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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

#101

Post by Macha »

mrgaro wrote: post #96

Great article! After reading I started to think there must be some purchable items which would demonstrate colours outside P3 colorspace. It would be cool to hold one on your hand and experience how a photo of it just cannot do justice. Anybody know any links to webshops for such items?

There's a few dyes (mostly pinks and cyans) that are outside sRGB space (though once you apply them to a material, that combination of material and dye might be fine), Tom Scott had a video a few years ago, though I don't know if that particular dye/seller is still going:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_NzVmtbPOrM

There's also Vantablack and similar ultra-black dyes which are a somewhat adjacent phenomena but in the same category of "colors your screen can't display". The most black a pixel can be is "off" (and that's only achievable if the display is on if your screen is an OLED), and the back coating of your screen is probably not as black as those dyes.

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

#102

Post by Macha »

arbourtrary wrote: post #38

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.

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

#103

Post by anfilt »

I can tell you there are some places people do notice that a screen can't reproduce all the colors they can see.

Anyone who has mixed paint at hardware store or paint store with a modern paint machine will eventually notice this. A of lot them have a spectrometer to match color from a sample. The software often has a preview that appears on a screen of the sample color. That preview color is often not quite the same and it's often either the limit of the sRGB color space or the monitor.

The data from the spectrometers is eventually converted to CIELAB color points with a D65 white point. Then that little preview needs to be converted to sRGB to display it or some colorspace the system supports.

There also some problems with the LAB colorspace, but they are minuet compared tot the limits of sRGB and display hardware.

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

#104

Post by anfilt »

m3047 wrote: post #99
jakzurr wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The way this is done (has been done) is printing with custom colors. Standard printing is done with CMYK (three colors and black). Purportedly high-end printers (I don't care if the printer is gold plated and diamond studded, if the driver / host-based preprocessor was written in 1999 using Visual BASIC then the printer is sh*t) have had an extra blue, or an extra red, for years. In the back of my mind, I find it odd…

Offset printing can have more colors than CYMK. Sometimes a setup will include multiple additional inks beyond CYMK to produce a color or effect that CYMK alone can't produce. Sometimes those colors will be mixed from other colors as well much like paint.

Problem is offset printing presses are HUGE and expensive and require making plates first. There are digital offset presses, but they generally can't have an other stage added like traditional offset printing, it's capped at however many colors that machine has built in. They also are huge compared to other printers people will have at home or the office.

-EDIT- It is probably possible to scale down the hardware and do something like digital offset presses. I think it would cool if there was a *small* printer people could connect multiple color stages like a legos and mix up a colors for those stages.

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

#107

Post by drumdude »

js2 wrote: post #84
adrian_b wrote: post #21

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…

> The full Rec. 2020 color space can be reproduced only with laser projectors, because it uses monochromatic primary colors. All of the non-commercial triple laser projectors I'm aware of are single-chip DLP, so they suffer rainbow artifacts and have poor black levels. They're also liable to laser speckle[^1] if you're not careful on your screen selection. The JVC (LCoS), Sony (LcoS) and Epson (LCD) laser projectors…

Cinema RGB laser projectors are around $50,000. The cheaper non cinema versions are probably around $20,000.

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

#108

Post by gwbas1c »

A lot of this comes across similar to describing how the upper range of human hearing is 27khz, not 20khz and commonly believed, and where to hear these.

Hint: If you listen to a live orchestra without amplification, and the sound "sparkles", it's because of the frequencies slightly above 20khz that are normally filtered out of audio CDs and streaming music.

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

#109

Post by anfilt »

WillAdams wrote: post #78
thinkingemote wrote: post #5

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…

I do think it would be awesome if something like offset printing was more accessible. The number of stages/steps for a press that can used for a color or effect is often just limited by floor space. Although some presses can't have an other stage as easily added depending on the manufacture.
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