Live data from Hacker News

Color Concepts 101 (2001) [pdf]

developers.hp.com

11–13 of 13 posts

Re: Color Concepts 101 (2001) [pdf]

#11

> In theory, the combination of CMY at 100% (100,100,100) creates black, In practice it creates a muddy brown due to limitations of toner (and ink) secondaries. Does anyone know why this is? > "K" is used for black to avoid confusion with Blue and because the black component is the "Key" for a set of color separations I always assumed it was just because "K" is the last letter in "black" — apparently not!

One reason is that printers inks do not have very dence pigment content. Pigment is the expensive part of paint/ink. Also, printers ink is very transparent, almost like a staining agent.

CMKY is basically a variant of the painter's RYB color space. A CMY mix using high quality painter's paints will get closer to black. However, generally mixing a black from primaries is waste of energy. Easier to mix from secondaries (e.g. an Alizarin Crimson with Ultramarine Blue).

Re: Color Concepts 101 (2001) [pdf]

#12

> In theory, the combination of CMY at 100% (100,100,100) creates black, In practice it creates a muddy brown due to limitations of toner (and ink) secondaries. Does anyone know why this is? > "K" is used for black to avoid confusion with Blue and because the black component is the "Key" for a set of color separations I always assumed it was just because "K" is the last letter in "black" — apparently not!

> I always assumed it was just because "K" is the last letter in "black" — apparently not!

Actually, I think that this is a better reason.

Re: Color Concepts 101 (2001) [pdf]

#13
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a good answer: one of the hardest things to explain about color is there's nothing "blessed" about RGB or CMYK. So it's not so much "why don't they combine to do X?" as "how could they combine to do X?", especially at the extremes of color, i.e. white/black You can pick any N pigments and they won't be able to produce a full range of colors when combined, and it's always an issue in every domain. Colors physi…

There is something blessed about red, green, and blue: they're close to an orthogonal basis for the L, M, and S receptors in our eyes. However, there's nothing particularly special about any particular set of R, G, and B primaries. In fact, there is no set of three primaries that are both physically realizable and completely cover the set of colors we can see. This is why different color spaces exist: for photos arch…

The history of Adobe RGB was partially a mistake, according to Wikipedia--

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_RGB_color_space

or maybe better to say it was an error of convenience.

Adobe engineers had plans to harmonize their RGB with SMPTE 240M but something didn't quite jibe, and Adobe RGB was compromised to merely extend green of sRGB to cover cyan ink for offset printing.

As was previously alluded to, RGB creates a triangle of gamut coverage in the numerical space of the CIE 1931 and 1976 projections of the spectrum locus.

This trait of straight lines is mathematically convenient for calculating colors from primaries, and CRT display devices follow the RGB model closely. But commercial printing color coverage doesn't fit a triangular RGB projection very well: commercial CMY devices present a lumpier gamut with an area of significant extension of cyan outside of sRGB.

—Keep in mind color names are colloquial and a color wheel is an satisfying artistic contrivance that dates to earliest science of color, but in context of CIE diagrams, CMY are modeled as –R –G —B. (minus).

One one hand, sRGB was an excellent compromise of good coding efficiency, which means effective use of scarce bits in 24 bit color, needed to control quantization noise a.k.a. "posterization" / "banding" by not wasting codes on colors that rarely occur, while on the other hand completely covering the industry standard Macbeth Color Checker 24, the design of which was strongly informed by color film response.

The sRGB edge of cyan lives precisely at Color Checker 24 cyan and all the other patches live inside sRGB.

But electronic devices have surpassed film and are now far more common.

Ultimately DCI P3 would become a better fit with Apple's Display P3 variant (sort of sRGB v2) offering sRGB luminance response and a very slightly weaker cyan than Adobe RGB, but a much more generally useful extension to red, which for coding real world colors is more desirable than the furthest edge of a cyan which only occurs in inks and dyes, e.g. hitting a cyan spot color in commercial printing is not a compelling use case for most of us.

Post reply on HN