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Posted by moultano 17 hours ago

Where to Find the Colors Your Screen Can't Show You(moultano.wordpress.com)
385 points | 98 commentspage 3
arbourtrary 10 hours ago|
Very well written, super interesting topic. I never understood all these natural reasons why real life colors feel so much more vivid. I guess when I look outside of the rgb triangle in the graphic, the cyans/blues/greens shown (since I'm seeing this on a screen) are sort of shadow colors? Approximations without the full vibrancy?
Macha 1 hour ago|
> I guess when I look outside of the rgb triangle in the graphic, the cyans/blues/greens shown (since I'm seeing this on a screen) are sort of shadow colors? Approximations without the full vibrancy?

So there's 3 options you have for rendering the colours outside the sRGB space in this kind of image.

1. Don't. This is usually the most honest, and what all but the first diagram in this article opts for.

2. Clamping. You just set the green component to 255 for every colour beyond green=255, which effectively looks like you extend the edges of the triangle to the edge of the visual range. This is the most common, and the approach used in the article's first image, but it's basically a lie. Some articles will dumb the out of range colors to make it clear they're not the real colour, but this article's first image doesn't.

3. HDR: If the author uses an image format capable of decoding HDR data, and your browser, OS and monitor, and the author's authoring pipeline are all correctly configured to pass through that HDR data, you can get a bit more colour, depending on your monitor. Not the full visible gamut, but up to whatever colorspace your monitor is using.

pcrh 6 hours ago||
Very well-written!

I wonder if the inaccurate representation of colors by screens, etc, in any way underlies the distinctive color palette of many AI image generators?

divvsaxena 5 hours ago||
Reading this made me realize how much of my day is spent looking at screens. It's weird to think there are colors in the world that I've technically seen before, but have never actually been able to capture or reproduce digitally.
sam_lowry_ 11 hours ago||
Impressionist paintings used a lot of synthetic ultramarine, they look very different IRL. There is a whole room in the Orsay museum where paintings seem to glow from the inside in the dark.
ProllyInfamous 6 hours ago||
When reading the article, 520nm light is closest in color reproduction to the "yellowgreen" Crayola color, as seen within their 64-pack.
Sharlin 11 hours ago||
Great article. Small nitpick though: while I understand that P3 deserves specific mention because it’s so ubiquitous now, it’s not like Apple invented the idea of wide-gamut displays. Adobe RGB, commonly used by wide-gamut computer monitors, in particular is noteworthy in the context of this article because it extends further into the blue-cyan-green than P3,
dkeners 8 hours ago||
This reminds me of a video [1] going over the use of structural color photography, where theoretically what you see in real life is what you get in your final image. It cover some of the same topics, but goes more in depth about the process of structural color and some animal examples, like the butterfly mentioned in the article. If you have an interest in chemistry or film photography it is a great watch! This process was also, to my knowledge, the stepping stone for holograms, which we can now see structural colors everyday on IDs and licenses.

[1] (18 minutes) https://youtu.be/-DyrBDsKA5s

gumboshoes 7 hours ago||
"The eyespots on a peacock’s train are super cyan, so when the peacock spreads its train feathers it is going super saiyan super cyan." Haha.
AdamH12113 5 hours ago||
My favorite color in all the world is the green of a mineral called dioptase. It's a deep, dark green, richer than an emerald. It looks amazing in real life and utterly boring on an RGB display. The Houston Museum of Natural Science has a large sample; every time I'm there I go stare at it for a while.
garaetjjte 4 hours ago|
I hate that type of diagrams. Why sRGB-encoded image, pretends to show any color outside of sRGB region? It doesn't make any sense! (and when these diagrams attempt to illustrate sRGB, often actual colors encoded are narrower than full sRGB)
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