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A visualization of the RGB space covered by named colors

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Re: A visualization of the RGB space covered by named colors

#81

Post by meodai »

mrgaro wrote: post #71
meodai wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it does not colornames.org emerged after my color name list.

I'm curious to understand the need to have names for such many different colors and I'd love to hear your take! A naive reasoning would say that names are useful if at least two different persons know the meaning for a name and thus it will help communication. Now I'm not sure how many colors are there in that list, but it feels like there are too many to be practically useful. How do you see this?

I build a lot of tools that generate colorpalettes and I wanted a wide range of nice-sounding names that feel evocative of the colors they represent. I see it as an API between a program and a human.

I started with about 1,600 names scraped from Wikipedia, but with only that many, there were a lot of redundancies and when you disallow duplicates, you end up with colors being labeled as “orange” even though they don’t actually look orange. On top of that many of the names were racist or at least questionable (so are many names on colornames.org)

Other large lists like the Pantone one, don't have a permissive license.

So for the past ten years or so, I’ve been collecting color names in a very unscientific way. It slowly turned into a hobby—something I often do on vacation, especially when I’m surrounded by unfamiliar places, dishes, or objects where color is used in unexpected ways.

Tools I made that benefit from using the names:

- https://meodai.github.io/poline/ - https://words.github.io/color-description/ - https://farbvelo.elastiq.ch/ - https://codepen.io/meodai/pen/PoaRgLm - https://parrot.color.pizza/ - https://meodai.github.io/rampensau/

And probably some that I forgot about...

Re: A visualization of the RGB space covered by named colors

#82

Post by efilife »

meodai wrote: post #81
mrgaro wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious to understand the need to have names for such many different colors and I'd love to hear your take! A naive reasoning would say that names are useful if at least two different persons know the meaning for a name and thus it will help communication. Now I'm not sure how many colors are there in that list, but it feels like there are too many to be practically useful. How do you see this?

I build a lot of tools that generate colorpalettes and I wanted a wide range of nice-sounding names that feel evocative of the colors they represent. I see it as an API between a program and a human. I started with about 1,600 names scraped from Wikipedia, but with only that many, there were a lot of redundancies and when you disallow duplicates, you end up with colors being labeled as “orange” even though they don’t…

incredible tools, I love rampensau

also, beautiful site! https://elastiq.ch/

Re: A visualization of the RGB space covered by named colors

#83

Post by dahart »

subb wrote: post #80
dahart wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's definitely not something you can plug into a three-value model. What do you mean? And what is screwed up? We use 3 dimensions because most of us are trichromats, and because (un-coincidentally) most digital display devices have 3 primaries. The three-value models definitely are sufficient for many color tasks & goals. Three-value models work so well that outside of science and graphics research it’s hard to fi…

They are very useful to encode stimuli, but stimuli is "not yet" color. When you have an image that is not just a patch of RGB value, a lot of things will influence what color you will compute based on the exact same RGB. Akiyoshi's color constancy demonstrations are good examples of this. The RGB model (and any three-values "perceptual" model) fails to predict the perceived color here. You are seeing different color…

Here you’re talking about only perception, and not physical color. You could use 100 dimensional spectral colors, or even 1D grayscale values, and still have the same result. So this example doesn’t have any bearing on whether a 3D color space works well for humans or not. Do you have any other examples that suggest a 3D color space isn’t good enough? I still don’t understand what you meant.

Re: A visualization of the RGB space covered by named colors

#84

Post by mceachen »

IgorPartola wrote: post #78
wongarsu wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"You only need three colors" is a bit of a cheat, because it doesn't really work out in reality. You can use three colors to get a good color gamut (as your screen is doing right now), but to represent close to every color we can see you would need to choose a red and blue close to the edge of what we can perceive, which would make it very dim. And because human vision is weird you would need some negative red as wel…

Which is interesting because I am printing digital photos which I edit on an RGB screen.

I paid for college in part by doing digital prepress. We had CMYK and 8 and 12 color separations.

CMYK always has a dramatic color shift from any on-screen colorspace. Vivid green is really hard to get. Neons are (kinda obviously) impossible. And, hilariously/ironically (given how prevalent they are), all manor of skin tones are tough too.

Photoshop and Illustrator let you work in CMYK, and is directionally correct. Ask your printer if they accept those natively.

Re: A visualization of the RGB space covered by named colors

#85

Post by dahart »

IgorPartola wrote: post #73
dahart wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's definitely not something you can plug into a three-value model. What do you mean? And what is screwed up? We use 3 dimensions because most of us are trichromats, and because (un-coincidentally) most digital display devices have 3 primaries. The three-value models definitely are sufficient for many color tasks & goals. Three-value models work so well that outside of science and graphics research it’s hard to fi…

I had experimented with some photo printing services and came across one professional level service that offered pigment inkjet printing (vs much more common dye inkjet printing). Their printers had 12 colors of ink vs the traditional 4. I did some test photos and visually they looked stunning.

Have you looked at the actual ink colors? Printing is a very different story. They’re not using 12 primaries, they’re using multiple gradations of the same primary. I don’t know which ink set you used, but 5 different grayscale values is common in a 12-ink set. Here’s an example of a 12 ink set:

https://www.amazon.com/Xeepton-Cartridge-Replacement-PFI4100...

