
A Short History of Color Theory - nonoesp
https://programmingdesignsystems.com/color/a-short-history-of-color-theory/index.html
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OscarCunningham
There's an interesting aspect of colour that this article doesn't cover, which
is the psychological primaries
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primary_color#Psychological_pr...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primary_color#Psychological_primaries)).

The eye gets colour information from the three types of cone, but it then
processes this information into three new dimensions. Black against white, red
against green, yellow against blue. So from a psychological point of view
there are four primary colours: RYGB.

These are arranged like the points on a compassb so it's impossible to
experience a mix of red and green or yellow and blue, just like it's
impossible to be both north and south.

I think this is why these colours tend to be used more often in logos and
board game pieces. The brain views them as more simple, and the psychological
secodary colours (orange, chartreuse, turquoise and purple) as more complex.

~~~
deltron3030
Yup, color production/reproduction/mixing vs. color selection/perception.

It's a bit strange that UI designers are mostly using tools made for color
production for selecting colors (rgb/hsv/hsl), not those that are appropriate
for color selection like lch.

>I think this is why these colours tend to be used more often in logos and
board game pieces.

Cool/serious vs. warm/playful colors, most businesses try to be serious, most
toys want to be played with..

~~~
davidivadavid
There's work being done in that department so hopefully the rest of the tools
adapt: [http://lea.verou.me/2020/04/lch-colors-in-css-what-why-
and-h...](http://lea.verou.me/2020/04/lch-colors-in-css-what-why-and-how/)

~~~
nyanpasu64
> Today, the gamut (range of possible colors displayed) of most monitors is
> closer to P3, which has a 50% larger volume than sRGB.

Most monitors that... Macs have? As a Windows/Linux user, none of the monitors
I've used as my daily driver are wide-gamut. The only wide-gamut monitor I've
really seen was in my university's computer lab. It displayed every color a
bit more brightly, and my laptop didn't desaturate colors to compensate.

> Firefox does not implement the spec that restricts CSS colors to sRGB.
> Instead, it just throws the raw RGB coordinates on the screen, so e.g.
> rgb(100% 0% 0%) is the brightest red your screen can display. While this may
> seem like a superior solution, it’s incredibly inconsistent: specifying a
> color is approximate at best, since every screen displays it differently. By
> restricting CSS colors to a known color space (sRGB) we gained device
> independence. LCH and Lab are also device independent as they are based on
> actual measured color.

Yeah that explains why.

~~~
skavi
Any smartphone with an OLED or high end LCD is physically capable of
displaying more than sRGB. That’s a pretty decent number of devices. Android
is awful for color management though, if the OEM even implements it.

------
andrewla
I find it really amazing how we went down the process of figuring out how
color works -- Goethe's work in particular is really interesting because it is
a very empirical approach based on the observation that afterimages exist.

The limitation in so many cases, and the reason why there's a constant
crossover in this history between textiles dying, artists, and researchers, is
that producing substances which represent a given color and have good light-
fastness are hard to come by unless there's a strong commercial reason to
explore the space.

At one point I was looking to see if I could buy paints for my kids to play
with in the "true"-er primary colors, CMYK, and that led down a big rabbit
hole (basic answer is "not easily", unfortunately) eventually leading me to
[1] which is a fascinating look at our ability to span the gamut through some
set of primaries.

From personal experience, I always find it amazing when I see a color magazine
in the light and note that some parts are reflective and some are more matte;
and that this is not a function of intent of any sort -- those are just the
incidental properties of the physical pigments selected for their
saturation/brightness/fastness primarily.

