COMPOSITION
DESIGN
COLOR
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Christopher Butler – Understanding the Eye-Mind Connection – Vision is a mental process
Read more: Christopher Butler – Understanding the Eye-Mind Connection – Vision is a mental processhttps://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:
- Attention and Engagement
- Visual Hierarchy
- Cognitive Load Management
- Context and Meaning
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No one could see the colour blue until modern times
Read more: No one could see the colour blue until modern timeshttps://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/
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/scientists-recreate-lost-recipes-for-a-5-000-year-old-egyptian-blue-dye/ar-AA1FXcj1
Assessment of process variability and color in synthesized and ancient Egyptian blue pigments | npj Heritage ScienceThe approximately 5,000-year-old dye wasn’t a single color, but instead encompassed a range of hues, from deep blues to duller grays and greens. Artisans first crafted Egyptian blue during the Fourth Dynasty (roughly 2613 to 2494 BCE) from recipes reliant on calcium-copper silicate. These techniques were later adopted by Romans in lieu of more expensive materials like lapis lazuli and turquoise. But the additional ingredient lists were lost to history by the time of the Renaissance.
McCloy’s team confirmed that cuprorivaite—the naturally occurring mineral equivalent to Egyptian blue—remains the primary color influence in each hue. Despite the presence of other components, Egyptian blue appears as a uniform color after the cuprorivaite becomes encased in colorless particles such as silicate during the heating process.
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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Light and Matter : The 2018 theory of Physically-Based Rendering and Shading by Allegorithmic
Read more: Light and Matter : The 2018 theory of Physically-Based Rendering and Shading by Allegorithmicacademy.substance3d.com/courses/the-pbr-guide-part-1
academy.substance3d.com/courses/the-pbr-guide-part-2
Local copy:
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Rec-2020 – TVs new color gamut standard used by Dolby Vision?
Read more: Rec-2020 – TVs new color gamut standard used by Dolby Vision?https://www.hdrsoft.com/resources/dri.html#bit-depth
The dynamic range is a ratio between the maximum and minimum values of a physical measurement. Its definition depends on what the dynamic range refers to.
For a scene: Dynamic range is the ratio between the brightest and darkest parts of the scene.
For a camera: Dynamic range is the ratio of saturation to noise. More specifically, the ratio of the intensity that just saturates the camera to the intensity that just lifts the camera response one standard deviation above camera noise.
For a display: Dynamic range is the ratio between the maximum and minimum intensities emitted from the screen.
The Dynamic Range of real-world scenes can be quite high — ratios of 100,000:1 are common in the natural world. An HDR (High Dynamic Range) image stores pixel values that span the whole tonal range of real-world scenes. Therefore, an HDR image is encoded in a format that allows the largest range of values, e.g. floating-point values stored with 32 bits per color channel. Another characteristics of an HDR image is that it stores linear values. This means that the value of a pixel from an HDR image is proportional to the amount of light measured by the camera.
For TVs HDR is great, but it’s not the only new TV feature worth discussing.
Wide color gamut, or WCG, is often lumped in with HDR. While they’re often found together, they’re not intrinsically linked. Where HDR is an increase in the dynamic range of the picture (with contrast and brighter highlights in particular), a TV’s wide color gamut coverage refers to how much of the new, larger color gamuts a TV can display.
Wide color gamuts only really matter for HDR video sources like UHD Blu-rays and some streaming video, as only HDR sources are meant to take advantage of the ability to display more colors.
www.cnet.com/how-to/what-is-wide-color-gamut-wcg/
Color depth is only one aspect of color representation, expressing the precision with which the amount of each primary can be expressed through a pixel; the other aspect is how broad a range of colors can be expressed (the gamut)
Image rendering bit depth
Wide color gamuts include a greater number of colors than what most current TVs can display, so the greater a TV’s coverage of a wide color gamut, the more colors a TV will be able to reproduce.
When we talk about a color space or color gamut we refer to the range of color values stored in an image. The perception of these color also requires a display that has been tuned with to resolve these color profiles at best. This is often referred to as a ‘viewer lut’.
So this comes also usually paired with an increase in bit depth, going from the old 8 bit system (256 shades per color, with the potential of over 16.7 million colors: 256 green x 256 blue x 256 red) to 10 (1024+ shades per color, with access to over a billion colors) or higher bits, like 12 bit (4096 shades per RGB for 68 billion colors).
The advantage of higher bit depth is in the ability to bias color with the minimum loss.
For an extreme example, raising the brightness from a completely dark image allows for better reproduction, independently on the reproduction medium, due to the amount of data available at editing time:
For reference, 8-bit images (i.e. 24 bits per pixel for a color image) are considered Low Dynamic Range.
They can store around 5 stops of light and each pixel carry a value from 0 (black) to 255 (white).
As a comparison, DSLR cameras can capture ~12-15 stops of light and they use RAW files to store the information.
https://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials/dynamic-range.htm
https://www.hdrsoft.com/resources/dri.html#bit-depth
Note that the number of bits itself may be a misleading indication of the real dynamic range that the image reproduces — converting a Low Dynamic Range image to a higher bit depth does not change its dynamic range, of course.
