COLOR

  • The Forbidden colors – Red-Green & Blue-Yellow: The Stunning Colors You Can’t See

    www.livescience.com/17948-red-green-blue-yellow-stunning-colors.html

     

     

    While the human eye has red, green, and blue-sensing cones, those cones are cross-wired in the retina to produce a luminance channel plus a red-green and a blue-yellow channel, and it’s data in that color space (known technically as “LAB”) that goes to the brain. That’s why we can’t perceive a reddish-green or a yellowish-blue, whereas such colors can be represented in the RGB color space used by digital cameras.

     

    https://en.rockcontent.com/blog/the-use-of-yellow-in-data-design

    The back of the retina is covered in light-sensitive neurons known as cone cells and rod cells. There are three types of cone cells, each sensitive to different ranges of light. These ranges overlap, but for convenience the cones are referred to as blue (short-wavelength), green (medium-wavelength), and red (long-wavelength). The rod cells are primarily used in low-light situations, so we’ll ignore those for now.

     

    When light enters the eye and hits the cone cells, the cones get excited and send signals to the brain through the visual cortex. Different wavelengths of light excite different combinations of cones to varying levels, which generates our perception of color. You can see that the red cones are most sensitive to light, and the blue cones are least sensitive. The sensitivity of green and red cones overlaps for most of the visible spectrum.

     

    Here’s how your brain takes the signals of light intensity from the cones and turns it into color information. To see red or green, your brain finds the difference between the levels of excitement in your red and green cones. This is the red-green channel.

     

    To get “brightness,” your brain combines the excitement of your red and green cones. This creates the luminance, or black-white, channel. To see yellow or blue, your brain then finds the difference between this luminance signal and the excitement of your blue cones. This is the yellow-blue channel.

     

    From the calculations made in the brain along those three channels, we get four basic colors: blue, green, yellow, and red. Seeing blue is what you experience when low-wavelength light excites the blue cones more than the green and red.

     

    Seeing green happens when light excites the green cones more than the red cones. Seeing red happens when only the red cones are excited by high-wavelength light.

     

    Here’s where it gets interesting. Seeing yellow is what happens when BOTH the green AND red cones are highly excited near their peak sensitivity. This is the biggest collective excitement that your cones ever have, aside from seeing pure white.

     

    Notice that yellow occurs at peak intensity in the graph to the right. Further, the lens and cornea of the eye happen to block shorter wavelengths, reducing sensitivity to blue and violet light.

    Read more: The Forbidden colors – Red-Green & Blue-Yellow: The Stunning Colors You Can’t See
  • Björn Ottosson – How software gets color wrong

    https://bottosson.github.io/posts/colorwrong/

     

    Most software around us today are decent at accurately displaying colors. Processing of colors is another story unfortunately, and is often done badly.

     

    To understand what the problem is, let’s start with an example of three ways of blending green and magenta:

    • Perceptual blend – A smooth transition using a model designed to mimic human perception of color. The blending is done so that the perceived brightness and color varies smoothly and evenly.
    • Linear blend – A model for blending color based on how light behaves physically. This type of blending can occur in many ways naturally, for example when colors are blended together by focus blur in a camera or when viewing a pattern of two colors at a distance.
    • sRGB blend – This is how colors would normally be blended in computer software, using sRGB to represent the colors. 

     

    Let’s look at some more examples of blending of colors, to see how these problems surface more practically. The examples use strong colors since then the differences are more pronounced. This is using the same three ways of blending colors as the first example.

     

    Instead of making it as easy as possible to work with color, most software make it unnecessarily hard, by doing image processing with representations not designed for it. Approximating the physical behavior of light with linear RGB models is one easy thing to do, but more work is needed to create image representations tailored for image processing and human perception.

     

    Also see:

    https://www.pixelsham.com/2022/04/05/bjorn-ottosson-okhsv-and-okhsl-two-new-color-spaces-for-color-picking/

    Read more: Björn Ottosson – How software gets color wrong
  • Capturing textures albedo

    Building a Portable PBR Texture Scanner by Stephane Lb
    http://rtgfx.com/pbr-texture-scanner/

     

     

    How To Split Specular And Diffuse In Real Images, by John Hable
    http://filmicworlds.com/blog/how-to-split-specular-and-diffuse-in-real-images/

     

    Capturing albedo using a Spectralon
    https://www.activision.com/cdn/research/Real_World_Measurements_for_Call_of_Duty_Advanced_Warfare.pdf

    Real_World_Measurements_for_Call_of_Duty_Advanced_Warfare.pdf

    Spectralon is a teflon-based pressed powderthat comes closest to being a pure Lambertian diffuse material that reflects 100% of all light. If we take an HDR photograph of the Spectralon alongside the material to be measured, we can derive thediffuse albedo of that material.

