COLOR

  • Björn Ottosson – OKHSV and OKHSL – Two new color spaces for color picking

    https://bottosson.github.io/misc/colorpicker

     

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

     

    https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2024/10/interview-bjorn-ottosson-creator-oklab-color-space/

     

    One problem with sRGB is that in a gradient between blue and white, it becomes a bit purple in the middle of the transition. That’s because sRGB really isn’t created to mimic how the eye sees colors; rather, it is based on how CRT monitors work. That means it works with certain frequencies of red, green, and blue, and also the non-linear coding called gamma. It’s a miracle it works as well as it does, but it’s not connected to color perception. When using those tools, you sometimes get surprising results, like purple in the gradient.

     

     

    There were also attempts to create simple models matching human perception based on XYZ, but as it turned out, it’s not possible to model all color vision that way. Perception of color is incredibly complex and depends, among other things, on whether it is dark or light in the room and the background color it is against. When you look at a photograph, it also depends on what you think the color of the light source is. The dress is a typical example of color vision being very context-dependent. It is almost impossible to model this perfectly.

     

    I based Oklab on two other color spaces, CIECAM16 and IPT. I used the lightness and saturation prediction from CIECAM16, which is a color appearance model, as a target. I actually wanted to use the datasets used to create CIECAM16, but I couldn’t find them.

     

    IPT was designed to have better hue uniformity. In experiments, they asked people to match light and dark colors, saturated and unsaturated colors, which resulted in a dataset for which colors, subjectively, have the same hue. IPT has a few other issues but is the basis for hue in Oklab.

     

    In the Munsell color system, colors are described with three parameters, designed to match the perceived appearance of colors: Hue, Chroma and Value. The parameters are designed to be independent and each have a uniform scale. This results in a color solid with an irregular shape. The parameters are designed to be independent and each have a uniform scale. This results in a color solid with an irregular shape. Modern color spaces and models, such as CIELAB, Cam16 and Björn Ottosson own Oklab, are very similar in their construction.

     

     

    By far the most used color spaces today for color picking are HSL and HSV, two representations introduced in the classic 1978 paper “Color Spaces for Computer Graphics”. HSL and HSV designed to roughly correlate with perceptual color properties while being very simple and cheap to compute.

     

    Today HSL and HSV are most commonly used together with the sRGB color space.

     

     

    One of the main advantages of HSL and HSV over the different Lab color spaces is that they map the sRGB gamut to a cylinder. This makes them easy to use since all parameters can be changed independently, without the risk of creating colors outside of the target gamut.

     

     

    The main drawback on the other hand is that their properties don’t match human perception particularly well.
    Reconciling these conflicting goals perfectly isn’t possible, but given that HSV and HSL don’t use anything derived from experiments relating to human perception, creating something that makes a better tradeoff does not seem unreasonable.

     

     

    With this new lightness estimate, we are ready to look into the construction of Okhsv and Okhsl.

     

     

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    Read more: Björn Ottosson – OKHSV and OKHSL – Two new color spaces for color picking
  • What is a Gamut or Color Space and why do I need to know about CIE

    http://www.xdcam-user.com/2014/05/what-is-a-gamut-or-color-space-and-why-do-i-need-to-know-about-it/

     

    In video terms gamut is normally related to as the full range of colours and brightness that can be either captured or displayed.

     

    Generally speaking all color gamuts recommendations are trying to define a reasonable level of color representation based on available technology and hardware. REC-601 represents the old TVs. REC-709 is currently the most distributed solution. P3 is mainly available in movie theaters and is now being adopted in some of the best new 4K HDR TVs. Rec2020 (a wider space than P3 that improves on visibke color representation) and ACES (the full coverage of visible color) are other common standards which see major hardware development these days.

     

     

    To compare and visualize different solution (across video and printing solutions), most developers use the CIE color model chart as a reference.
    The CIE color model is a color space model created by the International Commission on Illumination known as the Commission Internationale de l’Elcairage (CIE) in 1931. It is also known as the CIE XYZ color space or the CIE 1931 XYZ color space.
    This chart represents the first defined quantitative link between distributions of wavelengths in the electromagnetic visible spectrum, and physiologically perceived colors in human color vision. Or basically, the range of color a typical human eye can perceive through visible light.

