I'm happy to give them the benefit of the doubt, and I think many colour pickers wanted to do the right thing.
HSL or HSV was a step up from RGB, so it made sense to use it to derive other colours quickly. Because if you're an underpaid freelance developer, the primary colour is usually set by the client, but they usually son't have a full colour scheme. Using a colour wheel based tool gave good enough results fast.
Not only are perceptual uniform models like CIE Lab*, and the derived CIELCh or CIEHLC mindbending to understand and code, but monitor colour gamuts sucked, and so it was overkill.
So is it scientific? If what you wanted was an easy way to derive a number of colours, sort of. If you need them to "look good", well that's art, not science. So ultimately, IDK what answer you're looking for. Colour wheels have always just been a nice way to visualise hue.
> If you need them to "look good", well that's art, not science.
I'm not so much interested in "look good" but in "look pleasing or harmonious together" and I think that's a question science might have an answer to.
It's no coincidence that the palette generators borrow musical jargon.
In music the definitions of minor second and perfect octave are completely uncontroversial. That these two intervals have different musical qualities, we call them dissonance and consonance, is uncontroversial too.
Sure, some cultures use dissonant intervals heavily in their music but they still recognize the different qualities. Most importantly there has been a ton of research in this field.
Contrast this with the state of the art in color science:
When it comes to color harmony there is not even a single universal definition of opposite or complementary. Look at the Wikipedia article about that topic [1]. It mixes up three completely separate topics:
1. Colors that when mixed together give a neutral hue
2. Colors that are opposite of each other on some wheel
3. Colors that supposedly have a certain effect, like contrast or harmony, when perceived next to each other
Color wheels are a dime a dozen. There is no shortage of claims that this and that color go well together but there doesn't seem to be any serious research.
I wonder if that is just my impression because it's not my field, or if maybe color science really is just not developed enough to tackle these kind of questions.
>I wonder if that is just my impression because it's not my field, or if maybe color science really is just not developed enough to tackle these kind of questions.
I've had some subsequent thoughts. We know that there is a characteristic of the human perception of scenes called "color constancy". That is that our visual perceptual abilities are surprisingly robust to changes in the character of light sources. We may be aware of the light source color, but we easily "factor it out" of what we see of the objects in the scene. It is as if color constancy takes the distribution of colors and applies some transformation to standardize that distribution.
My guess is that the mechanisms underlying color constancy contribute to the aesthetic feel of the scene. If a scene's colors lie along a single line (e.g. a grayscale image), there is a sort of cramped or confined feeling (at least, I experience this), as if the color constancy mechanism is attempting to make a gaussian sphere* out of the colors but there's not enough variance to make it work.
At the same time, if you make a palette out of the corners of the RGB cube, there's an unusually high amount of variance. The image might be very vivid but it gives me an impression of excessive busy-ness or energy. The sphere has spikes now!
Maybe harmonious color schemes are those in which the color constancy mechanism doesn't have to do too much work to make the color distribution into a standard shape... maybe. I don't have any evidence or anything.
I don't think the "standard" distribution of colors that would feel neutral is actually going to be a sphere, but it's not going to be perfectly flat and it's not going to be a straight line. It is possible to visualize the color histograms of images as 3d point clouds to get some sense of what feeling is evoked by different color distributions (e.g. http://opensource.graphics/visualizing-the-3d-point-cloud-of... )
> we call them dissonance and consonance, is uncontroversial too
haha, right... but only for western music. compare it to e.g. Gamelan or throat/overtone singing. babies to have some concept of pitch, but mostly what sounds good is very much cultural and not "scientific" at all (good post on this: https://blog.nationalgeographic.org/2013/11/12/the-emotional...)
> Not only are perceptual uniform models like CIE Lab*, and the derived CIELCh or CIEHLC mindbending to understand and code
Conversion from srgb to lab and back (through xyz) is a handful of functions, all under a dozen lines of javascript. Lab to lch and back are a pair of functions, about two lines of code each.
If you're implementing a user interface with sliders, you might also want to clamp the values to avoid producing out of gamut colours. The weird shape is probably the hardest thing to understand (user point of view), but the controls remain very intuitive.
I should have phrased it better. Teenage me struggled, but I haven't attempted it since. Having said that, HSL/HSV worked well enough, and monitors now have better colour accuracy and wider colour gamut. Back then, people were still using "web-safe" colours.
HSL or HSV was a step up from RGB, so it made sense to use it to derive other colours quickly. Because if you're an underpaid freelance developer, the primary colour is usually set by the client, but they usually son't have a full colour scheme. Using a colour wheel based tool gave good enough results fast.
Not only are perceptual uniform models like CIE Lab*, and the derived CIELCh or CIEHLC mindbending to understand and code, but monitor colour gamuts sucked, and so it was overkill.
So is it scientific? If what you wanted was an easy way to derive a number of colours, sort of. If you need them to "look good", well that's art, not science. So ultimately, IDK what answer you're looking for. Colour wheels have always just been a nice way to visualise hue.