Well, “color” is fundamentally an electromagnetic spectrum. You can’t describe it by 3 values, as it might have an arbitrary shape. What it does is separate ou

Well, “color” is fundamentally an electromagnetic spectrum. You can’t describe it by 3 values, as it might have an arbitrary shape. What it does is separate out the whole spectrum/graph into 3 graphs that overlap, and summing them up would roughly be the original. But neither of them is quantized this way, the R is not a single value, but still is a spectrum. It’s a human sensory “feature” that certain graphs can be substituted by more standard ones that can be represented by a single number, e.g. a red LED’s spectrum between a certain range might combine well with a green and blue’s given spectrum, so that the combined graph looks similar to the original to us. Nonetheless, we have “compressed” the original and lost data.