- 8-bit images (i.e. 24 bits per pixel for a color image) are considered Low Dynamic Range.
- 16-bit images (i.e. 48 bits per pixel for a color image) resulting from RAW conversion are still considered Low Dynamic Range, even though the range of values they can encode is significantly higher than for 8-bit images (65536 versus 256). Note that converting a RAW file involves applying a tonal curve that compresses the dynamic range of the RAW data so that the converted image shows correctly on low dynamic range monitors. The need to adapt the output image file to the dynamic range of the display is the factor that dictates how much the dynamic range is compressed, not the output bit-depth. By using 16 instead of 8 bits, you will gain precision but you will not gain dynamic range.
- 32-bit images (i.e. 96 bits per pixel for a color image) are considered High Dynamic Range.Unlike 8- and 16-bit images which can take a finite number of values, 32-bit images are coded using floating point numbers, which means the values they can take is unlimited.It is important to note, though, that storing an image in a 32-bit HDR format is a necessary condition for an HDR image but not a sufficient one. When an image comes from a single capture with a standard camera, it will remain a Low Dynamic Range image,
Also note that bit depth and dynamic range are often confused as one, but are indeed separate concepts and there is no direct one to one relationship between them. Bit depth is about capacity, dynamic range is about the actual ratio of data stored.
The bit depth of a capturing or displaying device gives you an indication of its dynamic range capacity. That is, the highest dynamic range that the device would be capable of reproducing if all other constraints are eliminated.https://rawpedia.rawtherapee.com/Bit_Depth
Finally, note that there are two ways to “count” bits for an image — either the number of bits per color channel (BPC) or the number of bits per pixel (BPP). A bit (0,1) is the smallest unit of data stored in a computer.
For a grayscale image, 8-bit means that each pixel can be one of 256 levels of gray (256 is 2 to the power 8).
For an RGB color image, 8-bit means that each one of the three color channels can be one of 256 levels of color.
Since each pixel is represented by 3 colors in this case, 8-bit per color channel actually means 24-bit per pixel.Similarly, 16-bit for an RGB image means 65,536 levels per color channel and 48-bit per pixel.
To complicate matters, when an image is classified as 16-bit, it just means that it can store a maximum 65,535 values. It does not necessarily mean that it actually spans that range. If the camera sensors can not capture more than 12 bits of tonal values, the actual bit depth of the image will be at best 12-bit and probably less because of noise.
The following table attempts to summarize the above for the case of an RGB color image.
Type of digital support Bit depth per color channel Bit depth per pixel FStops Theoretical maximum Dynamic Range Reality 8-bit 8 24 8 256:1 most consumer images 12-bit CCD 12 36 12 4,096:1 real maximum limited by noise 14-bit CCD 14 42 14 16,384:1 real maximum limited by noise 16-bit TIFF (integer) 16 48 16 65,536:1 bit-depth in this case is not directly related to the dynamic range captured 16-bit float EXR 16 48 30 65,536:1 values are distributed more closely in the (lower) darker tones than in the (higher) lighter ones, thus allowing for a more accurate description of the tones more significant to humans. The range of normalized 16-bit floats can represent thirty stops of information with 1024 steps per stop. We have eighteen and a half stops over middle gray, and eleven and a half below. The denormalized numbers provide an additional ten stops with decreasing precision per stop.
http://download.nvidia.com/developer/GPU_Gems/CD_Image/Image_Processing/OpenEXR/OpenEXR-1.0.6/doc/#recsHDR image (e.g. Radiance format) 32 96 “infinite” 4.3 billion:1 real maximum limited by the captured dynamic range 32-bit floats are often called “single-precision” floats, and 64-bit floats are often called “double-precision” floats. 16-bit floats therefore are called “half-precision” floats, or just “half floats”.
https://petapixel.com/2018/09/19/8-12-14-vs-16-bit-depth-what-do-you-really-need
On a separate note, even Photoshop does not handle 16bit per channel. Photoshop does actually use 16-bits per channel. However, it treats the 16th digit differently – it is simply added to the value created from the first 15-digits. This is sometimes called 15+1 bits. This means that instead of 216 possible values (which would be 65,536 possible values) there are only 215+1 possible values (which is 32,768 +1 = 32,769 possible values).
Rec-601 (for the older SDTV format, very similar to rec-709) and Rec-709 (the HDTV’s recommended set of color standards, at times also referred to sRGB, although not exactly the same) are currently the most spread color formats and hardware configurations in the world.
Following those you can find the larger P3 gamut, more commonly used in theaters and in digital production houses (with small variations and improvements to color coverage), as well as most of best 4K/WCG TVs.
And a new standard is now promoted against P3, referred to Rec-2020 and UHDTV.
It is still debatable if this is going to be adopted at consumer level beyond the P3, mainly due to lack of hardware supporting it. But initial tests do prove that it would be a future proof investment.
www.colour-science.org/anders-langlands/
Rec. 2020 is ultimately designed for television, and not cinema. Therefore, it is to be expected that its properties must behave according to current signal processing standards. In this respect, its foundation is based on current HD and SD video signal characteristics.