     

    The process to capture diffuse reflectance is very similar to the one outlined by Hable.

     

    1. We put a linear polarizing filter in front of the camera lens and a second linear polarizing filterin front of a modeling light or a flash such that the two filters are oriented perpendicular to eachother, i.e. cross polarized.

     

    2. We place Spectralon close to and parallel with the material we are capturing and take brack-eted shots of the setup7. Typically, we’ll take nine photographs, from -4EV to +4EV in 1EVincrements.

     

    3. We convert the bracketed shots to a linear HDR image. We found that many HDR packagesdo not produce an HDR image in which the pixel values are linear. PTGui is an example of apackage which does generate a linear HDR image. At this point, because of the cross polarization,the image is one of surface diffuse response.

     

    4. We open the file in Photoshop and normalize the image by color picking the Spectralon, filling anew layer with that color and setting that layer to “Divide”. This sets the Spectralon to 1 in theimage. All other color values are relative to this so we can consider them as diffuse albedo.

    , , ,
    Read more: Capturing textures albedo
  • FXGuide – ACES 2.0 with ILM’s Alex Fry

    https://draftdocs.acescentral.com/background/whats-new/

    ACES 2.0 is the second major release of the components that make up the ACES system. The most significant change is a new suite of rendering transforms whose design was informed by collected feedback and requests from users of ACES 1. The changes aim to improve the appearance of perceived artifacts and to complete previously unfinished components of the system, resulting in a more complete, robust, and consistent product.

    Highlights of the key changes in ACES 2.0 are as follows:

    • New output transforms, including:
      • A less aggressive tone scale
      • More intuitive controls to create custom outputs to non-standard displays
      • Robust gamut mapping to improve perceptual uniformity
      • Improved performance of the inverse transforms
    • Enhanced AMF specification
    • An updated specification for ACES Transform IDs
    • OpenEXR compression recommendations
    • Enhanced tools for generating Input Transforms and recommended procedures for characterizing prosumer cameras
    • Look Transform Library
    • Expanded documentation

    Rendering Transform

    The most substantial change in ACES 2.0 is a complete redesign of the rendering transform.

    ACES 2.0 was built as a unified system, rather than through piecemeal additions. Different deliverable outputs “match” better and making outputs to display setups other than the provided presets is intended to be user-driven. The rendering transforms are less likely to produce undesirable artifacts “out of the box”, which means less time can be spent fixing problematic images and more time making pictures look the way you want.

    Key design goals

    • Improve consistency of tone scale and provide an easy to use parameter to allow for outputs between preset dynamic ranges
    • Minimize hue skews across exposure range in a region of same hue
    • Unify for structural consistency across transform type
    • Easy to use parameters to create outputs other than the presets
    • Robust gamut mapping to improve harsh clipping artifacts
    • Fill extents of output code value cube (where appropriate and expected)
    • Invertible – not necessarily reversible, but Output > ACES > Output round-trip should be possible
    • Accomplish all of the above while maintaining an acceptable “out-of-the box” rendering

    ,
    Read more: FXGuide – ACES 2.0 with ILM’s Alex Fry
  • Polarised vs unpolarized filtering

    A light wave that is vibrating in more than one plane is referred to as unpolarized light. …

    Polarized light waves are light waves in which the vibrations occur in a single plane. The process of transforming unpolarized light into polarized light is known as polarization.

    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polarizing_filter_(photography)

    The most common use of polarized technology is to reduce lighting complexity on the subject.
    Details such as glare and hard edges are not removed, but greatly reduced.

    This method is usually used in VFX to capture raw images with the least amount of specular diffusion or pollution, thus allowing artists to infer detail back through typical shading and rendering techniques and on demand.

    Light reflected from a non-metallic surface becomes polarized; this effect is maximum at Brewster’s angle, about 56° from the vertical for common glass.

    A polarizer rotated to pass only light polarized in the direction perpendicular to the reflected light will absorb much of it. This absorption allows glare reflected from, for example, a body of water or a road to be reduced. Reflections from shiny surfaces (e.g. vegetation, sweaty skin, water surfaces, glass) are also reduced. This allows the natural color and detail of what is beneath to come through. Reflections from a window into a dark interior can be much reduced, allowing it to be seen through. (The same effects are available for vision by using polarizing sunglasses.)

