9 ms·

Where to Find the Colors Your Screen Can't Show You

495 points by moultano 3mo ago

pphysch 3mo ago
What an truly incredible article, particularly the way the color space diagrams are used to gradually tell the story (and the prose is great too). I actually want to read it again tomorrow morning in more depth.
lefra 3mo ago
Really nice article, I'll look closer to green lights next time I see one. The most striking experience I had was working with a blue laser (430nm). The best way I found to describe its color is that it was screaming "blue" at me. Since then, I'm always disappointed when looking at a screen displaying #0000FF.
- tomaskafka 3mo ago
  Sounds like we need the next VR glasses to shine colorful lasers into our eyes instead of screens.
  - high_priest 3mo ago
    "Destroy them with lasers!" https://youtu.be/u6-U-apEUZI https://youtu.be/u6-U-apEUZI
  - functionmouse 3mo ago
    it'll be awesome, once
  - TeMPOraL 3mo ago
    If we could get that to work, then we'd be much closer to VR without a headset - a device able to paint arbitrary images directly onto users' retinas could be stationary and handle multiple users - giving us a holodeck, just without the tactile parts.
- olejorgenb 3mo ago
  "This is a good time to spare a thought for our red-green colorblind brethren. [...] it is to them that we owe the beautiful color of green traffic lights. The spectral requirements that make the green signals distinguishable from red in their eyes make them beautiful in ours."
thinkingemote 3mo ago
Can these colours be replicated or captured using ink, paint or traditional film photography?
- orthoxerox 3mo ago
  Ultramarine pigment is too blue for your screen to replicate properly, for example. I don't know if there's a pigment that reflects only 520nm light, though.
- carlosjobim 3mo ago
  Many colours outside of the electric screen spectrum can be made with ink or paint. You probably have a bunch of objects in your own house with colours that can't be shown as full on your screen.
- lukewarm707 3mo ago
  yes, using a photo printer. with varying levels of price and gamut.
- WillAdams 3mo ago
  Should be. For printing there was PANTONE's Hexachrome which used 6 ink colours to greatly extend the possible colour range --- but the only printer I know of who made great use of, and profited by doing so, used it only for its increased range's covering of additional spot colours --- so they basically persuaded every printer w/in driving distance to sub-contract spot colour work to them (for those colours which fit in the Hexachrome gamut), then used fancy software to gang up jobs onto a plate, run as many copies as were necessary, cut and stack, and then send out the jobs and run the next plate, no need to wash down the press and change inks. I tried to sell the idea of implementing it for high-end photo pieces at a printer I worked at, but no real interest because it was difficult for sales to communicate, and no one wanted to spend money printing a sample/researching images which benefited from it.
  - anfilt 3mo ago
    I do think it would be awesome if something like offset printing was more accessible. The number of stages/steps for a press that can used for a color or effect is often just limited by floor space. Although some presses can't have an other stage as easily added depending on the manufacture.
TheAceOfHearts 3mo ago
I took up acrylics painting a few years back and I've been surprised by how much is lost in photos and videos. The two colors with which I've noticed this the most are ultramarine blue and prussian blue. I don't think it's just the color though, part of it comes down to how light is reflected off the painting and where you're standing, as well as the texture and the brush strokes. I have a few paintings hanging in my room and occasionally I'll look at them for a while and it'll reveal a new perspective to me that I had previously missed, despite being the one who made it. This post is making me feel a bit inspired to go outside and immerse myself in the forest to take in the greens. Thanks for sharing.
- jakzurr 3mo ago
  Thanks mentioning acrylics. Now I'm wondering if new technology will eventually improve our printing to allow better colors in news media, and even in prints in art exhibits? Does anyone have any comments on the future of printed media?
  - m3047 3mo ago
    The way this is done (has been done) is printing with custom colors. Standard printing is done with CMYK (three colors and black). Purportedly high-end printers (I don't care if the printer is gold plated and diamond studded, if the driver / host-based preprocessor was written in 1999 using Visual BASIC then the printer is sh*t) have had an extra blue, or an extra red, for years. In the back of my mind, I find it oddly surprising that we have 3D printers but I haven't seen a printer where you can mix your own pigments and print with them. Many years ago I knew someone in Seattle who made microprints with burnished copper plates, some of them with a dozen different colors. He designed a couple of commemorative postage stamp-like objects, and that somehow got him hired by an eastern european country as an anti-counterfeiting advisor and then he disappeared.
    - anfilt 3mo ago
      Offset printing can have more colors than CYMK. Sometimes a setup will include multiple additional inks beyond CYMK to produce a color or effect that CYMK alone can't produce. Sometimes those colors will be mixed from other colors as well much like paint. Problem is offset printing presses are HUGE and expensive and require making plates first. There are digital offset presses, but they generally can't have an other stage added like traditional offset printing, it's capped at however many colors that machine has built in. They also are huge compared to other printers people will have at home or the office. -EDIT- It is probably possible to scale down the hardware and do something like digital offset presses. I think it would cool if there was a *small* printer people could connect multiple color stages like a legos and mix up a colors for those stages.
AgentMasterRace 3mo ago
Tl;dr.... It's LSD.
Sophira 3mo ago
That was incredibly well-explained. Kudos. I do have a question that the article doesn't seem to attempt to answer, though. The article says (paraphrased in my new understanding) that any spectra which makes the cones in your eyes react the same way will result in seeing the same colour. Do we know of any examples of this? (Colour-blindness seems like an obvious example; I'm curious though if there are any examples of two common scenarios where it can be demonstrated that there are different spectra in each, and yet most people will see them as the same colour.)
- frotaur 3mo ago
  Well, the most common example si precisely screens, no? A screen displaying the color yellow is actually a spectrum of red and green peaks, stimulating your red and green cones just like a spectrum containing a single frequency of the color yellow.
  - Sophira 3mo ago
    Oh right. I feel silly for forgetting about that even though it's mentioned in the article. Thank you!
- grumbelbart2 3mo ago
  This is called metamerism. It can be a practical issue if two pigments have the same color under one light source, but a different one under another. You want your artificial teeth to have the same color as your real teeth in sunlight, led light, and a classic lightbulb for example.
  - clort 3mo ago
    Well, now that you mention it, I'd just like to remind you that people are a lot weirder than you might think! Having incisors to be a different colour (say, a brilliant red) under artificial lights could definitely be a thing people desired..
- 317070 3mo ago
  A flower, a picture of the flower in print and the picture shown on a screen will all have different spectra, but look the same. See the first minutes of this video, where he has a spectrum analyser: https://youtu.be/-DyrBDsKA5s?si=mRJPT2ecy6NqpB4N https://youtu.be/-DyrBDsKA5s?si=mRJPT2ecy6NqpB4N
olejorgenb 3mo ago
