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

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 many saturated orange/red/purple colors, which are very frequently encountered around us, e.g. in flowers, fruits and clothes.

The missing orange-red-purple corner appears small in the diagram in comparison with the missing blue-green corner, but in reality humans perceive much more different colors in the orange/red/purple corner, so the relation between those areas would be opposite in a uniform color space.

The Display P3 color space is much better than sRGB for reproducing orange/red/purple colors and now it is available even in many cheap monitors. However many monitors that can reproduce Display P3 come configured by default to use just sRGB. Such monitors should always be reconfigured to use Display P3.

Monitors that can reproduce an even greater part of the Rec. 2020 color space are obviously better than those that can do only Display P3, but such monitors with a higher color gamut are usually more expensive. The full Rec. 2020 color space can be reproduced only with laser projectors, because it uses monochromatic primary colors.

That video was super interesting, thank you!

I guess it is the 2-dimensional section such that it have constant total brightness. You can then multiply later by your desired brightness.

>indexed by how much each of the 3-cones is activated

This will actually differ from person to person. If you look at a pure yellow wavelength light next to a red/green light mixed such that they create the exact same perceived yellow to you, it will look different to another person.

Aside from that, not really sure what a 3d view with the dimensions being r,g,b would actually offer

It is 3 dimensional. That commonly repeated CIE diagram is a 2d slice of the color volume. Since 1931 that diagram is obsolete, misleading, and fails at a lot of modern color science, and has been replaced many times, but is what many people go to. The most recent replacement (well, by CIE), is CIE 2015. Comment on it [1]

Modern color modeling is much richer then 3 parameters, because human vision is much more complex than simply color frequencies. CIE 1931 was low brightness, 2 degree field of vision, center of vision derived. As brightness increases, color perception shifts. Colors are NOT linear; sRGB and CIE 1931 chose such a small section of human vision that they approximate that section with a linear assumption. Modern CIECAM models are not linear, are not 3 parameter, because color is not linear (CIECAM02 is 6 parameter [2], there are several after that one). A century of experiments, wide color gamuts, HDR, have thrown out CIE 1931 as a good model. It’s only momentum now, and slowly higher end things are replacing it.

A good introduction is Color Appearance Models, by Mark Fairchild, also any of his technical papers give a starting point into the science.

[1] https://community.acescentral.com/t/cie-2015-cmfs-what-would...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIECAM02