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I'm a color nerd and I love seeing how even with such an old concept (RGB is 162 years old), people are still interested in finding opportunities to innovate. I

I'm a color nerd and I love seeing how even with such an old concept (RGB is 162 years old), people are still interested in finding opportunities to innovate. I love this palette and will be adopting it. Thanks for sharing.

hypertele-Xii 4y ago
RGB is a bit older than 162 years, those are the three colors the human eye percieves (excluding mutations).
- ravi-delia 4y ago
  Eh, RGB is a particular abstraction which is about that old. The human eye is way weirder even before you throw in all the luminosity stuff, and by the time the brain actually computes the color data? Forget it.
  - visarga 4y ago
    Like this optical illusion - the pieces at the top are the exact same colour as the ones at the bottom. https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FSqWB1yX0AAZ-fk?format=png https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FSqWB1yX0AAZ-fk?format=png
  - hypertele-Xii 4y ago
    RGB is not an abstraction. The color-sensing cells in your eyes come in literally three varieties: red, green, and blue. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cone_cell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cone_cell
    - function_seven 4y ago
      They’re actually S, M, and L. While we can choose three primary colors such that a large gamut can be represented, it is impossible to choose 3 hues that will be able to represent the entire visible gamut. Our color sensing cones and the brain processing behind them is more complicated than simple mixing of R, G, and B. Cyan is a good example. It lives on a “hump” in the color space that cannot be reached by any general-purpose gamut.
      - hypertele-Xii 4y ago
        S, M, and L are shorthands for short, medium, and long wavelengths. Guess what these wavelengths are commonly called? Red, green, and blue (though in inverse order, L=R, M=G, S=B). Can you clarify your example of cyan? I'm perfectly capable of both seeing and producing cyan with my human eyes and RGB screen.
        function_seven 4y ago
        So what is called "Cyan" on a computer screen (#00ffff) is as close as you can get to the real color by mixing RGB. In real life, Cyan would be a pure lightsource at, say, 490nm. When that light hits your retina, it will stimulate the S, M, and L receptors in different ways, and your brain will do the math on those differential signals to "rebuild" the color. RGB is a hack we've come up with to stimulate each of the cones separately. But it cannot cover the whole gamut. Look at this diagram: [0]. The triangle is the gamut that results from choosing a particular set of 3 primaries. Only colors inside that triangle can be simulated by the mixing of those primaries. Colors that lie outside of the triangle cannot be created. There are other gamuts that cover more visible colors, like the Adobe Wide Gamut [1]. Even this one still manages only 78% of the colors we're capable of seeing. And still no pure Cyan. The thing we call "cyan" on our computer screens is desaturated. The mixing of the green and blue primaries that mimics pure 490nm unfortunately also stimulates the L cone too much. From [2]: > No mixture of colors, however, can produce a response truly identical to that of a spectral color, although one can get close, especially for the longer wavelengths, where the CIE 1931 color space chromaticity diagram has a nearly straight edge. For example, mixing green light (530 nm) and blue light (460 nm) produces cyan light that is slightly desaturated, because response of the red color receptor would be greater to the green and blue light in the mixture than it would be to a pure cyan light at 485 nm that has the same intensity as the mixture of blue and green. [0] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:CIE_chromaticity_diagram_2012_version.png#/media/File:CIE_chromaticity_diagram_2012_version.png https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:CIE_chromaticity_dia... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wide-gamut_RGB_color_space https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wide-gamut_RGB_color_space [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color#Color_in_the_eye https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color#Color_in_the_eye
    - ravi-delia 4y ago
      Not the sRGB used in monitors and simple color-pickers, no? Might be wrong here, but I'm fairly certain that day-to-day RGB that most programmers are familiar with is a direct representation of the brightness of the various colors of pixel in a given region (modulo green). The CIE-XYZ color space is the one which tries to represent human vision. RGB isn't crazy far off, but the R, G, and B values certainly don't map directly onto the activation of the L, M, and S cones. (0,255,0) is legal RGB, and displays a particular color, even though such a combination of activations is clearly impossible in the human eye. So given that RGB is a simpler, more tractable representation of a more complicated system...I'd call that an abstraction.
- nomagicbullet 4y ago
  Appreciate your note. I should have said the RGB color model used by humans to represent color spectrum.