Off topic, but the other articles are well made too. I enjoyed this one: https://moultano.wordpress.com/2025/02/24/you-should-make-cross-views/ https://moultano.wordpress.com/2025/02/24/you-should-make-cr...
orthoxerox 3mo ago
ACES AP0 is the only color space I know that is designed to represent all possible visible colors. It's a purely theoretical color space, though. The widest color space designed for actual implementation, Rec. 2020, still can't faithfully show most of the natural greens and cyans, like your green laser pointer.
frotaur 3mo ago
Its unclear to me why the color space is 2-dimensional. Why wouldn't it be a 3-dimensional space, indexed by how much each of the 3-cones is activated ? Not clear to me from the article!
- psd1 3mo ago
  It is, inasmuch as we have 3 types of cone, which is an inherent orthogonality. It is also not, inasmuch as each cone is a wavelength in the same spectrum. Either way, you can project a volume onto a plane, which is great for communicating visual data on paper or screen. The interesting question is "why that arc in particular"; my ignorance will shine through if I speculate. I assume that the projection encodes something about our relative perception of each cone's band, hence the big green corner.
  - carlosjobim 3mo ago
    It is 3 dimensional, because in our perception we see the third dimension of magentas and purples, which do not exist in physical reality on the spectrum.
- audeyisaacs 3mo ago
  >indexed by how much each of the 3-cones is activated This will actually differ from person to person. If you look at a pure yellow wavelength light next to a red/green light mixed such that they create the exact same perceived yellow to you, it will look different to another person. Aside from that, not really sure what a 3d view with the dimensions being r,g,b would actually offer
- HappyPanacea 3mo ago
  I guess it is the 2-dimensional section such that it have constant total brightness. You can then multiply later by your desired brightness.
- isoprophlex 3mo ago
  There are three cones, but there is an additional constraint that we plot the colors at maximum summed luminosity. So for one cone you would just have a point; two would show a line from 0% cone A+100% cone B -> 100% cone A; three is a plane
adrian_b 3mo ago
While it is true that some saturated blue-green colors will never be reproducible with only 3 primary colors, the CIE 1931 chromaticity diagram used in TFA overemphasizes their importance, because human vision cannot distinguish many colors in that area of the diagram. In reality, the greatest defect of the sRGB color space, which is still too frequently the default color space, is that it is not able to reproduce many saturated orange/red/purple colors, which are very frequently encountered around us, e.g. in flowers, fruits and clothes. The missing orange-red-purple corner appears small in the diagram in comparison with the missing blue-green corner, but in reality humans perceive much more different colors in the orange/red/purple corner, so the relation between those areas would be opposite in a uniform color space. The Display P3 color space is much better than sRGB for reproducing orange/red/purple colors and now it is available even in many cheap monitors. However many monitors that can reproduce Display P3 come configured by default to use just sRGB. Such monitors should always be reconfigured to use Display P3. Monitors that can reproduce an even greater part of the Rec. 2020 color space are obviously better than those that can do only Display P3, but such monitors with a higher color gamut are usually more expensive. The full Rec. 2020 color space can be reproduced only with laser projectors, because it uses monochromatic primary colors.
- red75prime 3mo ago
  > the relation between those areas would be opposite in a uniform color space. If I understand correctly fig. 3 in [1] should be perceptually uniform. The bluegreens missing from sRGB, but present in BT.2020 comprise a sizeable chunk comparable to redyellows. [1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/345252499_Evaluating_Display_Color_Capability https://www.researchgate.net/publication/345252499_Evaluatin...
  - adrian_b 3mo ago
    Indeed, "Figure 3" from that article should be a realistic depiction of the differences between sRGB, Display P3 and BT.2020. It is true that both the red and green primary colors of sRGB are bad (because they correspond with obsolete CRT phosphors that have not been used for decades), but in practice the defects of the green primary color are much less important, because the objects with saturated green colors are more rarely encountered. Like I have said, objects with saturated orange/red/purple colors are very frequently encountered, even in most homes, e.g. flowers, fruits, clothes, blood. Photographs or movies showing such objects that have been recorded using a wider color gamut look extremely differently on an sRGB monitor vs. a monitor supporting Display P3 or an even wider color gamut. Only very rarely I have seen examples with obvious differences between monitors when showing green objects, e.g. some documentaries with certain vividly colored animals, like some insects, birds, frogs or lizards.
rollulus 3mo ago
What I missed in the article: the curves of the three “cone kinds” overlap. What if you could stimulate kinds of cones individually to see entirely new colors? Some people shoot layers at them into eyes. But you can also try this website: https://dynomight.net/colors/ https://dynomight.net/colors/ (previously on HN but search fails me).
- limbicsystem 3mo ago
  Through the magic of liner algebra it turns out that you can stimulate cones independently even with normal displays. Search for 'silent substitution'!
  - ProllyInfamous 3mo ago
    Also search for "impossible chimerical colors" <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impossible_color#Chimerical_colors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impossible_color#Chimerical_co...>
- lefra 3mo ago
  Last year a research group managed to do just that, see https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adu1052 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adu1052 for details.
- mr_toad 3mo ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrachromacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrachromacy
deleted 3mo ago
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circadian 3mo ago
I once abseiled into a crevasse while in Antarctica. The colours I saw in there were utterly breathtaking and I never knew why. Now I do, and this also tells mewhy the photos don't even remotely do it justice (aside from not being as big and three dimensional!) Thanks for such a beautiful article about not looking at a screen: I'm off outside... :)
oersted 3mo ago
Such a cool article chock-full of cool facts! > Nearly every species of scorpion intensely fluoresces under UV light. […] Scorpions have photoreceptors in their tails, separate from their eyes. […] It is hypothesized that a scorpion uses this fluorescence to tell whether any bit of its body is left exposed from its hiding place. Its tail “looks” down at its body, and if it sees its own fluorescence, it knows it is exposed to light, and in danger. And a special call-out to the “Andean Cock-on-a-Rock” :), see a photo in the article.
sam_lowry_ 3mo ago
Impressionist paintings used a lot of synthetic ultramarine, they look very different IRL. There is a whole room in the Orsay museum where paintings seem to glow from the inside in the dark.
Sharlin 3mo ago
Great article. Small nitpick though: while I understand that P3 deserves specific mention because it’s so ubiquitous now, it’s not like Apple invented the idea of wide-gamut displays. Adobe RGB, commonly used by wide-gamut computer monitors, in particular is noteworthy in the context of this article because it extends further into the blue-cyan-green than P3,
heroku 3mo ago
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Stitch4223 3mo ago
