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If I hadn't been told what this is, I would never have guessed that it's a representation of all colors. I know it's all the colors -- I can zoom in and see lot

If I hadn't been told what this is, I would never have guessed that it's a representation of all colors. I know it's all the colors -- I can zoom in and see lots of different colors -- but why doesn't it look like that? My initial description would have been "purple and green squares". I might elaborate that it's "purple and green squares with a bit of blue separating the rows". But why doesn't it feel like all colors? Because of the way it's organized? For the same reason that his randomized pixels looks like a grey blob?

nightcracker 5y ago
> I can zoom in and see lots of different colors If you zoom in further, you'd soon realize your screen is nothing but pure red, green and blue subpixels at varying intensities.
thaumasiotes 5y ago
You can't see the individual pixels. This is illustrated better by the second image, in which the same pixels occur in a random order. It is mostly a uniform gray, despite the fact that almost all of the pixels are not gray.
pavlov 5y ago
> “But why doesn't it feel like all colors?” Because RGB is not a perceptual color space. With RGB, a lot of values are wasted encoding colors that are perceptually very similar. Many colors that are “interesting” to humans are encoded in a narrow slice of the RGB cube. Much of the cube is a deep ocean of indistinguishable bluish shades. Video traditionally uses various luminance+chroma color spaces, which are more perpetually effective than RGB and allow for easy subsampling to save bandwidth on the less important color data.
- H8crilA 5y ago
  Now I feel cheated by the OP link and want to see an image with all colors but from some good perceptual-based space.
  - rkuykendall-com 5y ago
    Found in a link below, this may be closer: https://allrgb.com/chl https://allrgb.com/chl
5faulker 5y ago
It's literally so packed that it exceeds our capacity to resolve colors at generic sizes.
perl4ever 5y ago
This gave me an idea for reorganizing it. I want to do a kind of bubble sort on the pixels and see what it looks like. To be specific, let's say we take two pixels at random and compare each to their 8 neighbors. If they are closer to the surrounding pixels when swapped, then swap them. Repeat. I may try this, but I'm lazy, so in case someone else wants to...
- heyitsguay 5y ago
  I actually just did try it! I'm finding that random pixels don't really get swapped. Except along comparatively uncommon borders between squares, pixels are already very similar to their immediate neighbors. Creating a video with 10000 swaps per frame, I found no successful swaps in 50 frames. That said, I bet there's some other criterion that would have the desired effect.
- zamadatix 5y ago
  I don't think this has a stable "end" it can reach. Diagonals of pixels of the same x,y coordinates in linearly adjacent (green incrementation) cells would trigger a swap as the diagonal is +-1 in both the red and blue channel but the same pixel offset in a different cell is +-1 only in the green channel. I can't think of any 2d arrangement where the difference of a pixel in a cell to all 8 of it's neighbors could be 1 for every pixel so this "sort" would really just cycle pixels around based on the order your random number generator happens to pick swappable diagonals by chance. As such it'd never converge and look like slowly adding distance capped noise over time. The seams between cells would only seek to increase the cap on this noise from 2 to 255. 255 being the minimal maximum distance I can imagine for a sorted grid of 2d pixels (i.e. I think this image is a min-max optimal ordering). It'd also take a ridiculous number of iterations to really notice the noise being added. Perhaps unfeasibly many if you're wanting to go deep and truly rely on random comparisons.
  - OscarCunningham 5y ago
    The process would have to stop eventually, because each swap reduces the sum over all pixels of the distances to adjacent pixels, and there is no infinite descending sequence of positive whole numbers.
zerocrates 5y ago
The reason it specifically looks like "purple and green" squares is because of how it's organized. Each of those smaller squares is made by having red at 0 and blue at 0 at the top left corner, then increasing each along one of the x/y axes until you have red 255 and blue 255 at the bottom right corner. The "green" value is constant for each square, and just increases by one for each subsequent square packed in. At distant/normal viewing you're not going to resolve all those individual colors but more see the averages (to say nothing of the computer itself averaging things to make a zoomed out view or a smaller-dimension rendering). So you basically have subsquares that start, on average, as "purple" (or let's say magenta). They have no or very little green and mostly are mixtures of red and blue. As you go toward the bottom, green increasingly dominates as what were once the darkest parts of each sub-square become just green and what were the magenta parts tend toward white. Blur your vision a little and the image just looks like a magenta-to-green gradient. You would be able to construct this image so it would still contain "all the RGB colors" but looked from afar instead like "yellow and blue squares" or "cyan and red squares" instead, just by changing your method for constructing/organizing it. There'll be variation in how well these different variants "blend" and so on just based on how we perceive the different colors, of course. In terms of that perceptual variation, take for example this: https://allrgb.com/thingy https://allrgb.com/thingy , in particular the little preview in the left. This is what would be the "yellow to blue" kind of ordering, but it doesn't really "blend" as much. The bottom subsquares in particular read as "cyan/magenta/blue" combinations rather than just "blue", and in the top "yellow" isn't really as dominant either. Blur your vision again though and it's a yellow-to-blue gradient.
jonplackett 5y ago
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/RGB_color_space https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/RGB_color_space If you just think about it as a cube of colour with redness (0-255) on one axis, same with green and blue on the others and then taking 256 slices of that cube it all makes sense intuitively.

