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A Short History of Color Theory
- JacksonGariety 6y agoIt's kinda interesting that color, sound, and space all have three dimensions. What are some other fundamental three-dimensional things?
- jmole 6y agoColor doesn't have 3 dimensions, humans have 3 types of color receptors (and 1 type of broadband receptor). Spacetime has 4 dimensions. Sound can have as many "dimensions" as you care to analyze, but physically you have pressure & velocity embedded in a spacetime continuum. I think the fundamental three-dimensional thing is that we're all mostly limited to reasoning about three-dimensional objects in a three-dimensional world.
- dylan604 6y agoFor video, a vectorscope is a way used to view the color of the video signal.[0] While it looks like a circular view, it is actually representing a sphere. QED color has 3 dimenisions [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vectorscope https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vectorscope
- andrewla 6y agoA video signal contains the assumption that color can be represented by three parameters. But those three parameters are not capable of expressing the complete gamut of visible colors. It's just close enough that there's really no point in pursuing it further.
- sudosysgen 6y agoThere is no biological basis for a fourth dimension of colour perception in humans. It is true that in practice we are unable to replicate the colours we can perceive. But it is possible to create a colourspace that completely contains the gamut of perceivable colours using only three dimensions.
- slavik81 6y agoOur video technology is designed to capture and reproduce what humans can see. If all humans were red-green colourblind, we would only have designed our videos to capture green-blue images, and our TVs would only output green-blue images. To us, they would look like perfect reproductions of the world. In that world, you would be arguing there are only two colours. Yet, the image on those green-blue TVs would obviously not be an accurate reproduction if viewed by a person with normal RGB colour vision from our world. Similarly, compared to Geordi La Forge, we are all colourblind. He can distinguish thousands of different wavelengths of light independently, and to him our current RGB videos look nothing like the reality they attempt to depict, due to all the colours they throw away.
- sudosysgen 6y agoColour does have three dimensions, though. You cannot describe human colour perception without three dimensions - frequency and magnitude is sufficient for pure waves, but saturation is needed to match colour perception of the impurity of a given tone. So colour as perceived by humans is indeed three-dimensional.
- andrewla 6y agoHuman color perception is three-ish-dimensional I think would be more accurate. There are no three colors that can be mixed to produce the whole gamut of colors that humans can perceive. That is, there are shades that are visibly distinct that can not be produced by the closest pigments we have to primary cyan/magenta/yellow, and similar cannot be produced by mixing of monochromatic light. Our perception is a window into the infinite dimensional space of frequency/intensity that can be very well-described by three parameters, but that is not adequate to completely describe colors even as perceived by humans.
- sudosysgen 6y agoWhile you cannot produce all colours humans can perceive using a mix of monochromatic light (indeed, some perceivable colours are entirely impossible to be perceived without afterimages), the colourspace of human colour perception is entirely three-dimensional. This is, fundamentally, because we have three types of receptors. Pigment maps into our perception of colour are possible in theory, but it is impossible to make an ideal pigment in practice nor an ideal substrate, which is why you see the issues you do when trying to produce them in practice.
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 6y agoNot only that, some people have four receptors.
- jcranmer 6y agoModern color perception theory is actually way more than 3-dimensional. That's because human perception of color isn't driven by the absolute amount of light hitting our various color receptor cells, but by the relative amounts we see in the various parts of the image, and white balance and fatigue enters the perception as well.
- BurningFrog 6y agoOne important fact is that we hear sound frequencies MUCH better than we see light frequencies. With sound, what we hear is pretty much all the frequency information within our range. With light, the huge frequency complexity gets reduced down to our three base colors. This is why a certain "color" can be produced with an uncountable number of frequency combinations.
- layer8 6y agoPart of the reason may be that the visible light spectrum only covers one "octave".
- OscarCunningham 6y agoAlso, if we had more types of cones then each type would have to be more spread out over the retina, so we would lose resolution. In some sense the eyes and ears are at opposite ends of a spectrum. The eyes give you lots of information about the direction light is coming from, but barely any information about its spectrum (only three types of cone), whereas the ears give you lots of information about sound's frequency spectrum, but barely any information about its direction (only two ears). Come to think of it, this could be phrased as a tradeoff between resolution in position and resolution in frequency. It's the uncertainty principle!
- BurningFrog 6y agoThat actually clarifies things for me. Thanks!
- andi999 6y agoQuite a number of humans are tetrachromat:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrachromacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrachromacy
- andrewla 6y agoI'm not sure why you say that sound has three dimensions -- for the most part we can treat sound as one-dimensional; just pressure at a point in space as a function of time. For a complete analysis of sound we need more than that, but that just inherits from the fact that space is three-dimensional so for a complete analysis we need the three-dimensional spatial distribution of pressure. On a similar note, color is not fundamentally three-dimensional; that's a function of our eyes having three band-pass filters. Light itself is infinite dimensional; any function mapping frequency to intensity corresponds to a "color" of sorts. We can only perceive colors in terms of how they activate the three different sensor types (four including intensity).