The phosphor screen of a B&O MX8000 TV (a Philips tube) was unlike any I’ve ever seen in terms of cyan intensity. That was in 2020 while the tv is from the 1980’s. Playing Donkey Kong on it was totally different than any other screen. It was like a Morpho butterfly, but in the article it is pointed out that phosphor screens have limited color range. Triangles between screens may differ with tuning, but I suppose they all are limited in range. I’ve yet to experiment if this experience was a “brand experience” because I liked the TV or that the colors are indeed more intense than even some HDR/DV flat screen from the past few years. This article was so well written that it gives a lot of energy to make this comparison for real. Absolutely masterful writing and all of the plenty examples make me want to look for colors I’ve missed out on while watching so many screens. What the article does very well is vibrantly describe what you are missing and then post an image of it, such as a beach. Looking at that image, it falls absolutely flat compared to memories and the imagination of those places. This makes it tangible how limited screens really are. Edit: added last paragraph
- strogonoff 3mo ago
  I’m not sure it’s possible to truthfully describe what we are missing in reality with a photo. You can publish a photo with default automatic JPEG processing, say by a phone, and it will certainly look flat. You could also present a masterful interpretation of raw sensor data that uses the most out of the available display space, and the impression might be different. There is no objectively correct way to represent reality in a photo; even the concept of neutral grey is not a real thing as soon as perception is concerned. A default camera interpretation of light is baseline and safe to maximally avoid awkward edge cases. We all know that time we photograph a bright pink sunset but our phone renders it as pale yellow or orange. However, give the same shot human attention, and even though it may never be as pink as what you have perceived in reality it will pop enough that the viewer will have a similar response. It is photographer’s job to work raw data in specific ways and make what impressed you stand out to your audience, arranging colours both relative to each other and in absolute display space, however limited it is. Human eyes are incredibly adaptive: we lower our relevant thresholds, adjust our idea of neutral grey—in short, we adapt to given display medium, to given photographic style, etc., and in the end perceive a true lush lagoon in a photo even if our eyes only receive a truly minuscule amount of colour range present in the scene.
arbourtrary 3mo ago
Very well written, super interesting topic. I never understood all these natural reasons why real life colors feel so much more vivid. I guess when I look outside of the rgb triangle in the graphic, the cyans/blues/greens shown (since I'm seeing this on a screen) are sort of shadow colors? Approximations without the full vibrancy?
- Macha 3mo ago
  > I guess when I look outside of the rgb triangle in the graphic, the cyans/blues/greens shown (since I'm seeing this on a screen) are sort of shadow colors? Approximations without the full vibrancy? So there's 3 options you have for rendering the colours outside the sRGB space in this kind of image. 1. Don't. This is usually the most honest, and what all but the first diagram in this article opts for. 2. Clamping. You just set the green component to 255 for every colour beyond green=255, which effectively looks like you extend the edges of the triangle to the edge of the visual range. This is the most common, and the approach used in the article's first image, but it's basically a lie. Some articles will dumb the out of range colors to make it clear they're not the real colour, but this article's first image doesn't. 3. HDR: If the author uses an image format capable of decoding HDR data, and your browser, OS and monitor, and the author's authoring pipeline are all correctly configured to pass through that HDR data, you can get a bit more colour, depending on your monitor. Not the full visible gamut, but up to whatever colorspace your monitor is using.
VaporJournalAPP 3mo ago
[flagged]
card_zero 3mo ago
My debatable factoid is that all vision is movement-dependent, including human vision, and so the bigness and wonderfulness of the tyrannosaur's eyes is beside the point of whether it needed its prey to move around in order to perceive it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stabilized_images https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stabilized_images , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixation_(visual) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixation_(visual) , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsaccade https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsaccade We fake the movement of anything we're staring at, by means of tiny automatic eye movements, in order to remain able to see the thing at all.
- kowbell 3mo ago
  These are really interesting. I've noticed when I'm spacing out and staring at a single point for a while that there's some kind of "tunnel vision" that develops, where everything besides the small point I'm looking at starts to darken and if I shift my body suddenly everything that was fading will "refresh." I always thought it felt similar to when a particularly bright light "burns in" your vision for a moment. Sounds a lot like the phenomenon described in the Stabilized Image article. Neat stuff!
fmajid 3mo ago
> Today, on your way home, look at the “green” light on a traffic signal. It’s not green. Independently from this, the names for colors are culturally determined. The Japanese call green traffic lights as 青 "ao", blue. Russians have different terms for different shades of blue.
- qingcharles 3mo ago
  This is a good point. Here's the article on the weirdness of blue/green in different cultures: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue%E2%80%93green_distinction_in_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue%E2%80%93green_distinction...
analog8374 3mo ago
Colors on the screen are like symbols. Like words. they aren't the actual experience. They evoke the experience. Your mind connects the color to a memory and then it's the memory that you experience. That's screen reality. 1% evocative symbols and 99% in your head.
icemelt8 3mo ago
what a beautiful article, thoroughly enjoyed reading it.
dkeners 3mo ago
This reminds me of a video [1] going over the use of structural color photography, where theoretically what you see in real life is what you get in your final image. It cover some of the same topics, but goes more in depth about the process of structural color and some animal examples, like the butterfly mentioned in the article. If you have an interest in chemistry or film photography it is a great watch! This process was also, to my knowledge, the stepping stone for holograms, which we can now see structural colors everyday on IDs and licenses. [1] (18 minutes) https://youtu.be/-DyrBDsKA5s https://youtu.be/-DyrBDsKA5s
gumboshoes 3mo ago
"The eyespots on a peacock’s train are super cyan, so when the peacock spreads its train feathers it is going super saiyan super cyan." Haha.
lukewarm707 3mo ago
interesting, nicely written article. if you want to replicate the colors, you can use wider gamut end to end: - use raw format on the camera - edit raw eg pro photo rgb - send this to a wide gamut printer with a large set of inks to view the image the printer would replicate the color outside the srgb space there are such inks as cyan, light cyan, orange
krick 3mo ago
Really enjoyed the article, even though it's not a new topic to me, but still it was very interesting, very nicely written and I still managed to pick up a couple of new details. To be fair to Jurassic Park, though, at least in the book the quirks of T-Rex's vision were explained by the details of genetic engineering (the base DNA used was some kind of amphibian, that allegedly had this problem — still not very scientifically plausible, but not quite as silly as in the movie). It goes a long way to emphasize that in the end these are not real dinosaurs, these are human-made abominations.