     

    www.physicsclassroom.com/class/light/u12l1e.cfm

     

    Some of the light coming from the sky is polarized (bees use this phenomenon for navigation). The electrons in the air molecules cause a scattering of sunlight in all directions. This explains why the sky is not dark during the day. But when looked at from the sides, the light emitted from a specific electron is totally polarized.[3] Hence, a picture taken in a direction at 90 degrees from the sun can take advantage of this polarization.

    Use of a polarizing filter, in the correct direction, will filter out the polarized component of skylight, darkening the sky; the landscape below it, and clouds, will be less affected, giving a photograph with a darker and more dramatic sky, and emphasizing the clouds.

     

    There are two types of polarizing filters readily available, linear and “circular”, which have exactly the same effect photographically. But the metering and auto-focus sensors in certain cameras, including virtually all auto-focus SLRs, will not work properly with linear polarizers because the beam splitters used to split off the light for focusing and metering are polarization-dependent.

     

    Polarizing filters reduce the light passed through to the film or sensor by about one to three stops (2–8×) depending on how much of the light is polarized at the filter angle selected. Auto-exposure cameras will adjust for this by widening the aperture, lengthening the time the shutter is open, and/or increasing the ASA/ISO speed of the camera.

     

    www.adorama.com/alc/nd-filter-vs-polarizer-what%25e2%2580%2599s-the-difference

     

    Neutral Density (ND) filters help control image exposure by reducing the light that enters the camera so that you can have more control of your depth of field and shutter speed. Polarizers or polarizing filters work in a similar way, but the difference is that they selectively let light waves of a certain polarization pass through. This effect helps create more vivid colors in an image, as well as manage glare and reflections from water surfaces. Both are regarded as some of the best filters for landscape and travel photography as they reduce the dynamic range in high-contrast images, thus enabling photographers to capture more realistic and dramatic sceneries.

     

    shopfelixgray.com/blog/polarized-vs-non-polarized-sunglasses/

     

    www.eyebuydirect.com/blog/difference-polarized-nonpolarized-sunglasses/

    , ,
    Read more: Polarised vs unpolarized filtering
  • Weta Digital – Manuka Raytracer and Gazebo GPU renderers – pipeline

    https://jo.dreggn.org/home/2018_manuka.pdf

     

    http://www.fxguide.com/featured/manuka-weta-digitals-new-renderer/

     

    The Manuka rendering architecture has been designed in the spirit of the classic reyes rendering architecture. In its core, reyes is based on stochastic rasterisation of micropolygons, facilitating depth of field, motion blur, high geometric complexity,and programmable shading.

     

    This is commonly achieved with Monte Carlo path tracing, using a paradigm often called shade-on-hit, in which the renderer alternates tracing rays with running shaders on the various ray hits. The shaders take the role of generating the inputs of the local material structure which is then used bypath sampling logic to evaluate contributions and to inform what further rays to cast through the scene.

     

    Over the years, however, the expectations have risen substantially when it comes to image quality. Computing pictures which are indistinguishable from real footage requires accurate simulation of light transport, which is most often performed using some variant of Monte Carlo path tracing. Unfortunately this paradigm requires random memory accesses to the whole scene and does not lend itself well to a rasterisation approach at all.

     

    Manuka is both a uni-directional and bidirectional path tracer and encompasses multiple importance sampling (MIS). Interestingly, and importantly for production character skin work, it is the first major production renderer to incorporate spectral MIS in the form of a new ‘Hero Spectral Sampling’ technique, which was recently published at Eurographics Symposium on Rendering 2014.

     

    Manuka propose a shade-before-hit paradigm in-stead and minimise I/O strain (and some memory costs) on the system, leveraging locality of reference by running pattern generation shaders before we execute light transport simulation by path sampling, “compressing” any bvh structure as needed, and as such also limiting duplication of source data.
    The difference with reyes is that instead of baking colors into the geometry like in Reyes, manuka bakes surface closures. This means that light transport is still calculated with path tracing, but all texture lookups etc. are done up-front and baked into the geometry.

     

    The main drawback with this method is that geometry has to be tessellated to its highest, stable topology before shading can be evaluated properly. As such, the high cost to first pixel. Even a basic 4 vertices square becomes a much more complex model with this approach.