[1]
[https://www.handprint.com/HP/WCL/color13.html](https://www.handprint.com/HP/WCL/color13.html)

~~~
itronitron
I've found that Golden and Amsterdam have good options for CMYK process colors
available as acrylic inks, and these work well within refillable acrylic
markers from Montana, Molotow, et al.

One caveat to the acrylic inks for a CMYK process is that they need to be
really thinned down with an acrylic medium in order to get the proper
transparency to achieve red, green, and blue.

------
encom
About 10 years ago, I had an idea about designing a lamp, using LEDs (I'm an
electrician). So I wanted to learn which colours to blend in what proportion
to achieve a pleasant colour temperature and good colour rendering. This idea
led me down an UNBELIEVABLE rabbit hole of colour theory. This subject is
maddeningly complex, and I feel like I still don't know anything at all.

~~~
pjc50
In practice, you're best off picking one of "warm white" or "cool white",
which are tuned to look like either incandescent or fluorescent bulbs. The
LEDs are widely available in various "COB" (chip-on-board) packages that
consist of a bunch of them wirebonded to an aluminium PCB. They're in series
so they take a more convenient terminal voltage like 12V or 36V. Then you have
to decide whether you trust the Chinese constant-current supplies or get a
more expensive one.

~~~
encom
Buying ready-made solutions in China takes all the fun out of the job. It's
much more interesting to submerge yourself in literal years of analysis
paralysis, and get nothing done.

~~~
cmendel
I like the cut of your jib.

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leni536
I love this conference talk for introducing linear and perceptually uniform
colorspaces:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAoljeRJ3lU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAoljeRJ3lU)

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dhosek
Back in the 80s/90s I spent time trying to standardize the \special commands
used by TeX. I remember thinking color would be a simple thing and then
discovering the whole rathole that's RGB vs CMY vs CMYK vs HSB. The problem of
doing simple in-line graphics was another issue that raised its ugly head as I
realized that I was facing essentially reinventing PostScript once you face
the question of what happens at the corner of two lines. I don't think much if
any of what I came with was ever implemented and the migration in the twenty-
first century of TeX to pdftex then xetex and luatex made it all moot since
there was no longer the plethora of dvi-to-printer drivers in the mix.

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wwarner
James Turrell's light sculptures are an exercise in color theory

[https://crystalbridges.org/blog/james-turrell-josef-
albers-c...](https://crystalbridges.org/blog/james-turrell-josef-albers-color-
theory-work-skyspace/)

------
somewhereoutth
I have experimented with synthesizing colour in the computer using a kind of
binary DNA as a basis, which allowed me to mix colours (or more precisely
their RGB components) in interesting ways [1]. I'm not sure it stands up to
artistic or theoretical scrutiny, but it was fun and I saw some nice results.
I should take some time and get a better understanding of colour theory, as
per the article.

[1] [http://robertallison.co.uk/](http://robertallison.co.uk/)

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Jenz
This site is fantastic!

~~~
runemadsen
Author here. This makes me very happy to hear :)

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JacksonGariety
It's kinda interesting that color, sound, and space all have three dimensions.
What are some other fundamental three-dimensional things?

~~~
jmole
Color doesn't have 3 dimensions, humans have 3 types of color receptors (and 1
type of broadband receptor). Spacetime has 4 dimensions.

Sound can have as many "dimensions" as you care to analyze, but physically you
have pressure & velocity embedded in a spacetime continuum.

I think the fundamental three-dimensional thing is that we're all mostly
limited to reasoning about three-dimensional objects in a three-dimensional
world.

~~~
dylan604
For video, a vectorscope is a way used to view the color of the video
signal.[0] While it looks like a circular view, it is actually representing a
sphere. QED color has 3 dimenisions

[0][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vectorscope](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vectorscope)

~~~
andrewla
A video signal contains the assumption that color can be represented by three
parameters. But those three parameters are not capable of expressing the
complete gamut of visible colors. It's just close enough that there's really
no point in pursuing it further.

~~~
sudosysgen
There is no biological basis for a fourth dimension of colour perception in
humans.

It is true that in practice we are unable to replicate the colours we can
perceive. But it is possible to create a colourspace that completely contains
the gamut of perceivable colours using only three dimensions.

------
chadlavi
This is interesting for Jeopardy-trivia-like reasons, but I didn't feel better
equipped to do my work after reading it.

