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

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

#71
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

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

#72

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 ma…

There's color space and there's color depth. You may be using D-P3 with 8 bit, which is worse (less accurate?) than sRGB with 8 bit. And there's bandwidth. Your monitor may not be able to handle 4k 240fps 16 bit.

These days cheaper monitors with only 8bpc support advertising higher color support use FRC to flicker between different 8-bit colors at a high enough rate to trick the vision receptors to seeing a mix between the two.

Separately, sorry to nitpick, but while wide gamut colors with only eight bits of data have lower resolution than sRGB, that doesn’t make them an inferior option. You might not be able to specify the exact shade but a) your effective accuracy is still greater and b) you trade that for greater range.

Just as an example, assume you have buckets of granularity 1 (sRGB) and 0.5 granularity (wide gamut). With only eight bits you can precisely select any individual bucket of granularity 1, whereas with only eight bits you sometimes miss the intended wide gamut 0.5 precision bucket and hit its neighbor instead (as if you had a granularity of 1 in this specific worst case). That doesn’t make it worse; you just aren’t taking full advantage. On top of that, your range with granularity one is, say, 200 to 800 while your “range” with the wide bucket is 0 to 1000 (just as an example).

There’s a reason photos or graphics saved as eight-bit png or jpeg still manage to look ten times better in a wide gamut profile than in sRGB (on a better-than-sRGB display).

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

#73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's color space and there's color depth. You may be using D-P3 with 8 bit, which is worse (less accurate?) than sRGB with 8 bit. And there's bandwidth. Your monitor may not be able to handle 4k 240fps 16 bit.

> Your monitor may not be able to handle 4k 240fps 16 bit. 10 bits per channel is the common target for higher color depth. The formats with 16 bits per channel are generally for image storage and allowing more bits for downstream transforms to avoid quantization. I don’t even know if there are video cards that would output 16 bits per channel, let alone panels for it.

I don’t think 16 bpc is supported in the standard consumer workflow but I believe 12 bpc is?

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

#74
post #51
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to mention the Color Rendering Index (CRI) metric Ra does not weigh the R9 (deep red) so many forms of lighting don't try to render it correctly to save costs.

This is truly an (accidental?) setback of color reproduction as it has progressed over time. For LED lights R9 is also crucial for skin tones which makes it so bad to just leave that out. Now, the mass produced LEDs are even optimized for CRI at all are virtually all excluding R9, which may be one of the main quality issues that many people perceive with LEDs vs eg incandescent. There’s of course more to it but R9 pr…

what's the alternative metric to look for as a consumer?

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

#75
post #61

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 scien…

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?

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

#76
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is truly an (accidental?) setback of color reproduction as it has progressed over time. For LED lights R9 is also crucial for skin tones which makes it so bad to just leave that out. Now, the mass produced LEDs are even optimized for CRI at all are virtually all excluding R9, which may be one of the main quality issues that many people perceive with LEDs vs eg incandescent. There’s of course more to it but R9 pr…

what's the alternative metric to look for as a consumer?

It is not reported often by the manufacturer, but SSI and TLCI numbers can be a better metric if available. They are used by the Broadcast/Photography community to match the spectrum's similarity to Sunlight.

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

#77
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.

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

#78

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

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.

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