- ralfd 3mo ago
  Doesnt Dr Grant scare a kid in the beginning with the Velociraptor and say there that T Rex vision was movement based? I wonder if Chrichton made that up or if it was a real theory by paleaologists?
fortran77 3mo ago
I'm having an amazing time seeing colors now because I just had cataract surgery on my right eye (left eye next month) and have a clear lens again. If I compare my new right eye to my old left eye, I'm seeing colors I haven't seen in decades. Skies look blue with my right eye, gray with my left. It's odd he noted Apple monitiers were "better". Maybe but marginally. Many options for other platforms, like Asus Pro Arte, beat it handily. And profressional color graders use Sony BVM series (Trimaster HX / OLED) for HDR or Flanders Scientific (FSI) DM/XM series or Eizo ColorEdge CG series. You won't see a single Mac at a movie studio for movie editing or color grading.
- blincoln 3mo ago
  If you haven't already, you should do some tests to see if you can see UV-A now. Some replacement lenses are UV-transparent. Dandelions in sunlight are an easy option, at least in my part of the world. If your replacement lens is UV-transparent, dandelions should have a very distinct colour difference between the center and outer parts of the petals, instead of a mostly-uniform yellow.
pcrh 3mo ago
Very well-written! I wonder if the inaccurate representation of colors by screens, etc, in any way underlies the distinctive color palette of many AI image generators?
ProllyInfamous 3mo ago
When reading the article, 520nm light is closest in color reproduction to the "yellowgreen" Crayola color, as seen within their 64-pack.
divvsaxena 3mo ago
Reading this made me realize how much of my day is spent looking at screens. It's weird to think there are colors in the world that I've technically seen before, but have never actually been able to capture or reproduce digitally.
Yinameah 3mo ago
Incredible article. I used to work as a light designer and therefore spent lot of time thinking about colors and training my eyes to see them more precisely. I lost some of this competency surprisingly quickly, but this article brought many great feelings/souvenirs back. Thanks to the author
AdamH12113 3mo ago
My favorite color in all the world is the green of a mineral called dioptase. It's a deep, dark green, richer than an emerald. It looks amazing in real life and utterly boring on an RGB display. The Houston Museum of Natural Science has a large sample; every time I'm there I go stare at it for a while.
garaetjjte 3mo ago
I hate that type of diagrams. Why sRGB-encoded image, pretends to show any color outside of sRGB region? It doesn't make any sense! (and when these diagrams attempt to illustrate sRGB, often actual colors encoded are narrower than full sRGB)
whiw 3mo ago
If we had a display with n (n>3) pixel colours, say (red, green, cyan, blue) for example, we could display more of the colour space. Shopping list: 4 colour channel display, 4 channel GPU, 4 channel software. Why isn't this a thing already?
- mceachen 3mo ago
  More than 3 channel displays have been attempted by several companies, but I suspect they fail due to: 1) trying to convince content makers to use new custom high-gamut hardware to capture the new spot colors 2) you'd need a full video content production pipeline that can render to that color space 3) finding enough people to care enough to pay the (substantial) premium for niche production numbers. 4) Most content just doesn't warrant high gamut unless it's narrated by David Attenborough. So, you have both a chicken and egg problem, and not that big of a TAM to warrant the struggle.
  - zahlman 3mo ago
    5) You'd need image formats that record those channels, and that in turn would cause problems for raw bitmaps with alpha (they either get twice as big or the pixels are no longer aligned).
    - blincoln 3mo ago
      AFAIK TIFF supports an arbitrary number of additional channels already.
ricardobeat 3mo ago
Many modern triple-laser projectors can reproduce or exceed the Rec. 2020 color space. It's still not full coverage but much larger than P3.
- zahlman 3mo ago
  Couldn't we capture more of it by just using a slightly bluer green phosphor?
thadk 3mo ago
Somewhat related, but TIL the macOS Screenshot.app utility (and the system wide keyboard shortcuts) in Sonoma got HDR capability to help re-convey just a bit more fidelity. Even in PNG, it keeps the display profile, just not HDR. Open Utilities->Screenshot.app Options->Capture/Capture Format->HEIC. Note, it changes the system screenshot default away from PNG too.
mrgaro 3mo ago
Great article! After reading I started to think there must be some purchable items which would demonstrate colours outside P3 colorspace. It would be cool to hold one on your hand and experience how a photo of it just cannot do justice. Anybody know any links to webshops for such items?
- Macha 3mo ago
  There's a few dyes (mostly pinks and cyans) that are outside sRGB space (though once you apply them to a material, that combination of material and dye might be fine), Tom Scott had a video a few years ago, though I don't know if that particular dye/seller is still going: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_NzVmtbPOrM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_NzVmtbPOrM There's also Vantablack and similar ultra-black dyes which are a somewhat adjacent phenomena but in the same category of "colors your screen can't display". The most black a pixel can be is "off" (and that's only achievable if the display is on if your screen is an OLED), and the back coating of your screen is probably not as black as those dyes.
hyttioaoa 3mo ago
My two most favorite and most seldomly seen colors are near uv. One of them is a blue sky at an altitude of over 3000m. The other was a powerful deep blue laser in a microscopy lab, just on the end of the visible spectrum
- m3047 3mo ago
  One of the things which is unaccounted for in both printing and lighting is florescence.
anfilt 3mo ago
I can tell you there are some places people do notice that a screen can't reproduce all the colors they can see. Anyone who has mixed paint at hardware store or paint store with a modern paint machine will eventually notice this. A of lot them have a spectrometer to match color from a sample. The software often has a preview that appears on a screen of the sample color. That preview color is often not quite the same and it's often either the limit of the sRGB color space or the monitor. The data from the spectrometers is eventually converted to CIELAB color points with a D65 white point. Then that little preview needs to be converted to sRGB to display it or some colorspace the system supports. There also some problems with the LAB colorspace, but they are minuet compared tot the limits of sRGB and display hardware.
m3047 3mo ago
From the person who brought us Dark Breakfast!
assimpleaspossi 3mo ago
Can you see them with film? Either projected or on photographic paper.
- gwbas1c 3mo ago
  What about equipment with more than three primaries: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_depth#More_than_three_primaries https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_depth#More_than_three_pr...
gwbas1c 3mo ago
A lot of this comes across similar to describing how the upper range of human hearing is 27khz, not 20khz and commonly believed, and where to hear these. Hint: If you listen to a live orchestra without amplification, and the sound "sparkles", it's because of the frequencies slightly above 20khz that are normally filtered out of audio CDs and streaming music.
jackbucks 3mo ago
Humans have no color memory. Seeking out obscure colors or unique ones is a fools errand.
rustcleaner 3mo ago
Can't this be fixed by adding a cyan to RGB, making RGcB? Or, even adding yellow and magenta for RyGcBm?