     

    Note that while the human perception is quite wide, and generally speaking biased towards greens (we are apes after all), the amount of colors available through nature, generated through light reflection, tend to be a much smaller section. This is defined by the Pointer’s Chart.

     

    In short. Color gamut is a representation of color coverage, used to describe data stored in images against available hardware and viewer technologies.

     

    Camera color encoding from
    https://www.slideshare.net/hpduiker/acescg-a-common-color-encoding-for-visual-effects-applications

     

    CIE 1976

    http://bernardsmith.eu/computatrum/scan_and_restore_archive_and_print/scanning/

     

    https://store.yujiintl.com/blogs/high-cri-led/understanding-cie1931-and-cie-1976

     

    The CIE 1931 standard has been replaced by a CIE 1976 standard. Below we can see the significance of this.

     

    People have observed that the biggest issue with CIE 1931 is the lack of uniformity with chromaticity, the three dimension color space in rectangular coordinates is not visually uniformed.

     

    The CIE 1976 (also called CIELUV) was created by the CIE in 1976. It was put forward in an attempt to provide a more uniform color spacing than CIE 1931 for colors at approximately the same luminance

     

    The CIE 1976 standard colour space is more linear and variations in perceived colour between different people has also been reduced. The disproportionately large green-turquoise area in CIE 1931, which cannot be generated with existing computer screens, has been reduced.

     

    If we move from CIE 1931 to the CIE 1976 standard colour space we can see that the improvements made in the gamut for the “new” iPad screen (as compared to the “old” iPad 2) are more evident in the CIE 1976 colour space than in the CIE 1931 colour space, particularly in the blues from aqua to deep blue.

     

     

    https://dot-color.com/2012/08/14/color-space-confusion/

    Despite its age, CIE 1931, named for the year of its adoption, remains a well-worn and familiar shorthand throughout the display industry. CIE 1931 is the primary language of customers. When a customer says that their current display “can do 72% of NTSC,” they implicitly mean 72% of NTSC 1953 color gamut as mapped against CIE 1931.

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    Read more: What is a Gamut or Color Space and why do I need to know about CIE
  • No one could see the colour blue until modern times

    https://www.businessinsider.com/what-is-blue-and-how-do-we-see-color-2015-2

     

    The way that humans see the world… until we have a way to describe something, even something so fundamental as a colour, we may not even notice that something it’s there.

     

    Ancient languages didn’t have a word for blue — not Greek, not Chinese, not Japanese, not Hebrew, not Icelandic cultures. And without a word for the colour, there’s evidence that they may not have seen it at all.

    https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/211119-colors

     

    Every language first had a word for black and for white, or dark and light. The next word for a colour to come into existence — in every language studied around the world — was red, the colour of blood and wine.

    After red, historically, yellow appears, and later, green (though in a couple of languages, yellow and green switch places). The last of these colours to appear in every language is blue.

     

    The only ancient culture to develop a word for blue was the Egyptians — and as it happens, they were also the only culture that had a way to produce a blue dye.

    https://mymodernmet.com/shades-of-blue-color-history/

     

    Considered to be the first ever synthetically produced color pigment, Egyptian blue (also known as cuprorivaite) was created around 2,200 B.C. It was made from ground limestone mixed with sand and a copper-containing mineral, such as azurite or malachite, which was then heated between 1470 and 1650°F. The result was an opaque blue glass which then had to be crushed and combined with thickening agents such as egg whites to create a long-lasting paint or glaze.

     

     

    If you think about it, blue doesn’t appear much in nature — there aren’t animals with blue pigments (except for one butterfly, Obrina Olivewing, all animals generate blue through light scattering), blue eyes are rare (also blue through light scattering), and blue flowers are mostly human creations. There is, of course, the sky, but is that really blue?

     

     

    So before we had a word for it, did people not naturally see blue? Do you really see something if you don’t have a word for it?

