The thing that is difficult to "math," is that we perceive color in a certain way (if you ever look at the CIELAB[0] space, that's based on human eye perception

The thing that is difficult to "math," is that we perceive color in a certain way (if you ever look at the CIELAB[0] space, that's based on human eye perception). So there's a lot of "it just don't look right." involved. I have found that getting weighted LUTs that have been extracted from some process (math, context measurements, user testing, etc.), and simply applying them in the conversion is how you execute the conversion, but generating the LUTs is the tricky part. It's not always best handled by a formula. I guess you could really go crazy, and generate the LUT on the fly, as a per-pixel conversion (we actually did something like this, for RAW conversion). [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIELAB_color_space https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIELAB_color_space