The interactive color picker is neat, but the irregularity of the space is hard to visualize in 2D. I'd love to see a 3D point cloud version of the color space.
HUSL – A human-friendly alternative to HSL
21–29 of 29 posts
Re: HUSL – A human-friendly alternative to HSL
#22Someone emailed me recently about a tool he was building using an HUSL-based color picker. Here was part of my response:
As for the color space, I can understand the idea, but personally I think both HuSL and HuSLp are quite far from human friendly in practice, either for manual color selections or programming heuruistic color choices. In the case of HuSL, the numerical values for “saturation” are useless for comparisons across lightnesses or hues, and in the case of HuSLp, the very limited gamut of RGB displays in certain hues ends up leaving the majority of display colors outside of the HuSLp gamut, while still leaving the saturation numbers somewhat useless for comparisons across lightnesses.
I think end users would be better served by just using a cylindrical representation of CIELUV directly (or actually CIELAB, IPT, or CIECAM02 would be better still for most UI purposes I think, even in the context of computer displays, or perhaps NCS for certain use cases). HuSL is better than HSL/HSV, but that’s a very low bar.
Re: HUSL – A human-friendly alternative to HSL
#23Does anyone know why HUSL is based on CIELUV rather than CIELAB? It seems that, although CIELUV and CIELAB were considered equally good when adopted in 1976, CIELAB has generally been preferred more recently (e.g. for the 1994 and 2000 "Delta E" formulae [1]). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_difference#Delta_E
The CIE 1976 (u', v') UCS chromaticity diagram is a somewhat better chromaticity diagram than the standard 1931 (x, y) version for e.g. showing chromaticity of the primaries on a computer display: it reduces some of the dramatic perceptual distortions of xy. CIELUV is supposed to be a full 3D color space made out of a combination of a (very bad) chromatic adaptation method, the same lightness L* from CIELAB, and color coordinates L* u* v* which are simply derived from L*, u', and v'.
In theory, CIELUV is a bit more directly relevant to colored lights or images on a television / computer display, whereas CIELAB is defined for surface colors. In practice, CIELUV just isn’t a very good uniform model of human color vision, and CIELAB is somewhat better (even for display colors) while still being quite easy to compute.
The reason color difference measures are defined with reference to CIELAB coordinates is that they are typically used for specifying tolerances on surface colors in industry. For instance, you might specify that a particular textile or paint color must be within a particular perceptual distance of a target color. CIELUV wouldn’t make any sense for such a use case.
Personally, I’d recommend people move on to use IPT or CIECAM02 or something similar instead.
Re: HUSL – A human-friendly alternative to HSL
#24The tool jacobolus is referring to is a color scheme editor I made: https://www.colorize.io/baskerville/RVXGW50G/.
It was, indeed, originally based on HuSL, but I later realized I could get a more meaningful picker by just constraining the chroma component not to go beyond the maximum in-gamut chroma for the given lightness and hue.
Re: HUSL – A human-friendly alternative to HSL
#25So far, when it comes to color models the only one I found rudimentary intuitive is NCS[1]. Unfortunately it's proprietary.
Re: HUSL – A human-friendly alternative to HSL
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd love to know this too: almost every article on HN has someone commenting about the contrast on some text. To me the difference between the black and grey is fine, and I wouldn't have even thought about it if you hadn't said anything. I initially figured it was because of the MacBook Pro retina monitor is good, but I hear the same complaints from other people on the same (or similar) set ups. Is it a world of diff…
The macbook pros tend to use more correctly calibrated colour than typical desktops with monitors, and typical non-apple laptops; This means that decisions made on non-reference monitors that have never been calibrated.. well, they can look completely wrong on a monitor with the correct calibration. Get a Lenovo huey or a Colorhug, correct your monitor, and you'll see what I mean. On the web, you don't really know wh…
Got any reference for that statement? I often work with color in surveys so that would be super interesting.
Re: HUSL – A human-friendly alternative to HSL
#27I've added HUSL support to the "Colour Picking by Simulation" program.
http://xqt2.com/p/colours_sim_HUSL.html
You can toggle between normal HSL and HUSL. I find that the greens are too suppressed for my liking.
Re: HUSL – A human-friendly alternative to HSL
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
The macbook pros tend to use more correctly calibrated colour than typical desktops with monitors, and typical non-apple laptops; This means that decisions made on non-reference monitors that have never been calibrated.. well, they can look completely wrong on a monitor with the correct calibration. Get a Lenovo huey or a Colorhug, correct your monitor, and you'll see what I mean. On the web, you don't really know wh…
Got any reference for that statement? I often work with color in surveys so that would be super interesting.
Sadly only personal experience and rumour.
I work in an office full of Mac users, and I'm among maybe three people who don't use Macs for work at the company.
All of the non-Apple monitors in the company are not correctly calibrated and lack colour profiles (and are by default not configured correctly either).
I recently bought a colorimeter, and calibrated all of my displays(including my external displays); after doing this I realized that the colour on my monitors most closely resembled the default colour response on the MacBook Pros in the office.
My colleagues(who admittedly didn't understand colour calibration at all, even the designers) are under the impression that Apple profiles and calibrates the panels at the factory(and presumably ships custom profiles for the factory state of the panel).
I think it's probably cruder than that. It's likely that they ship one profile for an entire family of panels, which gets it closer but doesn't account for time and manufacturing variances.
Re: HUSL – A human-friendly alternative to HSL
#29HSL is bad for this use case that's why we use HSV. The swatches at the bottom of this Wikipedia article show the difference. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HSL_and_HSV CIE* gets you more comparative, perceptive uniformity however when picking a color that's almost exactly what you don't care about. Author would benefit from an art class and/or two hours reading the mind-numbing tech documentation around color theory.
HUSL brings the perceptual uniformity of CIELab with the intuitiveness of HSL. Author has done something awesome with a solid theoretical foundation. I have used HUSL to generate pleasant color palettes in http://bezier.method.ac
I'm an artist and musician and generally horrified by the amateurish algorithmic noodling in both spaces.
When you pick a color you're picking it relative to one already on screen -- or something in your mind's eye. This color picker does not help solve either problem.
If you look at the paint chips in the store -- or the Pantone books -- you'll see they're organized a certain way. Often you pick the color and then you tweak the saturation and brightness. I do it all day every day. Even the dorkky CSS pre-processors have features for tweaking saturation and lightness. It's what artists do.
This tool makes a mess of saturation in particular.
Meanwhile nobody's demanding to do Delta-E crossfades on #ffffcc vs #ffccff in SASS. Hmm. I wonder why.
Color picking is often handled by swatches and fanning out real-world books of similar tones. Fiddling with a computer is great, and if you think it's important that your screensaver randomly pick cool colors -- hey, if this helps you, go for it.
You're likely far better off limiting the color cube a different way. Perhaps by popularity, or culture, or by simply typing in a couple dozen colors that don't look like shit and calling it done.