495 points by moultano 3mo ago

What an truly incredible article, particularly the way the color space diagrams are used to gradually tell the story (and the prose is great too). I actually want to read it again tomorrow morning in more depth.

lefra 3mo ago

Really nice article, I'll look closer to green lights next time I see one. The most striking experience I had was working with a blue laser (430nm). The best way I found to describe its color is that it was screaming "blue" at me. Since then, I'm always disappointed when looking at a screen displaying #0000FF.

tomaskafka 3mo ago
Sounds like we need the next VR glasses to shine colorful lasers into our eyes instead of screens.
- high_priest 3mo ago
  "Destroy them with lasers!" https://youtu.be/u6-U-apEUZI https://youtu.be/u6-U-apEUZI
- functionmouse 3mo ago
  it'll be awesome, once
- TeMPOraL 3mo ago
  If we could get that to work, then we'd be much closer to VR without a headset - a device able to paint arbitrary images directly onto users' retinas could be stationary and handle multiple users - giving us a holodeck, just without the tactile parts.
olejorgenb 3mo ago
"This is a good time to spare a thought for our red-green colorblind brethren. [...] it is to them that we owe the beautiful color of green traffic lights. The spectral requirements that make the green signals distinguishable from red in their eyes make them beautiful in ours."

thinkingemote 3mo ago

Can these colours be replicated or captured using ink, paint or traditional film photography?

orthoxerox 3mo ago
Ultramarine pigment is too blue for your screen to replicate properly, for example. I don't know if there's a pigment that reflects only 520nm light, though.
carlosjobim 3mo ago
Many colours outside of the electric screen spectrum can be made with ink or paint. You probably have a bunch of objects in your own house with colours that can't be shown as full on your screen.
lukewarm707 3mo ago
yes, using a photo printer. with varying levels of price and gamut.
WillAdams 3mo ago
Should be. For printing there was PANTONE's Hexachrome which used 6 ink colours to greatly extend the possible colour range --- but the only printer I know of who made great use of, and profited by doing so, used it only for its increased range's covering of additional spot colours --- so they basically persuaded every printer w/in driving distance to sub-contract spot colour work to them (for those colours which fit in the Hexachrome gamut), then used fancy software to gang up jobs onto a plate, run as many copies as were necessary, cut and stack, and then send out the jobs and run the next plate, no need to wash down the press and change inks. I tried to sell the idea of implementing it for high-end photo pieces at a printer I worked at, but no real interest because it was difficult for sales to communicate, and no one wanted to spend money printing a sample/researching images which benefited from it.
- anfilt 3mo ago
  I do think it would be awesome if something like offset printing was more accessible. The number of stages/steps for a press that can used for a color or effect is often just limited by floor space. Although some presses can't have an other stage as easily added depending on the manufacture.

TheAceOfHearts 3mo ago

I took up acrylics painting a few years back and I've been surprised by how much is lost in photos and videos. The two colors with which I've noticed this the most are ultramarine blue and prussian blue. I don't think it's just the color though, part of it comes down to how light is reflected off the painting and where you're standing, as well as the texture and the brush strokes. I have a few paintings hanging in my room and occasionally I'll look at them for a while and it'll reveal a new perspective to me that I had previously missed, despite being the one who made it. This post is making me feel a bit inspired to go outside and immerse myself in the forest to take in the greens. Thanks for sharing.

jakzurr 3mo ago
Thanks mentioning acrylics. Now I'm wondering if new technology will eventually improve our printing to allow better colors in news media, and even in prints in art exhibits? Does anyone have any comments on the future of printed media?
- m3047 3mo ago
  The way this is done (has been done) is printing with custom colors. Standard printing is done with CMYK (three colors and black). Purportedly high-end printers (I don't care if the printer is gold plated and diamond studded, if the driver / host-based preprocessor was written in 1999 using Visual BASIC then the printer is sh*t) have had an extra blue, or an extra red, for years. In the back of my mind, I find it oddly surprising that we have 3D printers but I haven't seen a printer where you can mix your own pigments and print with them. Many years ago I knew someone in Seattle who made microprints with burnished copper plates, some of them with a dozen different colors. He designed a couple of commemorative postage stamp-like objects, and that somehow got him hired by an eastern european country as an anti-counterfeiting advisor and then he disappeared.
  - anfilt 3mo ago
    Offset printing can have more colors than CYMK. Sometimes a setup will include multiple additional inks beyond CYMK to produce a color or effect that CYMK alone can't produce. Sometimes those colors will be mixed from other colors as well much like paint. Problem is offset printing presses are HUGE and expensive and require making plates first. There are digital offset presses, but they generally can't have an other stage added like traditional offset printing, it's capped at however many colors that machine has built in. They also are huge compared to other printers people will have at home or the office. -EDIT- It is probably possible to scale down the hardware and do something like digital offset presses. I think it would cool if there was a *small* printer people could connect multiple color stages like a legos and mix up a colors for those stages.

AgentMasterRace 3mo ago

Tl;dr.... It's LSD.

Sophira 3mo ago

That was incredibly well-explained. Kudos. I do have a question that the article doesn't seem to attempt to answer, though. The article says (paraphrased in my new understanding) that any spectra which makes the cones in your eyes react the same way will result in seeing the same colour. Do we know of any examples of this? (Colour-blindness seems like an obvious example; I'm curious though if there are any examples of two common scenarios where it can be demonstrated that there are different spectra in each, and yet most people will see them as the same colour.)

frotaur 3mo ago
Well, the most common example si precisely screens, no? A screen displaying the color yellow is actually a spectrum of red and green peaks, stimulating your red and green cones just like a spectrum containing a single frequency of the color yellow.
- Sophira 3mo ago
  Oh right. I feel silly for forgetting about that even though it's mentioned in the article. Thank you!
grumbelbart2 3mo ago
This is called metamerism. It can be a practical issue if two pigments have the same color under one light source, but a different one under another. You want your artificial teeth to have the same color as your real teeth in sunlight, led light, and a classic lightbulb for example.
- clort 3mo ago
  Well, now that you mention it, I'd just like to remind you that people are a lot weirder than you might think! Having incisors to be a different colour (say, a brilliant red) under artificial lights could definitely be a thing people desired..
317070 3mo ago
A flower, a picture of the flower in print and the picture shown on a screen will all have different spectra, but look the same. See the first minutes of this video, where he has a spectrum analyser: https://youtu.be/-DyrBDsKA5s?si=mRJPT2ecy6NqpB4N https://youtu.be/-DyrBDsKA5s?si=mRJPT2ecy6NqpB4N

olejorgenb 3mo ago

Off topic, but the other articles are well made too. I enjoyed this one: https://moultano.wordpress.com/2025/02/24/you-should-make-cross-views/ https://moultano.wordpress.com/2025/02/24/you-should-make-cr...

