COLOR

  • No one could see the colour blue until modern times

    https://www.businessinsider.com/what-is-blue-and-how-do-we-see-color-2015-2

     

    The way that humans see the world… until we have a way to describe something, even something so fundamental as a colour, we may not even notice that something it’s there.

     

    Ancient languages didn’t have a word for blue — not Greek, not Chinese, not Japanese, not Hebrew, not Icelandic cultures. And without a word for the colour, there’s evidence that they may not have seen it at all.

    https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/211119-colors

     

    Every language first had a word for black and for white, or dark and light. The next word for a colour to come into existence — in every language studied around the world — was red, the colour of blood and wine.

    After red, historically, yellow appears, and later, green (though in a couple of languages, yellow and green switch places). The last of these colours to appear in every language is blue.

     

    The only ancient culture to develop a word for blue was the Egyptians — and as it happens, they were also the only culture that had a way to produce a blue dye.

    https://mymodernmet.com/shades-of-blue-color-history/

     

    Considered to be the first ever synthetically produced color pigment, Egyptian blue (also known as cuprorivaite) was created around 2,200 B.C. It was made from ground limestone mixed with sand and a copper-containing mineral, such as azurite or malachite, which was then heated between 1470 and 1650°F. The result was an opaque blue glass which then had to be crushed and combined with thickening agents such as egg whites to create a long-lasting paint or glaze.

     

     

    If you think about it, blue doesn’t appear much in nature — there aren’t animals with blue pigments (except for one butterfly, Obrina Olivewing, all animals generate blue through light scattering), blue eyes are rare (also blue through light scattering), and blue flowers are mostly human creations. There is, of course, the sky, but is that really blue?

     

     

    So before we had a word for it, did people not naturally see blue? Do you really see something if you don’t have a word for it?

     

    A researcher named Jules Davidoff traveled to Namibia to investigate this, where he conducted an experiment with the Himba tribe, who speak a language that has no word for blue or distinction between blue and green. When shown a circle with 11 green squares and one blue, they couldn’t pick out which one was different from the others.

     

    When looking at a circle of green squares with only one slightly different shade, they could immediately spot the different one. Can you?

     

    Davidoff says that without a word for a colour, without a way of identifying it as different, it’s much harder for us to notice what’s unique about it — even though our eyes are physically seeing the blocks it in the same way.

     

    Further research brought to wider discussions about color perception in humans. Everything that we make is based on the fact that humans are trichromatic. The television only has 3 colors. Our color printers have 3 different colors. But some people, and in specific some women seemed to be more sensible to color differences… mainly because they’re just more aware or – because of the job that they do.

    Eventually this brought to the discovery of a small percentage of the population, referred to as tetrachromats, which developed an extra cone sensitivity to yellow, likely due to gene modifications.

    The interesting detail about these is that even between tetrachromats, only the ones that had a reason to develop, label and work with extra color sensitivity actually developed the ability to use their native skills.

     

    So before blue became a common concept, maybe humans saw it. But it seems they didn’t know they were seeing it.

    If you see something yet can’t see it, does it exist? Did colours come into existence over time? Not technically, but our ability to notice them… may have…

     

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  • Scene Referred vs Display Referred color workflows

    Display Referred it is tied to the target hardware, as such it bakes color requirements into every type of media output request.

    Scene Referred uses a common unified wide gamut and targeting audience through CDL and DI libraries instead.
    So that color information stays untouched and only “transformed” as/when needed.

     

     

    Sources:
    – Victor Perez – Color Management Fundamentals & ACES Workflows in Nuke
    – https://z-fx.nl/ColorspACES.pdf
    – Wicus

     

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  • What light is best to illuminate gems for resale

    www.palagems.com/gem-lighting2

     

    Artificial light sources, not unlike the diverse phases of natural light, vary considerably in their properties. As a result, some lamps render an object’s color better than others do.

     

    The most important criterion for assessing the color-rendering ability of any lamp is its spectral power distribution curve.