- sudosysgen 6y agoNot really, no. The human perception of colour is fundamentally three-dimensional. In order to describe a perceived colour, no matter the system you choose, you need three dimensions. For example, you could use frequency and amplitude of a light wave, but that would only be sufficient for pure tones, leading to the need of a third dimension - saturation - for "impurity". Or you could use a B-L B-R pair for tone and a third component for Luma - three-dimensional. Or you can give the amplitude of Red, Green and Blue; three dimensions. You could add a fourth dimension, RGB+Luma, but the fourth dimension is useless in describing a given perceived colour, as the activation of the intensity receptor is a function of the activation of the three colour receptors, it is only there for high-gain situations. Sound is not one-dimensional, as simply considering the pressure of a point is insufficient as a description of sound perception of humans. Indeed, we perceive variations in pressure, not pressure itself (consider the balancing of the pressure of the inner ear). In order to understand sound, you fundamentally need two dimensions, either pressure and time, or frequency and amplitude. This is only for an instantaneous perception of sound, in order to record "a sound", you need three dimensions. Although you could indeed plot a time-series of pressures, this does not describe what actually is happening - for a time-series of pressures to be interpreted as a recorded sound you necessarily need a sample rate, otherwise the physical interpretations are infinite. This is why a spectrogram is three-dimensional - frequency, amplitude, and time. Hence, the sounds we operate on and process are three-dimensional, as any representation of a sound is tridimensional, either a time series of pressure, time and sample rate, or a continuous spectrum of time, frequency and amplitude.
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 6y agoColor is infinite dimensional. Imagine you shine four lasers each with wavelengths of 100, 200, 300, and 400 nanometers. We might see them smushed together into a combination that's 3 dimensional (unless you're a tetrachromat, a rare person who has extra rods or cones or something), but physically it's just the four frequencies (and phases). You can't combine the first 100, 200, 300nm laser beams to get a 400nm beam, so it's not three dimensional. With N lasers, it's N frequencies, and you can't reproduce them as combinations of fewer frequencies. N goes arbitrarily high. Follow that logic and the dimension of color space is the dimension of the space of frequency distributions, which is infinite dimensional. Likewise with sound, unless you want to describe it as just the amplitude at a single spatial point versus time, in with case sound and color are just 1D (plus time), which isn't a useful model since you now have to account for all spatial points.
- sudosysgen 6y agoColour can't be described as 1D, as you can have multiple amplitudes of different frequencies at once. You could have an infinite amount of points of differing amplitudes, but this conception breaks down because of the reality of limited bandwidth, and so the best representation is a frequency-space. If you want, here is something you can do. Get a square, inside of that square plot the x axis for frequency, and the y axis for time. For every frequency x, at every time y, choose a luminosity level going from 0 from null amplitude to 1 corresponding to the entire amount of energy in the observable universe. That square will be able to represent perfectly colour over time, what you claim is "infinite dimensional", in a three-dimensional space.
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 6y agoHere's a counter argument against what you just said for N dimensions, in almost exactly your words. Get a square, inside of that square, plot the x axis for dimension, and the y axis for time (the x axis is discrete, taking values of 1, 2, 3, ... up to N). For every dimension x, at every time y, choose a luminosity level going from 0 from null amplitude to 1 corresponding to the entire amount of energy in the observable universe. That square will be able to represent perfectly ND position over time, which I claim is N dimensional (plus time), in a three dimensional space. Much more simply, you can represent an Nd point in 2d, with the first dimension indexing dimension, and the second dimension indexing value. The 2D representation isn't the space. It's a single point in the space, which can vary along some number of degrees of freedom (N in this case). If that first dimension of the two (the index dimension) was continuous, and the second still represents value, then we're representing the set of 1D functions, which is infinite dimensional. That's how we represent a frequency distribution.
- captaincrowbar 6y ago"Colour has three dimensions" is a fact about human anatomy, not physics.
- andrewla 6y agoI find it really amazing how we went down the process of figuring out how color works -- Goethe's work in particular is really interesting because it is a very empirical approach based on the observation that afterimages exist. The limitation in so many cases, and the reason why there's a constant crossover in this history between textiles dying, artists, and researchers, is that producing substances which represent a given color and have good light-fastness are hard to come by unless there's a strong commercial reason to explore the space. At one point I was looking to see if I could buy paints for my kids to play with in the "true"-er primary colors, CMYK, and that led down a big rabbit hole (basic answer is "not easily", unfortunately) eventually leading me to [1] which is a fascinating look at our ability to span the gamut through some set of primaries. From personal experience, I always find it amazing when I see a color magazine in the light and note that some parts are reflective and some are more matte; and that this is not a function of intent of any sort -- those are just the incidental properties of the physical pigments selected for their saturation/brightness/fastness primarily. [1] https://www.handprint.com/HP/WCL/color13.html https://www.handprint.com/HP/WCL/color13.html
- itronitron 6y agoI've found that Golden and Amsterdam have good options for CMYK process colors available as acrylic inks, and these work well within refillable acrylic markers from Montana, Molotow, et al. One caveat to the acrylic inks for a CMYK process is that they need to be really thinned down with an acrylic medium in order to get the proper transparency to achieve red, green, and blue.