There’s only 1 extra color there: red. There are multiple blacks, multiple cyans, multiple yellows, and multiple magentas. The reason printers use more than 3 inks is for better tone in gradations, better gloss and consistency. It’s not because there’s anything wrong with 3D color models. It’s because they’re a different medium than TVs. Note that most color printers take 3D color models as input, even when they use more than 3 inks.

Re: A visualization of the RGB space covered by named colors

#86

Post by IgorPartola »

dahart wrote: post #85
IgorPartola wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had experimented with some photo printing services and came across one professional level service that offered pigment inkjet printing (vs much more common dye inkjet printing). Their printers had 12 colors of ink vs the traditional 4. I did some test photos and visually they looked stunning.

Have you looked at the actual ink colors? Printing is a very different story. They’re not using 12 primaries, they’re using multiple gradations of the same primary. I don’t know which ink set you used, but 5 different grayscale values is common in a 12-ink set. Here’s an example of a 12 ink set: https://www.amazon.com/Xeepton-Cartridge-Replacement-PFI4100... There’s only 1 extra color there: red. There are multiple b…

I believe they had the standard CMYK, four shades of black, as well as red, orange, green, and either violet or blue. But it has been a bunch of years so this is off memory. I honestly don’t remember the name of it. What I do remember is that they didn’t not have a web based ordering system. Instead they had a piece of desktop software you had to install. And you had to prove that you are a professional photographer before they would let you create an account. I am not a professional photographer but I did enough amateur photography that I managed to fake my way into it and placed a few orders. Quality was definitely better for all options compared to Nations Photo Lab but so was the price and the ordering setup was much more complex so I didn’t continue using them. They did have a lot more specialty options than any other printer I have seen.

Re: A visualization of the RGB space covered by named colors

#87

Post by gsck »

IgorPartola wrote: post #73
dahart wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's definitely not something you can plug into a three-value model. What do you mean? And what is screwed up? We use 3 dimensions because most of us are trichromats, and because (un-coincidentally) most digital display devices have 3 primaries. The three-value models definitely are sufficient for many color tasks & goals. Three-value models work so well that outside of science and graphics research it’s hard to fi…

I had experimented with some photo printing services and came across one professional level service that offered pigment inkjet printing (vs much more common dye inkjet printing). Their printers had 12 colors of ink vs the traditional 4. I did some test photos and visually they looked stunning.

You see this all the time with professional lighting fixtures as well!

For example, the ETC Source4 LED Lustr X8 has: Deep Red, Red, Amber, Lime, Green, Cyan, Blue, Indigo[0]

RGB LEDs are pretty crappy at rendering colours as they miss quite a lot of the colour spectrum, so the solution is just add more to fill in the gaps!

[0] https://www.etcconnect.com/WorkArea/DownloadAsset.aspx?id=10...

Re: A visualization of the RGB space covered by named colors

#88

Post by subb »

dahart wrote: post #83
subb wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are very useful to encode stimuli, but stimuli is "not yet" color. When you have an image that is not just a patch of RGB value, a lot of things will influence what color you will compute based on the exact same RGB. Akiyoshi's color constancy demonstrations are good examples of this. The RGB model (and any three-values "perceptual" model) fails to predict the perceived color here. You are seeing different color…

Here you’re talking about only perception, and not physical color. You could use 100 dimensional spectral colors, or even 1D grayscale values, and still have the same result. So this example doesn’t have any bearing on whether a 3D color space works well for humans or not. Do you have any other examples that suggest a 3D color space isn’t good enough? I still don’t understand what you meant.

Yes exactly. I'm intentionally using "color" as a perceptual thing, not as a physical thing. If we are talking about a color model, then it needs to model perception. As such, RGB, as a predictor of perception, can often fail because it doesn't account for much more than what hits the retina, not what happens after. For one, it lacks spatial context - placing the same RGB value with a different surround will feel different, like in the example above. But if you had a real color (as-in, perceptual) picker in Photoshop, you would get a different value.

It's excellent at compressing the visible part of the EM spectrum, however. This is what I meant by stimuli encoding.

Re: A visualization of the RGB space covered by named colors

#89

Post by dougb5 »

meodai wrote: post #63
dougb5 wrote: post #31

Great project! It's visually dazzling and it really drives home the sheer size of the universe(s) of named colors. I've long been interested in the names of colors and their associations. If I may plug my own site a bit, check out the "color thesaurus" feature on OneLook that organizes color names more linearly. Start with mauve, as an example: https://onelook.com/?w=mauve&colors=1 (It also lets you see the words evo…

I am the creator of the 3d thing that was shared. I am very interested in collaborating on something. Is the data you used for it accessible somewhere?

Yeah I can make it available! Contact me at the email in my profile and I can explain what I have.

Re: A visualization of the RGB space covered by named colors

#90

Post by meodai »

chime wrote: post #11
Eric_WVGG wrote: post #5

I use a similar app called Name That Color — https://chir.ag/projects/name-that-color/#6195ED I like sharing descriptive names with designers instead of naming everything "light blue" "dark blue" "not quite as light but still not dark blue" etc. This new thing is tons of fun but seems a bit less practically useful.

You just reminded me that my app turned 18 a few months ago. Another dev, Daniel Flück, extended the app to help color blind users: https://www.color-blindness.com/color-name-hue/

congrats!
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