     

     

    Manuka use the RenderMan Shading Language (rsl) for programmable shading [Pixar Animation Studios 2015], but we do not invoke rsl shaders when intersecting a ray with a surface (often called shade-on-hit). Instead, we pre-tessellate and pre-shade all the input geometry in the front end of the renderer.
    This way, we can efficiently order shading computations to sup-port near-optimal texture locality, vectorisation, and parallelism. This system avoids repeated evaluation of shaders at the same surface point, and presents a minimal amount of memory to be accessed during light transport time. An added benefit is that the acceleration structure for ray tracing (abounding volume hierarchy, bvh) is built once on the final tessellated geometry, which allows us to ray trace more efficiently than multi-level bvhs and avoids costly caching of on-demand tessellated micropolygons and the associated scheduling issues.

     

    For the shading reasons above, in terms of AOVs, the studio approach is to succeed at combining complex shading with ray paths in the render rather than pass a multi-pass render to compositing.

     

    For the Spectral Rendering component. The light transport stage is fully spectral, using a continuously sampled wavelength which is traced with each path and used to apply the spectral camera sensitivity of the sensor. This allows for faithfully support any degree of observer metamerism as the camera footage they are intended to match as well as complex materials which require wavelength dependent phenomena such as diffraction, dispersion, interference, iridescence, or chromatic extinction and Rayleigh scattering in participating media.

     

    As opposed to the original reyes paper, we use bilinear interpolation of these bsdf inputs later when evaluating bsdfs per pathv ertex during light transport4. This improves temporal stability of geometry which moves very slowly with respect to the pixel raster

     

    In terms of the pipeline, everything rendered at Weta was already completely interwoven with their deep data pipeline. Manuka very much was written with deep data in mind. Here, Manuka not so much extends the deep capabilities, rather it fully matches the already extremely complex and powerful setup Weta Digital already enjoy with RenderMan. For example, an ape in a scene can be selected, its ID is available and a NUKE artist can then paint in 3D say a hand and part of the way up the neutral posed ape.

     

    We called our system Manuka, as a respectful nod to reyes: we had heard a story froma former ILM employee about how reyes got its name from how fond the early Pixar people were of their lunches at Point Reyes, and decided to name our system after our surrounding natural environment, too. Manuka is a kind of tea tree very common in New Zealand which has very many very small leaves, in analogy to micropolygons ina tree structure for ray tracing. It also happens to be the case that Weta Digital’s main site is on Manuka Street.

     

     

    , ,
    Read more: Weta Digital – Manuka Raytracer and Gazebo GPU renderers – pipeline
  • Christopher Butler – Understanding the Eye-Mind Connection – Vision is a mental process

    https://www.chrbutler.com/understanding-the-eye-mind-connection

     

    The intricate relationship between the eyes and the brain, often termed the eye-mind connection, reveals that vision is predominantly a cognitive process. This understanding has profound implications for fields such as design, where capturing and maintaining attention is paramount. This essay delves into the nuances of visual perception, the brain’s role in interpreting visual data, and how this knowledge can be applied to effective design strategies.

     

    This cognitive aspect of vision is evident in phenomena such as optical illusions, where the brain interprets visual information in a way that contradicts physical reality. These illusions underscore that what we “see” is not merely a direct recording of the external world but a constructed experience shaped by cognitive processes.

     

    Understanding the cognitive nature of vision is crucial for effective design. Designers must consider how the brain processes visual information to create compelling and engaging visuals. This involves several key principles:

    1. Attention and Engagement
    2. Visual Hierarchy
    3. Cognitive Load Management
    4. Context and Meaning

     

     

    , , , ,
    Read more: Christopher Butler – Understanding the Eye-Mind Connection – Vision is a mental process
  • Types of Film Lights and their efficiency – CRI, Color Temperature and Luminous Efficacy

    nofilmschool.com/types-of-film-lights

     

    “Not every light performs the same way. Lights and lighting are tricky to handle. You have to plan for every circumstance. But the good news is, lighting can be adjusted. Let’s look at different factors that affect lighting in every scene you shoot. ”

    Use CRI, Luminous Efficacy and color temperature controls to match your needs.

     

    Color Temperature
    Color temperature describes the “color” of white light by a light source radiated by a perfect black body at a given temperature measured in degrees Kelvin

     

    https://www.pixelsham.com/2019/10/18/color-temperature/

     

    CRI
    “The Color Rendering Index is a measurement of how faithfully a light source reveals the colors of whatever it illuminates, it describes the ability of a light source to reveal the color of an object, as compared to the color a natural light source would provide. The highest possible CRI is 100. A CRI of 100 generally refers to a perfect black body, like a tungsten light source or the sun. ”

     

    https://www.studiobinder.com/blog/what-is-color-rendering-index/

     

     

     

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_rendering_index

     

    Light source CCT (K) CRI
    Low-pressure sodium (LPS/SOX) 1800 −44
    Clear mercury-vapor 6410 17
    High-pressure sodium (HPS/SON) 2100 24
    Coated mercury-vapor 3600 49
    Halophosphate warm-white fluorescent 2940 51
    Halophosphate cool-white fluorescent 4230 64
    Tri-phosphor warm-white fluorescent 2940 73
    Halophosphate cool-daylight fluorescent 6430 76
    “White” SON 2700 82
    Standard LED Lamp 2700–5000 83
    Quartz metal halide 4200 85
    Tri-phosphor cool-white fluorescent 4080 89
    High-CRI LED lamp (blue LED) 2700–5000 95
    Ceramic discharge metal-halide lamp 5400 96
    Ultra-high-CRI LED lamp (violet LED) 2700–5000 99
    Incandescent/halogen bulb 3200 100

     

    Luminous Efficacy
    Luminous efficacy is a measure of how well a light source produces visible light, watts out versus watts in, measured in lumens per watt. In other words it is a measurement that indicates the ability of a light source to emit visible light using a given amount of power. It is a ratio of the visible energy to the power that goes into the bulb.

     

    FILM LIGHT TYPES

    https://www.studiobinder.com/blog/video-lighting-kits/?utm_campaign=Weekly_Newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_source=sendgrid&utm_term=production-lighting&utm_content=production-lighting

     

     

     

    Consumer light types

     

    https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Emission-spectra-of-different-light-sources-a-incandescent-tungsten-light-bulb-b_fig1_312320039

     

    http://dev.informationdisplay.org/IDArchive/2015/NovemberDecember/FrontlineTechnologyCandleLikeEmission.aspx

     

     

    Tungsten Lights
    Light interiors and match domestic places or office locations. Daylight.

    Advantages of Tungsten Lights
    Almost perfect color rendition
    Low cost
    Does not use mercury like CFLs (fluorescent) or mercury vapor lights
    Better color temperature than standard tungsten
    Longer life than a conventional incandescent
    Instant on to full brightness, no warm-up time, and it is dimmable

    Disadvantages of Tungsten Lights
    Extremely hot
    High power requirement
    The lamp is sensitive to oils and cannot be touched
    The bulb is capable of blowing and sending hot glass shards outward. A screen or layer of glass on the outside of the lamp can protect users.

     

     

    Hydrargyrum medium-arc iodide lights
    HMI’s are used when high output is required. They are also used to recreate sun shining through windows or to fake additional sun while shooting exteriors. HMIs can light huge areas at once.

    Advantages of HMI lights
    High light output
    Higher efficiency
    High color temperature

    Disadvantages of HMI lights:
    High cost
    High power requirement
    Dims only to about 50%
    the color temperature increases with dimming
    HMI bulbs will explode is dropped and release toxic chemicals

     

     

    Fluorescent
    Fluorescent film lighting is achieved by laying multiple tubes next to each other, combining as many as you want for the desired brightness. The good news is you can choose your bulbs to either be warm or cool depending on the scenario you’re shooting. You want to get these bulbs close to the subject because they’re not great at opening up spaces. Fluorescent lighting is used to light interiors and is more compact and cooler than tungsten or HMI lighting.

    Advantages of Fluorescent lights
    High efficiency
    Low power requirement
    Low cost
    Long lamp life
    Cool
    Capable of soft even lighting over a large area
    Lightweight

    Disadvantages of Fluorescent lights
    Flicker
    High CRI
    Domestic tubes have low CRI & poor color rendition.

     

     

    LED
    LED’s are more and more common on film sets. You can use batteries to power them. That makes them portable and sleek – no messy cabled needed. You can rig your own panels of LED lights to fit any space necessary as well. LED’s can also power Fresnel style lamp heads such as the Arri L-series.

    Advantages of LED light
    Soft, even lighting
    Pure light without UV-artifacts
    High efficiency
    Low power consumption, can be battery powered
    Excellent dimming by means of pulse width modulation control
    Long lifespan
    Environmentally friendly
    Insensitive to shock
    No risk of explosion

    Disadvantages of LED light
    High cost.
    LED’s are currently still expensive for their total light output

    (more…)

    , , ,
    Read more: Types of Film Lights and their efficiency – CRI, Color Temperature and Luminous Efficacy

LIGHTING