Why 16 Million Hex Codes Aren't Enough: The Physics of Color
Quantifying Colour
This article explores how colors can be quantified physically, moving beyond imprecise word labels. It explains spectral power distributions, photoreceptor cells, and the science behind color perception, including why hex codes are limited and why color blindness occurs.
The idea of mapping colours to numbers might look odd, but it is not too far fetched.
- herf
This is both interesting and weird!
We know the typical LMS responses for human cones (e.g., Stockman-Sharpe) that could easily be plotted instead of the bell-curve-like things they use here - why? Is it good enough for illustration? You could say, kind of but then all the colors are kind of wrong too. For example, D65 is very blue here.
The article takes a really long time to get to the thing everyone should know: which is that our cones responses overlap a lot, and we get color sensations by (kind of) differencing them. Doing a matrix transform after ten pages to get to chromaticity is technically correct, but it's not the most accessible/intuitive way to teach this.
Nice effort but it would be better if it were closer to "real" color math.
- pmkary
There is a Knuth/TeX like elegance in the diagrams that you don't see on the web. More than the content that is amazing; and the visualizations that clearly took a very long time to make; it is a fabulous piece of art. Really really nice.