
Computer colors aren’t consistent - hodgesmr
http://augmentedreality.miamioh.edu/computer-colors-arent-consistent/
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TD-Linux
Color theory has been extremely well researched for quite a long time. If you
are not familiar, I would suggest reading up on the CIE 1931 color space [1].

Some of the confusion in the article relates to terminology. >When we say
“yellow” we typically mean a pure monochromatic light with a wavelength of
about 570nm. This is not actually what most people mean. Colors like "yellow"
usually mean the tristimulus values that produce the visible color yellow.
This is a totally different concept than a single-wavelength light source.
This becomes more important for colors like "purple".

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIE_1931_color_space](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIE_1931_color_space)

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kuschku
But CIE color space still doesn’t help with dichromatic people

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jacobolus
Ideally, each person should probably characterize their display by eye
(instead of a hardware device; and for this to work properly we’d need a
better user interface than the existing ones), separately for each context it
will be looked at in (i.e. a laptop would need several profiles for various
lighting conditions).

But we can actually get pretty good results for most people, most of the time,
by sticking to industry standards. If a display can get the chromaticity of
its primaries close to the sRGB spec and bright enough for the context, and
content authors design for sRGB, then most people (minus the substantial
percentage who have color vision deficiencies) will see something reasonably
close to what the content author intended.

If the display doesn’t match the spec (like the iPad mini retina display which
trades color fidelity for power efficiency), then it would be nice if software
would compensate a bit. Unfortunately, mobile operating systems and software
don’t ever bother with color management, because it was too computationally
expensive for the first 2 generations of iPhones. It’s sad that this is still
true for iOS, considering how Apple pioneered color management software in the
90s.

For folks with color vision deficiencies, we could probably do better than
current displays, but there are several types of color vision deficiencies so
it’s going to be pretty hard to satisfy everyone.

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anon4
>sRGB

If we're going to be fixing colour, we can start with the abomination that is
sRGB. It has a nontrivial RGB<->sRGB conversion function and you must convert
your images to/from it for every single operation like alpha blending (i.e.
font rendering with anti-aliasing) and scaling, or the results will be wrong.
Sometimes only a bit wrong, sometimes spectacularly wrong. We should just
switch to 16 bits per channel linear RGB. People just get everything else so
wrong.

~~~
jacobolus
My point is about getting the display primaries close to the industry-standard
spec. Whether you gamma-encode your image data or not isn’t really relevant to
that.

For saving images to disk or transmitting them over the wire (e.g. images
making up part of a web page), it’s a great advantage in most cases to use
gamma-encoded rather than linear values, because we want to save bandwidth and
storage.

For operations internal to e.g. an image editor, just use floating point
numbers and a linear space.

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datenwolf
Good morning… another one who woke up… finally. Anyone who was active in
computer graphics in the past century knows about this. This is why there are
contact color spaces like CIE XYZ or CIE Lab. Yet for some reason we're still
using desktop compositors that work in imprecise and small gamut sRGB instead
of a contact color space.

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yellowapple
This is why CRT monitors remained popular for as long as they did even with
the advent of LCD technology; they tend to be more accurate color-wise, so
graphic designers would prefer them.

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Taniwha
I spent a lot of time working on color matching back in the early 90s when the
first cheap Macs large screens came out - back thyen we thought some simple
transform could make it all the same - one thing we eventually realised was
that there's only so much you can do here - there are no standard human eyes,
they vary as much as screens (for example 10% of the male poulation is red-
green colorblind)

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jlebrech
that's why people who work with graphics use a calibrator.

