The article describes an attempt to create a "one true colorspace" by using fMRI to look at people's brain activity as they view colors, which is an interesting

The article describes an attempt to create a "one true colorspace" by using fMRI to look at people's brain activity as they view colors, which is an interesting idea. One of the questions asked at the beginning of the article is “Why are there so many different color spaces?” he asks. “If this is really reflective of something fundamental about how we see and perceive, then shouldn’t there be one color space?” There are multiple color spaces mostly because we generate, measure and communicate color spaces in different ways. Active displays (monitors) tend to use some kind of additive color space (e.g. RGB) where the default is "black" and we add various amounts of selective wavelengths to generate colors. Passive displays (printing) tend to use a subtractive space (e.g. CYMK) with a full spectrum (white) reflective surface (or backlight) and then selectively block certain frequencies. Paint colors have their own (proprietary) color spaces based what set of colorants and paint bases are available for mixing. For transmission of images as data, we tend to use other color spaces (e.g. YCrCb) that actually do map to something like the average of human color sensitivity, as that provides less visual color distortion when quantized to fewer bits. All these color spaces exist in parallel because they are optimized for different purposes. And of course color perception varies from person to person. In addition to the various types and degrees of color blindness, a very small % of people appear to have super color sensitivity [1]. I also expect that an fMRI of someone looking at colors would give very different results depending on whether their languages support the blue-green distinction [2]. So I wish them luck, but I doubt there will ever be a "one true color space". [1] http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/326976 http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/326976 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue%E2%80%93green_distinction_in_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue%E2%80%93green_distinction...