nightcracker 5y ago

> I can zoom in and see lots of different colors If you zoom in further, you'd soon realize your screen is nothing but pure red, green and blue subpixels at varying intensities.

thaumasiotes 5y ago

You can't see the individual pixels. This is illustrated better by the second image, in which the same pixels occur in a random order. It is mostly a uniform gray, despite the fact that almost all of the pixels are not gray.

pavlov 5y ago

> “But why doesn't it feel like all colors?” Because RGB is not a perceptual color space. With RGB, a lot of values are wasted encoding colors that are perceptually very similar. Many colors that are “interesting” to humans are encoded in a narrow slice of the RGB cube. Much of the cube is a deep ocean of indistinguishable bluish shades. Video traditionally uses various luminance+chroma color spaces, which are more perpetually effective than RGB and allow for easy subsampling to save bandwidth on the less important color data.

H8crilA 5y ago
Now I feel cheated by the OP link and want to see an image with all colors but from some good perceptual-based space.
- rkuykendall-com 5y ago
  Found in a link below, this may be closer: https://allrgb.com/chl https://allrgb.com/chl

5faulker 5y ago

It's literally so packed that it exceeds our capacity to resolve colors at generic sizes.

perl4ever 5y ago

This gave me an idea for reorganizing it. I want to do a kind of bubble sort on the pixels and see what it looks like. To be specific, let's say we take two pixels at random and compare each to their 8 neighbors. If they are closer to the surrounding pixels when swapped, then swap them. Repeat. I may try this, but I'm lazy, so in case someone else wants to...

heyitsguay 5y ago
I actually just did try it! I'm finding that random pixels don't really get swapped. Except along comparatively uncommon borders between squares, pixels are already very similar to their immediate neighbors. Creating a video with 10000 swaps per frame, I found no successful swaps in 50 frames. That said, I bet there's some other criterion that would have the desired effect.
zamadatix 5y ago
I don't think this has a stable "end" it can reach. Diagonals of pixels of the same x,y coordinates in linearly adjacent (green incrementation) cells would trigger a swap as the diagonal is +-1 in both the red and blue channel but the same pixel offset in a different cell is +-1 only in the green channel. I can't think of any 2d arrangement where the difference of a pixel in a cell to all 8 of it's neighbors could be 1 for every pixel so this "sort" would really just cycle pixels around based on the order your random number generator happens to pick swappable diagonals by chance. As such it'd never converge and look like slowly adding distance capped noise over time. The seams between cells would only seek to increase the cap on this noise from 2 to 255. 255 being the minimal maximum distance I can imagine for a sorted grid of 2d pixels (i.e. I think this image is a min-max optimal ordering). It'd also take a ridiculous number of iterations to really notice the noise being added. Perhaps unfeasibly many if you're wanting to go deep and truly rely on random comparisons.
- OscarCunningham 5y ago
  The process would have to stop eventually, because each swap reduces the sum over all pixels of the distances to adjacent pixels, and there is no infinite descending sequence of positive whole numbers.

zerocrates 5y ago

The reason it specifically looks like "purple and green" squares is because of how it's organized. Each of those smaller squares is made by having red at 0 and blue at 0 at the top left corner, then increasing each along one of the x/y axes until you have red 255 and blue 255 at the bottom right corner. The "green" value is constant for each square, and just increases by one for each subsequent square packed in. At distant/normal viewing you're not going to resolve all those individual colors but more see the averages (to say nothing of the computer itself averaging things to make a zoomed out view or a smaller-dimension rendering). So you basically have subsquares that start, on average, as "purple" (or let's say magenta). They have no or very little green and mostly are mixtures of red and blue. As you go toward the bottom, green increasingly dominates as what were once the darkest parts of each sub-square become just green and what were the magenta parts tend toward white. Blur your vision a little and the image just looks like a magenta-to-green gradient. You would be able to construct this image so it would still contain "all the RGB colors" but looked from afar instead like "yellow and blue squares" or "cyan and red squares" instead, just by changing your method for constructing/organizing it. There'll be variation in how well these different variants "blend" and so on just based on how we perceive the different colors, of course. In terms of that perceptual variation, take for example this: https://allrgb.com/thingy https://allrgb.com/thingy , in particular the little preview in the left. This is what would be the "yellow to blue" kind of ordering, but it doesn't really "blend" as much. The bottom subsquares in particular read as "cyan/magenta/blue" combinations rather than just "blue", and in the top "yellow" isn't really as dominant either. Blur your vision again though and it's a yellow-to-blue gradient.

jonplackett 5y ago

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/RGB_color_space https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/RGB_color_space If you just think about it as a cube of colour with redness (0-255) on one axis, same with green and blue on the others and then taking 256 slices of that cube it all makes sense intuitively.