As far as color bit depth is concerned, it allows for a maximum of 12 bits, which is more than enough for humans.
Comparing standards, REC-709 covers 35.9% of the human visible spectrum. P3 45.5%. And REC-2020 75.8%.
https://www.avsforum.com/forum/166-lcd-flat-panel-displays/2812161-what-color-volume.htmlComparing coverage to hardware devices
To note that all the new standards generally score very high on the Pointer’s Gamut chart. But with REC-2020 scoring 99.9% vs P3 at 88.2%.
www.tftcentral.co.uk/articles/pointers_gamut.htmhttps://www.slideshare.net/hpduiker/acescg-a-common-color-encoding-for-visual-effects-applications
The Pointer’s gamut is (an approximation of) the gamut of real surface colors as can be seen by the human eye, based on the research by Michael R. Pointer (1980). What this means is that every color that can be reflected by the surface of an object of any material is inside the Pointer’s gamut. Basically establishing a widely respected target for color reproduction. Visually, Pointers Gamut represents the colors we see about us in the natural world. Colors outside Pointers Gamut include those that do not occur naturally, such as neon lights and computer-generated colors possible in animation. Which would partially be accounted for with the new gamuts.
cinepedia.com/picture/color-gamut/
Not all current TVs can support the full spread of the new gamuts. Here is a list of modern TVs’ color coverage in percentage:
www.rtings.com/tv/tests/picture-quality/wide-color-gamut-rec-709-dci-p3-rec-2020There are no TVs that can come close to displaying all the colors within Rec.2020, and there likely won’t be for at least a few years. However, to help future-proof the technology, Rec.2020 support is already baked into the HDR spec. That means that the same genuine HDR media that fills the DCI P3 space on a compatible TV now, will in a few years also fill Rec.2020 on a TV supporting that larger space.
Rec.2020’s main gains are in the number of new tones of green that it will display, though it also offers improvements to the number of blue and red colors as well. Altogether, Rec.2020 will cover about 75% of the visual spectrum, which is a sizeable increase in coverage even over DCI P3.
Dolby Vision
https://www.highdefdigest.com/news/show/what-is-dolby-vision/39049
https://www.techhive.com/article/3237232/dolby-vision-vs-hdr10-which-is-best.html
Dolby Vision is a proprietary end-to-end High Dynamic Range (HDR) format that covers content creation and playback through select cinemas, Ultra HD displays, and 4K titles. Like other HDR standards, the process uses expanded brightness to improve contrast between dark and light aspects of an image, bringing out deeper black levels and more realistic details in specular highlights — like the sun reflecting off of an ocean — in specially graded Dolby Vision material.
The iPhone 12 Pro gets the ability to record 4K 10-bit HDR video. According to Apple, it is the very first smartphone that is capable of capturing Dolby Vision HDR.
The iPhone 12 Pro takes two separate exposures and runs them through Apple’s custom image signal processor to create a histogram, which is a graph of the tonal values in each frame. The Dolby Vision metadata is then generated based on that histogram. In Laymen’s terms, it is essentially doing real-time grading while you are shooting. This is only possible due to the A14 Bionic chip.
Dolby Vision also allows for 12-bit color, as opposed to HDR10’s and HDR10+’s 10-bit color. While no retail TV we’re aware of supports 12-bit color, Dolby claims it can be down-sampled in such a way as to render 10-bit color more accurately.
Resources for more reading:
https://www.avsforum.com/forum/166-lcd-flat-panel-displays/2812161-what-color-volume.html
wolfcrow.com/say-hello-to-rec-2020-the-color-space-of-the-future/
www.cnet.com/news/ultra-hd-tv-color-part-ii-the-future/
LIGHTING
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About green screens
Read more: About green screenshackaday.com/2015/02/07/how-green-screen-worked-before-computers/
www.newtek.com/blog/tips/best-green-screen-materials/
www.chromawall.com/blog//chroma-key-green
Chroma Key Green, the color of green screens is also known as Chroma Green and is valued at approximately 354C in the Pantone color matching system (PMS).
Chroma Green can be broken down in many different ways. Here is green screen green as other values useful for both physical and digital production:
Green Screen as RGB Color Value: 0, 177, 64
Green Screen as CMYK Color Value: 81, 0, 92, 0
Green Screen as Hex Color Value: #00b140
Green Screen as Websafe Color Value: #009933Chroma Key Green is reasonably close to an 18% gray reflectance.
Illuminate your green screen with an uniform source with less than 2/3 EV variation.
The level of brightness at any given f-stop should be equivalent to a 90% white card under the same lighting. -
Tracing Spherical harmonics and how Weta used them in production
Read more: Tracing Spherical harmonics and how Weta used them in productionA way to approximate complex lighting in ultra realistic renders.
All SH lighting techniques involve replacing parts of standard lighting equations with spherical functions that have been projected into frequency space using the spherical harmonics as a basis.
http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~cs4162/slides/spherical-harmonic-lighting.pdf
Spherical harmonics as used at Weta Digital
https://www.fxguide.com/fxfeatured/the-science-of-spherical-harmonics-at-weta-digital/
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