- Jenz 6y agoThis site is fantastic!
- runemadsen 6y agoAuthor here. This makes me very happy to hear :)
- Hoasi 6y agoAbsolutely, looking forward to reading more!
- leni536 6y agoI love this conference talk for introducing linear and perceptually uniform colorspaces: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAoljeRJ3lU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAoljeRJ3lU
- OscarCunningham 6y agoThere's an interesting aspect of colour that this article doesn't cover, which is the psychological primaries (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primary_color#Psychological_primaries https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primary_color#Psychological_pr...). The eye gets colour information from the three types of cone, but it then processes this information into three new dimensions. Black against white, red against green, yellow against blue. So from a psychological point of view there are four primary colours: RYGB. These are arranged like the points on a compassb so it's impossible to experience a mix of red and green or yellow and blue, just like it's impossible to be both north and south. I think this is why these colours tend to be used more often in logos and board game pieces. The brain views them as more simple, and the psychological secodary colours (orange, chartreuse, turquoise and purple) as more complex.
- deltron3030 6y agoYup, color production/reproduction/mixing vs. color selection/perception. It's a bit strange that UI designers are mostly using tools made for color production for selecting colors (rgb/hsv/hsl), not those that are appropriate for color selection like lch. >I think this is why these colours tend to be used more often in logos and board game pieces. Cool/serious vs. warm/playful colors, most businesses try to be serious, most toys want to be played with..
- davidivadavid 6y agoThere's work being done in that department so hopefully the rest of the tools adapt: http://lea.verou.me/2020/04/lch-colors-in-css-what-why-and-how/ http://lea.verou.me/2020/04/lch-colors-in-css-what-why-and-h...
- nyanpasu64 6y ago> Today, the gamut (range of possible colors displayed) of most monitors is closer to P3, which has a 50% larger volume than sRGB. Most monitors that... Macs have? As a Windows/Linux user, none of the monitors I've used as my daily driver are wide-gamut. The only wide-gamut monitor I've really seen was in my university's computer lab. It displayed every color a bit more brightly, and my laptop didn't desaturate colors to compensate. > Firefox does not implement the spec that restricts CSS colors to sRGB. Instead, it just throws the raw RGB coordinates on the screen, so e.g. rgb(100% 0% 0%) is the brightest red your screen can display. While this may seem like a superior solution, it’s incredibly inconsistent: specifying a color is approximate at best, since every screen displays it differently. By restricting CSS colors to a known color space (sRGB) we gained device independence. LCH and Lab are also device independent as they are based on actual measured color. Yeah that explains why.
- encom 6y agoAbout 10 years ago, I had an idea about designing a lamp, using LEDs (I'm an electrician). So I wanted to learn which colours to blend in what proportion to achieve a pleasant colour temperature and good colour rendering. This idea led me down an UNBELIEVABLE rabbit hole of colour theory. This subject is maddeningly complex, and I feel like I still don't know anything at all.
- pjc50 6y agoIn practice, you're best off picking one of "warm white" or "cool white", which are tuned to look like either incandescent or fluorescent bulbs. The LEDs are widely available in various "COB" (chip-on-board) packages that consist of a bunch of them wirebonded to an aluminium PCB. They're in series so they take a more convenient terminal voltage like 12V or 36V. Then you have to decide whether you trust the Chinese constant-current supplies or get a more expensive one.
- chadlavi 6y agoThis is interesting for Jeopardy-trivia-like reasons, but I didn't feel better equipped to do my work after reading it.
- somewhereoutth 6y agoI have experimented with synthesizing colour in the computer using a kind of binary DNA as a basis, which allowed me to mix colours (or more precisely their RGB components) in interesting ways [1]. I'm not sure it stands up to artistic or theoretical scrutiny, but it was fun and I saw some nice results. I should take some time and get a better understanding of colour theory, as per the article. [1] http://robertallison.co.uk/ http://robertallison.co.uk/
- dhosek 6y agoBack in the 80s/90s I spent time trying to standardize the \special commands used by TeX. I remember thinking color would be a simple thing and then discovering the whole rathole that's RGB vs CMY vs CMYK vs HSB. The problem of doing simple in-line graphics was another issue that raised its ugly head as I realized that I was facing essentially reinventing PostScript once you face the question of what happens at the corner of two lines. I don't think much if any of what I came with was ever implemented and the migration in the twenty-first century of TeX to pdftex then xetex and luatex made it all moot since there was no longer the plethora of dvi-to-printer drivers in the mix.
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- wwarner 6y agoJames Turrell's light sculptures are an exercise in color theory https://crystalbridges.org/blog/james-turrell-josef-albers-color-theory-work-skyspace/ https://crystalbridges.org/blog/james-turrell-josef-albers-c...