orthoxerox 3mo ago

ACES AP0 is the only color space I know that is designed to represent all possible visible colors. It's a purely theoretical color space, though. The widest color space designed for actual implementation, Rec. 2020, still can't faithfully show most of the natural greens and cyans, like your green laser pointer.

frotaur 3mo ago

Its unclear to me why the color space is 2-dimensional. Why wouldn't it be a 3-dimensional space, indexed by how much each of the 3-cones is activated ? Not clear to me from the article!

psd1 3mo ago
It is, inasmuch as we have 3 types of cone, which is an inherent orthogonality. It is also not, inasmuch as each cone is a wavelength in the same spectrum. Either way, you can project a volume onto a plane, which is great for communicating visual data on paper or screen. The interesting question is "why that arc in particular"; my ignorance will shine through if I speculate. I assume that the projection encodes something about our relative perception of each cone's band, hence the big green corner.
- carlosjobim 3mo ago
  It is 3 dimensional, because in our perception we see the third dimension of magentas and purples, which do not exist in physical reality on the spectrum.
audeyisaacs 3mo ago
>indexed by how much each of the 3-cones is activated This will actually differ from person to person. If you look at a pure yellow wavelength light next to a red/green light mixed such that they create the exact same perceived yellow to you, it will look different to another person. Aside from that, not really sure what a 3d view with the dimensions being r,g,b would actually offer
HappyPanacea 3mo ago
I guess it is the 2-dimensional section such that it have constant total brightness. You can then multiply later by your desired brightness.
isoprophlex 3mo ago
There are three cones, but there is an additional constraint that we plot the colors at maximum summed luminosity. So for one cone you would just have a point; two would show a line from 0% cone A+100% cone B -> 100% cone A; three is a plane

adrian_b 3mo ago

While it is true that some saturated blue-green colors will never be reproducible with only 3 primary colors, the CIE 1931 chromaticity diagram used in TFA overemphasizes their importance, because human vision cannot distinguish many colors in that area of the diagram. In reality, the greatest defect of the sRGB color space, which is still too frequently the default color space, is that it is not able to reproduce many saturated orange/red/purple colors, which are very frequently encountered around us, e.g. in flowers, fruits and clothes. The missing orange-red-purple corner appears small in the diagram in comparison with the missing blue-green corner, but in reality humans perceive much more different colors in the orange/red/purple corner, so the relation between those areas would be opposite in a uniform color space. The Display P3 color space is much better than sRGB for reproducing orange/red/purple colors and now it is available even in many cheap monitors. However many monitors that can reproduce Display P3 come configured by default to use just sRGB. Such monitors should always be reconfigured to use Display P3. Monitors that can reproduce an even greater part of the Rec. 2020 color space are obviously better than those that can do only Display P3, but such monitors with a higher color gamut are usually more expensive. The full Rec. 2020 color space can be reproduced only with laser projectors, because it uses monochromatic primary colors.

red75prime 3mo ago
> the relation between those areas would be opposite in a uniform color space. If I understand correctly fig. 3 in [1] should be perceptually uniform. The bluegreens missing from sRGB, but present in BT.2020 comprise a sizeable chunk comparable to redyellows. [1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/345252499_Evaluating_Display_Color_Capability https://www.researchgate.net/publication/345252499_Evaluatin...
- adrian_b 3mo ago
  Indeed, "Figure 3" from that article should be a realistic depiction of the differences between sRGB, Display P3 and BT.2020. It is true that both the red and green primary colors of sRGB are bad (because they correspond with obsolete CRT phosphors that have not been used for decades), but in practice the defects of the green primary color are much less important, because the objects with saturated green colors are more rarely encountered. Like I have said, objects with saturated orange/red/purple colors are very frequently encountered, even in most homes, e.g. flowers, fruits, clothes, blood. Photographs or movies showing such objects that have been recorded using a wider color gamut look extremely differently on an sRGB monitor vs. a monitor supporting Display P3 or an even wider color gamut. Only very rarely I have seen examples with obvious differences between monitors when showing green objects, e.g. some documentaries with certain vividly colored animals, like some insects, birds, frogs or lizards.

rollulus 3mo ago

What I missed in the article: the curves of the three “cone kinds” overlap. What if you could stimulate kinds of cones individually to see entirely new colors? Some people shoot layers at them into eyes. But you can also try this website: https://dynomight.net/colors/ https://dynomight.net/colors/ (previously on HN but search fails me).

limbicsystem 3mo ago
Through the magic of liner algebra it turns out that you can stimulate cones independently even with normal displays. Search for 'silent substitution'!
- ProllyInfamous 3mo ago
  Also search for "impossible chimerical colors" <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impossible_color#Chimerical_colors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impossible_color#Chimerical_co...>
lefra 3mo ago
Last year a research group managed to do just that, see https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adu1052 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adu1052 for details.
mr_toad 3mo ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrachromacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrachromacy

deleted 3mo ago

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circadian 3mo ago

I once abseiled into a crevasse while in Antarctica. The colours I saw in there were utterly breathtaking and I never knew why. Now I do, and this also tells mewhy the photos don't even remotely do it justice (aside from not being as big and three dimensional!) Thanks for such a beautiful article about not looking at a screen: I'm off outside... :)

oersted 3mo ago

Such a cool article chock-full of cool facts! > Nearly every species of scorpion intensely fluoresces under UV light. […] Scorpions have photoreceptors in their tails, separate from their eyes. […] It is hypothesized that a scorpion uses this fluorescence to tell whether any bit of its body is left exposed from its hiding place. Its tail “looks” down at its body, and if it sees its own fluorescence, it knows it is exposed to light, and in danger. And a special call-out to the “Andean Cock-on-a-Rock” :), see a photo in the article.

sam_lowry_ 3mo ago

Impressionist paintings used a lot of synthetic ultramarine, they look very different IRL. There is a whole room in the Orsay museum where paintings seem to glow from the inside in the dark.