     

    A researcher named Jules Davidoff traveled to Namibia to investigate this, where he conducted an experiment with the Himba tribe, who speak a language that has no word for blue or distinction between blue and green. When shown a circle with 11 green squares and one blue, they couldn’t pick out which one was different from the others.

     

    When looking at a circle of green squares with only one slightly different shade, they could immediately spot the different one. Can you?

     

    Davidoff says that without a word for a colour, without a way of identifying it as different, it’s much harder for us to notice what’s unique about it — even though our eyes are physically seeing the blocks it in the same way.

     

    Further research brought to wider discussions about color perception in humans. Everything that we make is based on the fact that humans are trichromatic. The television only has 3 colors. Our color printers have 3 different colors. But some people, and in specific some women seemed to be more sensible to color differences… mainly because they’re just more aware or – because of the job that they do.

    Eventually this brought to the discovery of a small percentage of the population, referred to as tetrachromats, which developed an extra cone sensitivity to yellow, likely due to gene modifications.

    The interesting detail about these is that even between tetrachromats, only the ones that had a reason to develop, label and work with extra color sensitivity actually developed the ability to use their native skills.

     

    So before blue became a common concept, maybe humans saw it. But it seems they didn’t know they were seeing it.

    If you see something yet can’t see it, does it exist? Did colours come into existence over time? Not technically, but our ability to notice them… may have…

     

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    Read more: No one could see the colour blue until modern times
  • 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/

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  • Practical Aspects of Spectral Data and LEDs in Digital Content Production and Virtual Production – SIGGRAPH 2022

     

    Comparison to the commercial side

     

    https://www.ecolorled.com/blog/detail/what-is-rgb-rgbw-rgbic-strip-lights

     

    RGBW (RGB + White) LED strip uses a 4-in-1 LED chip made up of red, green, blue, and white.

     

    RGBWW (RGB + White + Warm White) LED strip uses either a 5-in-1 LED chip with red, green, blue, white, and warm white for color mixing. The only difference between RGBW and RGBWW is the intensity of the white color. The term RGBCCT consists of RGB and CCT. CCT (Correlated Color Temperature) means that the color temperature of the led strip light can be adjusted to change between warm white and white. Thus, RGBWW strip light is another name of RGBCCT strip.

     

    RGBCW is the acronym for Red, Green, Blue, Cold, and Warm. These 5-in-1 chips are used in supper bright smart LED lighting products

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    Read more: Practical Aspects of Spectral Data and LEDs in Digital Content Production and Virtual Production – SIGGRAPH 2022
  • Scientists claim to have discovered ‘new colour’ no one has seen before: Olo

    https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/clyq0n3em41o

    By stimulating specific cells in the retina, the participants claim to have witnessed a blue-green colour that scientists have called “olo”, but some experts have said the existence of a new colour is “open to argument”.

    The findings, published in the journal Science Advances on Friday, have been described by the study’s co-author, Prof Ren Ng from the University of California, as “remarkable”.

    (A) System inputs. (i) Retina map of 103 cone cells preclassified by spectral type (7). (ii) Target visual percept (here, a video of a child, see movie S1 at 1:04). (iii) Infrared cellular-scale imaging of the retina with 60-frames-per-second rolling shutter. Fixational eye movement is visible over the three frames shown.

    (B) System outputs. (iv) Real-time per-cone target activation levels to reproduce the target percept, computed by: extracting eye motion from the input video relative to the retina map; identifying the spectral type of every cone in the field of view; computing the per-cone activation the target percept would have produced. (v) Intensities of visible-wavelength 488-nm laser microdoses at each cone required to achieve its target activation level.

    (C) Infrared imaging and visible-wavelength stimulation are physically accomplished in a raster scan across the retinal region using AOSLO. By modulating the visible-wavelength beam’s intensity, the laser microdoses shown in (v) are delivered. Drawing adapted with permission [Harmening and Sincich (54)].

    (D) Examples of target percepts with corresponding cone activations and laser microdoses, ranging from colored squares to complex imagery. Teal-striped regions represent the color “olo” of stimulating only M cones.

    Read more: Scientists claim to have discovered ‘new colour’ no one has seen before: Olo

LIGHTING