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.
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.
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.
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?
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.)
Everyone is pointing out examples around image reproduction, which are valid and interesting… but the case that comes up in nature is violet (beyond blue in spectrum) vs purple (mix of red and blue) pigments.
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.
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!
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.
As I understand it, JPEG cuts out a lot of detail in the blue range, because we don't see it as well. Is that due to the same thing as you're saying here?
Stupid question: does the computer or whatever the monitor is hooked up to need to know to do something special to then show those colors, or it's just normal rgb color levels and in a less-good-color-space monitor those would have been shifted to less accurate colors?
> 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.
Do you know if this is why looking through a true green-blocking (pure magenta or purple) filter (e.g. Wratten 32, 33, or 34A) is such a different experience than a digital photo taken using the same filter?
Looking through those filters is extremely surreal for me, but I've not been able to capture anything like it with any camera.
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/ (previously on HN but search fails me).
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... :)
> 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.
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.
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,
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
56 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 55.7 ms ] threadThe 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.
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.
Does anyone have any comments on the future of printed media?
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.)
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.
SCNR
Do you know if this is why looking through a true green-blocking (pure magenta or purple) filter (e.g. Wratten 32, 33, or 34A) is such a different experience than a digital photo taken using the same filter?
Looking through those filters is extremely surreal for me, but I've not been able to capture anything like it with any camera.
Thanks for such a beautiful article about not looking at a screen: I'm off outside... :)
> 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.
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
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stabilized_images , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixation_(visual) , 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.
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!
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.
That's screen reality. 1% evocative symbols and 99% in your head.
[1] (18 minutes) https://youtu.be/-DyrBDsKA5s