

Color spaces and ICC profiles: Guide to XYZ, RGB, ICC, xyY, and TRCs  - unwind
http://ninedegreesbelow.com/temp/xyz-rgb.html

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ToastyMallows
I wish I found this site when I took Color Science in college. I was able to
pick a free elective and that one sounded fun. The first day I went the
professor rattled off 3 prerequisite classes "we all should have taken by
now", I hadn't taken any of them. In fact, I was the only CS major in the
class.

I explained the situation to the professor and he understood but he said it
would be a hard class. Fortunately, we worked in groups for every assignment,
so I could get some help from people that actually knew what they were doing.

The book we had for the class was dense and I never really found a perfect
overview of everything we were learning. This website really sums up a lot of
it. We went into more detail about the 1931 XYZ color space, and learned about
color spaces that were made after that and how they affected the field.

I ended up learning a lot in that class. One of the big assignments we had was
to take a photo of a portrait under different light conditions in a light
booth (daylight, sunset, incandescent, etc.) and use MATLAB programs to make
all of the photos look exactly the same.

Here's a Wikipedia article that covers a lot of what we did:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_balance](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_balance)

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vanattab
It should be noted that the axis of of the XYZ color space does not perfectly
corresponded to the cone sensitivity of the human eye. The X and Y are close
but there is significant error in the Z (blueish). If you need to isolate
colors to a single cone in the human eye you need to use the LMS color space.
I which stands for the long, medium, and short wavelength cones.