Sharlin 3mo ago

Great article. Small nitpick though: while I understand that P3 deserves specific mention because it’s so ubiquitous now, it’s not like Apple invented the idea of wide-gamut displays. Adobe RGB, commonly used by wide-gamut computer monitors, in particular is noteworthy in the context of this article because it extends further into the blue-cyan-green than P3,

heroku 3mo ago

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Stitch4223 3mo ago

The phosphor screen of a B&O MX8000 TV (a Philips tube) was unlike any I’ve ever seen in terms of cyan intensity. That was in 2020 while the tv is from the 1980’s. Playing Donkey Kong on it was totally different than any other screen. It was like a Morpho butterfly, but in the article it is pointed out that phosphor screens have limited color range. Triangles between screens may differ with tuning, but I suppose they all are limited in range. I’ve yet to experiment if this experience was a “brand experience” because I liked the TV or that the colors are indeed more intense than even some HDR/DV flat screen from the past few years. This article was so well written that it gives a lot of energy to make this comparison for real. Absolutely masterful writing and all of the plenty examples make me want to look for colors I’ve missed out on while watching so many screens. What the article does very well is vibrantly describe what you are missing and then post an image of it, such as a beach. Looking at that image, it falls absolutely flat compared to memories and the imagination of those places. This makes it tangible how limited screens really are. Edit: added last paragraph

strogonoff 3mo ago
I’m not sure it’s possible to truthfully describe what we are missing in reality with a photo. You can publish a photo with default automatic JPEG processing, say by a phone, and it will certainly look flat. You could also present a masterful interpretation of raw sensor data that uses the most out of the available display space, and the impression might be different. There is no objectively correct way to represent reality in a photo; even the concept of neutral grey is not a real thing as soon as perception is concerned. A default camera interpretation of light is baseline and safe to maximally avoid awkward edge cases. We all know that time we photograph a bright pink sunset but our phone renders it as pale yellow or orange. However, give the same shot human attention, and even though it may never be as pink as what you have perceived in reality it will pop enough that the viewer will have a similar response. It is photographer’s job to work raw data in specific ways and make what impressed you stand out to your audience, arranging colours both relative to each other and in absolute display space, however limited it is. Human eyes are incredibly adaptive: we lower our relevant thresholds, adjust our idea of neutral grey—in short, we adapt to given display medium, to given photographic style, etc., and in the end perceive a true lush lagoon in a photo even if our eyes only receive a truly minuscule amount of colour range present in the scene.

arbourtrary 3mo ago

Very well written, super interesting topic. I never understood all these natural reasons why real life colors feel so much more vivid. I guess when I look outside of the rgb triangle in the graphic, the cyans/blues/greens shown (since I'm seeing this on a screen) are sort of shadow colors? Approximations without the full vibrancy?

Macha 3mo ago
> I guess when I look outside of the rgb triangle in the graphic, the cyans/blues/greens shown (since I'm seeing this on a screen) are sort of shadow colors? Approximations without the full vibrancy? So there's 3 options you have for rendering the colours outside the sRGB space in this kind of image. 1. Don't. This is usually the most honest, and what all but the first diagram in this article opts for. 2. Clamping. You just set the green component to 255 for every colour beyond green=255, which effectively looks like you extend the edges of the triangle to the edge of the visual range. This is the most common, and the approach used in the article's first image, but it's basically a lie. Some articles will dumb the out of range colors to make it clear they're not the real colour, but this article's first image doesn't. 3. HDR: If the author uses an image format capable of decoding HDR data, and your browser, OS and monitor, and the author's authoring pipeline are all correctly configured to pass through that HDR data, you can get a bit more colour, depending on your monitor. Not the full visible gamut, but up to whatever colorspace your monitor is using.

VaporJournalAPP 3mo ago

[flagged]

card_zero 3mo ago

My debatable factoid is that all vision is movement-dependent, including human vision, and so the bigness and wonderfulness of the tyrannosaur's eyes is beside the point of whether it needed its prey to move around in order to perceive it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stabilized_images https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stabilized_images , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixation_(visual) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixation_(visual) , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsaccade https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsaccade We fake the movement of anything we're staring at, by means of tiny automatic eye movements, in order to remain able to see the thing at all.

kowbell 3mo ago
These are really interesting. I've noticed when I'm spacing out and staring at a single point for a while that there's some kind of "tunnel vision" that develops, where everything besides the small point I'm looking at starts to darken and if I shift my body suddenly everything that was fading will "refresh." I always thought it felt similar to when a particularly bright light "burns in" your vision for a moment. Sounds a lot like the phenomenon described in the Stabilized Image article. Neat stuff!

fmajid 3mo ago

> Today, on your way home, look at the “green” light on a traffic signal. It’s not green. Independently from this, the names for colors are culturally determined. The Japanese call green traffic lights as 青 "ao", blue. Russians have different terms for different shades of blue.

qingcharles 3mo ago
This is a good point. Here's the article on the weirdness of blue/green in different cultures: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue%E2%80%93green_distinction_in_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue%E2%80%93green_distinction...

analog8374 3mo ago

Colors on the screen are like symbols. Like words. they aren't the actual experience. They evoke the experience. Your mind connects the color to a memory and then it's the memory that you experience. That's screen reality. 1% evocative symbols and 99% in your head.

icemelt8 3mo ago

what a beautiful article, thoroughly enjoyed reading it.

dkeners 3mo ago

This reminds me of a video [1] going over the use of structural color photography, where theoretically what you see in real life is what you get in your final image. It cover some of the same topics, but goes more in depth about the process of structural color and some animal examples, like the butterfly mentioned in the article. If you have an interest in chemistry or film photography it is a great watch! This process was also, to my knowledge, the stepping stone for holograms, which we can now see structural colors everyday on IDs and licenses. [1] (18 minutes) https://youtu.be/-DyrBDsKA5s https://youtu.be/-DyrBDsKA5s

gumboshoes 3mo ago

"The eyespots on a peacock’s train are super cyan, so when the peacock spreads its train feathers it is going super saiyan super cyan." Haha.

lukewarm707 3mo ago

interesting, nicely written article. if you want to replicate the colors, you can use wider gamut end to end: - use raw format on the camera - edit raw eg pro photo rgb - send this to a wide gamut printer with a large set of inks to view the image the printer would replicate the color outside the srgb space there are such inks as cyan, light cyan, orange

krick 3mo ago

Really enjoyed the article, even though it's not a new topic to me, but still it was very interesting, very nicely written and I still managed to pick up a couple of new details. To be fair to Jurassic Park, though, at least in the book the quirks of T-Rex's vision were explained by the details of genetic engineering (the base DNA used was some kind of amphibian, that allegedly had this problem — still not very scientifically plausible, but not quite as silly as in the movie). It goes a long way to emphasize that in the end these are not real dinosaurs, these are human-made abominations.

ralfd 3mo ago
Doesnt Dr Grant scare a kid in the beginning with the Velociraptor and say there that T Rex vision was movement based? I wonder if Chrichton made that up or if it was a real theory by paleaologists?

