Color Dimensions

Humans see color in three1 dimensions. If you set up three different primary-color lamps, such that their intensities are controllable, and then ask participants to match a given color, people can always find a matching configuration, and moreover different people will roughly come up with the same answer.2 I've replicated the basic idea on the right: you can try matching a particular color using different intensities of red, green, and blue.

  1. This is not strictly true. Certain kinds of color blindness can reduce the number of different dimensions available, and some people are tetrachromats and have another dimension to see with. We're going to be eliding over some of these details.↩
  2. This data, which was very important in defining the first color spaces, comes from the 1920s experiments conducted by Wright and Guild. There are some details here that I'm skipping: feel free to investigate on your own.↩

Color Dimensions

Humans see color in three1 dimensions. If you set up three different primary-color lamps, such that their intensities are controllable, and then ask participants to match a given color, people can always find a matching configuration, and moreover different people will roughly come up with the same answer.2 I've replicated the basic idea on the right: you can try matching a particular color using different intensities of red, green, and blue.

  1. This is not strictly true. Certain kinds of color blindness can reduce the number of different dimensions available, and some people are tetrachromats and have another dimension to see with. We're going to be eliding over some of these details.↩
  2. This data, which was very important in defining the first color spaces, comes from the 1920s experiments conducted by Wright and Guild. There are some details here that I'm skipping: feel free to investigate on your own.↩