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> assumption is that using another color space (like proposed CIE) would unlock mathematical manipulation of color palettes in design The point is not really “

> assumption is that using another color space (like proposed CIE) would unlock mathematical manipulation of color palettes in design The point is not really “mathematical manipulation” per se. It’s helpful to have human-relevant coordinates anywhere humans are making the decisions, because it dramatically reduces human confusion, and leads people to make better informed decisions. “HSL” and “HSV” (i.e. the RGB cube arbitrarily squashed into a cylinder) are bad models for human use, because despite their names the coordinates have little to do with human perception, and as a result create tremendous amounts of confusion and bad results, especially from anyone who isn’t an expert artist. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HSL_and_HSV#Disadvantages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HSL_and_HSV#Disadvantages

jmiskovic 7y ago
I've once built a color picker that used HSL and was very usable. It wasn't standard color wheel or set of HSL sliders. Instead you would modify the color directly on the design in relative fashion by slowly dragging cursor in one direction. Each of HSL values was modified by dragging in certain direction, for example hue was left to right, lightness was up-right to down-left and saturation was up-left to down-right. It was very intuitive and fast to find a good shade using this design. The key was modifying colors directly on design instead on separate UI panel, and using relative tweaking model for incremental approach to correct shade. HSL was great choice here. Maybe other color spaces like CIE would be more successful if they were less CS- and math-heavy and simpler to understand for designers.
- jacobolus 7y ago
  If you took your same design concept and changed the coordinate system to polar-coordinate CIELAB, I 100% promise you that essentially all artists would find it easier and more pleasant to use, without any other required change. For the software developer, the only additional bit of trickiness is that some color changes will push a color out of gamut, so you need to implement some method of bringing those back into gamut. As a simple first method to try let me recommend preserving hue/lightness and clipping the chroma so the result fits within the gamut.

jmiskovic 7y ago

I've once built a color picker that used HSL and was very usable. It wasn't standard color wheel or set of HSL sliders. Instead you would modify the color directly on the design in relative fashion by slowly dragging cursor in one direction. Each of HSL values was modified by dragging in certain direction, for example hue was left to right, lightness was up-right to down-left and saturation was up-left to down-right. It was very intuitive and fast to find a good shade using this design. The key was modifying colors directly on design instead on separate UI panel, and using relative tweaking model for incremental approach to correct shade. HSL was great choice here. Maybe other color spaces like CIE would be more successful if they were less CS- and math-heavy and simpler to understand for designers.

jacobolus 7y ago
If you took your same design concept and changed the coordinate system to polar-coordinate CIELAB, I 100% promise you that essentially all artists would find it easier and more pleasant to use, without any other required change. For the software developer, the only additional bit of trickiness is that some color changes will push a color out of gamut, so you need to implement some method of bringing those back into gamut. As a simple first method to try let me recommend preserving hue/lightness and clipping the chroma so the result fits within the gamut.