fortran77 3mo ago

I'm having an amazing time seeing colors now because I just had cataract surgery on my right eye (left eye next month) and have a clear lens again. If I compare my new right eye to my old left eye, I'm seeing colors I haven't seen in decades. Skies look blue with my right eye, gray with my left. It's odd he noted Apple monitiers were "better". Maybe but marginally. Many options for other platforms, like Asus Pro Arte, beat it handily. And profressional color graders use Sony BVM series (Trimaster HX / OLED) for HDR or Flanders Scientific (FSI) DM/XM series or Eizo ColorEdge CG series. You won't see a single Mac at a movie studio for movie editing or color grading.

blincoln 3mo ago
If you haven't already, you should do some tests to see if you can see UV-A now. Some replacement lenses are UV-transparent. Dandelions in sunlight are an easy option, at least in my part of the world. If your replacement lens is UV-transparent, dandelions should have a very distinct colour difference between the center and outer parts of the petals, instead of a mostly-uniform yellow.

pcrh 3mo ago

Very well-written! I wonder if the inaccurate representation of colors by screens, etc, in any way underlies the distinctive color palette of many AI image generators?

ProllyInfamous 3mo ago

When reading the article, 520nm light is closest in color reproduction to the "yellowgreen" Crayola color, as seen within their 64-pack.

divvsaxena 3mo ago

Reading this made me realize how much of my day is spent looking at screens. It's weird to think there are colors in the world that I've technically seen before, but have never actually been able to capture or reproduce digitally.

Yinameah 3mo ago

Incredible article. I used to work as a light designer and therefore spent lot of time thinking about colors and training my eyes to see them more precisely. I lost some of this competency surprisingly quickly, but this article brought many great feelings/souvenirs back. Thanks to the author

AdamH12113 3mo ago

My favorite color in all the world is the green of a mineral called dioptase. It's a deep, dark green, richer than an emerald. It looks amazing in real life and utterly boring on an RGB display. The Houston Museum of Natural Science has a large sample; every time I'm there I go stare at it for a while.

garaetjjte 3mo ago

I hate that type of diagrams. Why sRGB-encoded image, pretends to show any color outside of sRGB region? It doesn't make any sense! (and when these diagrams attempt to illustrate sRGB, often actual colors encoded are narrower than full sRGB)

whiw 3mo ago

If we had a display with n (n>3) pixel colours, say (red, green, cyan, blue) for example, we could display more of the colour space. Shopping list: 4 colour channel display, 4 channel GPU, 4 channel software. Why isn't this a thing already?

mceachen 3mo ago
More than 3 channel displays have been attempted by several companies, but I suspect they fail due to: 1) trying to convince content makers to use new custom high-gamut hardware to capture the new spot colors 2) you'd need a full video content production pipeline that can render to that color space 3) finding enough people to care enough to pay the (substantial) premium for niche production numbers. 4) Most content just doesn't warrant high gamut unless it's narrated by David Attenborough. So, you have both a chicken and egg problem, and not that big of a TAM to warrant the struggle.
- zahlman 3mo ago
  5) You'd need image formats that record those channels, and that in turn would cause problems for raw bitmaps with alpha (they either get twice as big or the pixels are no longer aligned).
  - blincoln 3mo ago
    AFAIK TIFF supports an arbitrary number of additional channels already.

ricardobeat 3mo ago

Many modern triple-laser projectors can reproduce or exceed the Rec. 2020 color space. It's still not full coverage but much larger than P3.

zahlman 3mo ago
Couldn't we capture more of it by just using a slightly bluer green phosphor?

thadk 3mo ago

Somewhat related, but TIL the macOS Screenshot.app utility (and the system wide keyboard shortcuts) in Sonoma got HDR capability to help re-convey just a bit more fidelity. Even in PNG, it keeps the display profile, just not HDR. Open Utilities->Screenshot.app Options->Capture/Capture Format->HEIC. Note, it changes the system screenshot default away from PNG too.

mrgaro 3mo ago

Great article! After reading I started to think there must be some purchable items which would demonstrate colours outside P3 colorspace. It would be cool to hold one on your hand and experience how a photo of it just cannot do justice. Anybody know any links to webshops for such items?

Macha 3mo ago
There's a few dyes (mostly pinks and cyans) that are outside sRGB space (though once you apply them to a material, that combination of material and dye might be fine), Tom Scott had a video a few years ago, though I don't know if that particular dye/seller is still going: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_NzVmtbPOrM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_NzVmtbPOrM There's also Vantablack and similar ultra-black dyes which are a somewhat adjacent phenomena but in the same category of "colors your screen can't display". The most black a pixel can be is "off" (and that's only achievable if the display is on if your screen is an OLED), and the back coating of your screen is probably not as black as those dyes.

hyttioaoa 3mo ago

My two most favorite and most seldomly seen colors are near uv. One of them is a blue sky at an altitude of over 3000m. The other was a powerful deep blue laser in a microscopy lab, just on the end of the visible spectrum

m3047 3mo ago
One of the things which is unaccounted for in both printing and lighting is florescence.

anfilt 3mo ago

I can tell you there are some places people do notice that a screen can't reproduce all the colors they can see. Anyone who has mixed paint at hardware store or paint store with a modern paint machine will eventually notice this. A of lot them have a spectrometer to match color from a sample. The software often has a preview that appears on a screen of the sample color. That preview color is often not quite the same and it's often either the limit of the sRGB color space or the monitor. The data from the spectrometers is eventually converted to CIELAB color points with a D65 white point. Then that little preview needs to be converted to sRGB to display it or some colorspace the system supports. There also some problems with the LAB colorspace, but they are minuet compared tot the limits of sRGB and display hardware.

m3047 3mo ago

From the person who brought us Dark Breakfast!

assimpleaspossi 3mo ago

Can you see them with film? Either projected or on photographic paper.

gwbas1c 3mo ago
What about equipment with more than three primaries: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_depth#More_than_three_primaries https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_depth#More_than_three_pr...

gwbas1c 3mo ago

A lot of this comes across similar to describing how the upper range of human hearing is 27khz, not 20khz and commonly believed, and where to hear these. Hint: If you listen to a live orchestra without amplification, and the sound "sparkles", it's because of the frequencies slightly above 20khz that are normally filtered out of audio CDs and streaming music.

jackbucks 3mo ago

Humans have no color memory. Seeking out obscure colors or unique ones is a fools errand.

rustcleaner 3mo ago

Can't this be fixed by adding a cyan to RGB, making RGcB? Or, even adding yellow and magenta for RyGcBm?