A Field Guide to Color: Beyond RGBThe sRGB Space
For data visualization, we care mainly about what can be shown on a computer screen. For most screens, that's standard RGB, or sRGB.
This figure shows all of the colors in sRGB (what your monitor can display), with the coordinate reflecting how much your red, green, and blue cones react to that color. We can see that it looks like a parallelepiped: there are the three primary colors and then different combinations of those colors. This is about 30% of all the colors you can see, as this diagram shows1:
(Each of those blue numbers is a wavelength of light: light that is purely one wavelength is the strongest color we can see.)
You've probably seen a sunset and taken a photograph of it, only to have the photograph not match how you remember the view. This is why: your monitor simply cannot handle colors that are too saturated.
- Credit to Dicklyon on Wikipedia.↩
The sRGB Space
For data visualization, we care mainly about what can be shown on a computer screen. For most screens, that's standard RGB, or sRGB.
This figure shows all of the colors in sRGB (what your monitor can display), with the coordinate reflecting how much your red, green, and blue cones react to that color. We can see that it looks like a parallelepiped: there are the three primary colors and then different combinations of those colors. This is about 30% of all the colors you can see, as this diagram shows1:
(Each of those blue numbers is a wavelength of light: light that is purely one wavelength is the strongest color we can see.)
You've probably seen a sunset and taken a photograph of it, only to have the photograph not match how you remember the view. This is why: your monitor simply cannot handle colors that are too saturated.
- Credit to Dicklyon on Wikipedia.↩