Exploring Trichromacy through Maxwell's Color Experiment (2023)

Post by turnsout » Tue, Jul 01, 2025, 9:35 PM UTC

niwrad wrote: post #11

turnsout wrote: post #6

This is awesome—I had never read about this experiment. I'm using the CMF quite heavily right now as I develop a spectral color management system. It's amazing that Maxwell was able to essentially plot out the CMF so early!

That’s really cool — it makes me happy to hear from someone that appreciates the novelty and feat of his experiment just through perceptual matching! The precision he achieved with such limited tools is honestly mind-blowing. What are you developing a spectral CMS for? Is it for lighting or materials or something imaging related?

It really is mind-blowing!

The CMS I'm building is for creative imaging—I want to model some specific subtractive processes from the physical world digitally. In the process, I had to come up with a way to convert RGB to spectral power, and was surprised to find that while there's a Spectral -> XYZ function (CMF), there's no industry standard inverse (XYZ -> Spectral). So I came up with a function which allows you to specify three RGB peaks, along with their widths, and it solves for the correct peak levels to reproduce an XYZ equivalent to the input color. This is my idea of fun! haha

Re: Exploring Trichromacy through Maxwell's Color Experiment (2023)

Re: Exploring Trichromacy through Maxwell's Color Experiment (2023)