hypertele-Xii 4y ago

RGB is a bit older than 162 years, those are the three colors the human eye percieves (excluding mutations).

ravi-delia 4y ago
Eh, RGB is a particular abstraction which is about that old. The human eye is way weirder even before you throw in all the luminosity stuff, and by the time the brain actually computes the color data? Forget it.
- visarga 4y ago
  Like this optical illusion - the pieces at the top are the exact same colour as the ones at the bottom. https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FSqWB1yX0AAZ-fk?format=png https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FSqWB1yX0AAZ-fk?format=png
- hypertele-Xii 4y ago
  RGB is not an abstraction. The color-sensing cells in your eyes come in literally three varieties: red, green, and blue. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cone_cell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cone_cell
  - function_seven 4y ago
    They’re actually S, M, and L. While we can choose three primary colors such that a large gamut can be represented, it is impossible to choose 3 hues that will be able to represent the entire visible gamut. Our color sensing cones and the brain processing behind them is more complicated than simple mixing of R, G, and B. Cyan is a good example. It lives on a “hump” in the color space that cannot be reached by any general-purpose gamut.
    - hypertele-Xii 4y ago
      S, M, and L are shorthands for short, medium, and long wavelengths. Guess what these wavelengths are commonly called? Red, green, and blue (though in inverse order, L=R, M=G, S=B). Can you clarify your example of cyan? I'm perfectly capable of both seeing and producing cyan with my human eyes and RGB screen.
      - function_seven 4y ago
        So what is called "Cyan" on a computer screen (#00ffff) is as close as you can get to the real color by mixing RGB. In real life, Cyan would be a pure lightsource at, say, 490nm. When that light hits your retina, it will stimulate the S, M, and L receptors in different ways, and your brain will do the math on those differential signals to "rebuild" the color. RGB is a hack we've come up with to stimulate each of the cones separately. But it cannot cover the whole gamut. Look at this diagram: [0]. The triangle is the gamut that results from choosing a particular set of 3 primaries. Only colors inside that triangle can be simulated by the mixing of those primaries. Colors that lie outside of the triangle cannot be created. There are other gamuts that cover more visible colors, like the Adobe Wide Gamut [1]. Even this one still manages only 78% of the colors we're capable of seeing. And still no pure Cyan. The thing we call "cyan" on our computer screens is desaturated. The mixing of the green and blue primaries that mimics pure 490nm unfortunately also stimulates the L cone too much. From [2]: > No mixture of colors, however, can produce a response truly identical to that of a spectral color, although one can get close, especially for the longer wavelengths, where the CIE 1931 color space chromaticity diagram has a nearly straight edge. For example, mixing green light (530 nm) and blue light (460 nm) produces cyan light that is slightly desaturated, because response of the red color receptor would be greater to the green and blue light in the mixture than it would be to a pure cyan light at 485 nm that has the same intensity as the mixture of blue and green. [0] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:CIE_chromaticity_diagram_2012_version.png#/media/File:CIE_chromaticity_diagram_2012_version.png https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:CIE_chromaticity_dia... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wide-gamut_RGB_color_space https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wide-gamut_RGB_color_space [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color#Color_in_the_eye https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color#Color_in_the_eye
  - ravi-delia 4y ago
    Not the sRGB used in monitors and simple color-pickers, no? Might be wrong here, but I'm fairly certain that day-to-day RGB that most programmers are familiar with is a direct representation of the brightness of the various colors of pixel in a given region (modulo green). The CIE-XYZ color space is the one which tries to represent human vision. RGB isn't crazy far off, but the R, G, and B values certainly don't map directly onto the activation of the L, M, and S cones. (0,255,0) is legal RGB, and displays a particular color, even though such a combination of activations is clearly impossible in the human eye. So given that RGB is a simpler, more tractable representation of a more complicated system...I'd call that an abstraction.
nomagicbullet 4y ago
Appreciate your note. I should have said the RGB color model used by humans to represent color spectrum.