A Field Guide to Color: Beyond RGBColor Theory
As with everything our brain does, color perception is a complex process. Let's start by setting the scene and covering the terminology and tools we'll need going forward. Consider this image:
You see this image because tiny lights in your computer are turned on with the right intensities to reproduce what my camera recorded.1 How are those colors stored and represented, and how can we mathematically describe them?
- I'll get one disclaimer out of the way. You're probably not reading this on a color-calibrated monitor in the proper lighting conditions and distance, so the colors you see are almost certainly not what my camera recorded. They're pretty close, though. If you have something like a night light mode turned on, I'd recommend turning it off to view this piece.↩
Color Theory
As with everything our brain does, color perception is a complex process. Let's start by setting the scene and covering the terminology and tools we'll need going forward. Consider this image:
You see this image because tiny lights in your computer are turned on with the right intensities to reproduce what my camera recorded.1 How are those colors stored and represented, and how can we mathematically describe them?
- I'll get one disclaimer out of the way. You're probably not reading this on a color-calibrated monitor in the proper lighting conditions and distance, so the colors you see are almost certainly not what my camera recorded. They're pretty close, though. If you have something like a night light mode turned on, I'd recommend turning it off to view this piece.↩