and do, use 3D color models, of course. And some of them are designed to try to be closer to perceptual in nature, such as the LAB space like @zeroq mentioned at the top of this sub-thread. No well known perceptual color space I know of, and no color space in Photoshop, accounts for context/surround/background, so I don’t understand your claim about Photoshop immediately after talking about the surround problem, but FWIW everyone here knows that RGB is not a perceptual color space and doesn’t have a specification or standard, and everyone here knows that color spaces don’t solve all perceptual problems. I find it confusing to claim that cone response isn’t color yet, that’s going to get you in trouble in serious color discussions. Maybe better to just be careful and qualify that you’re talking about perception than say something that is highly contestable? The claim that a color model must model perception is also inaccurate. Whether to incorporate human perception is a choice that is a goal in some models. Having perceptual goals is absolutely not a requirement to designing a practical color model, that depends entirely on the design goals. It’s perfectly valid to have physical color models with no perceptual elements.