     

    Natural daylight varies too much in strength and spectral composition to be taken seriously as a lighting standard for grading and dealing colored stones. For anything to be a standard, it must be constant in its properties, which natural light is not.

     

    For dealers in particular to make the transition from natural light to an artificial light source, that source must offer:
    1- A degree of illuminance at least as strong as the common phases of natural daylight.
    2- Spectral properties identical or comparable to a phase of natural daylight.

     

    A source combining these two things makes gems appear much the same as when viewed under a given phase of natural light. From the viewpoint of many dealers, this corresponds to a naturalappearance.

     

    The 6000° Kelvin xenon short-arc lamp appears closest to meeting the criteria for a standard light source. Besides the strong illuminance this lamp affords, its spectrum is very similar to CIE standard illuminants of similar color temperature.

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  • Björn Ottosson – OKHSV and OKHSL – Two new color spaces for color picking

    https://bottosson.github.io/misc/colorpicker

     

    https://bottosson.github.io/posts/colorpicker/

     

    https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2024/10/interview-bjorn-ottosson-creator-oklab-color-space/

     

    One problem with sRGB is that in a gradient between blue and white, it becomes a bit purple in the middle of the transition. That’s because sRGB really isn’t created to mimic how the eye sees colors; rather, it is based on how CRT monitors work. That means it works with certain frequencies of red, green, and blue, and also the non-linear coding called gamma. It’s a miracle it works as well as it does, but it’s not connected to color perception. When using those tools, you sometimes get surprising results, like purple in the gradient.

     

     

    There were also attempts to create simple models matching human perception based on XYZ, but as it turned out, it’s not possible to model all color vision that way. Perception of color is incredibly complex and depends, among other things, on whether it is dark or light in the room and the background color it is against. When you look at a photograph, it also depends on what you think the color of the light source is. The dress is a typical example of color vision being very context-dependent. It is almost impossible to model this perfectly.

     

    I based Oklab on two other color spaces, CIECAM16 and IPT. I used the lightness and saturation prediction from CIECAM16, which is a color appearance model, as a target. I actually wanted to use the datasets used to create CIECAM16, but I couldn’t find them.

     

    IPT was designed to have better hue uniformity. In experiments, they asked people to match light and dark colors, saturated and unsaturated colors, which resulted in a dataset for which colors, subjectively, have the same hue. IPT has a few other issues but is the basis for hue in Oklab.

     

    In the Munsell color system, colors are described with three parameters, designed to match the perceived appearance of colors: Hue, Chroma and Value. The parameters are designed to be independent and each have a uniform scale. This results in a color solid with an irregular shape. The parameters are designed to be independent and each have a uniform scale. This results in a color solid with an irregular shape. Modern color spaces and models, such as CIELAB, Cam16 and Björn Ottosson own Oklab, are very similar in their construction.

     

     

    By far the most used color spaces today for color picking are HSL and HSV, two representations introduced in the classic 1978 paper “Color Spaces for Computer Graphics”. HSL and HSV designed to roughly correlate with perceptual color properties while being very simple and cheap to compute.

     

    Today HSL and HSV are most commonly used together with the sRGB color space.

     

     

    One of the main advantages of HSL and HSV over the different Lab color spaces is that they map the sRGB gamut to a cylinder. This makes them easy to use since all parameters can be changed independently, without the risk of creating colors outside of the target gamut.

     

     

    The main drawback on the other hand is that their properties don’t match human perception particularly well.
    Reconciling these conflicting goals perfectly isn’t possible, but given that HSV and HSL don’t use anything derived from experiments relating to human perception, creating something that makes a better tradeoff does not seem unreasonable.

     

     

    With this new lightness estimate, we are ready to look into the construction of Okhsv and Okhsl.

     

     

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  • Image rendering bit depth

    The terms 8-bit, 16-bit, 16-bit float, and 32-bit refer to different data formats used to store and represent image information, as bits per pixel.

     

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_depth

     

    In color technology, color depth also known as bit depth, is either the number of bits used to indicate the color of a single pixel, OR the number of bits used for each color component of a single pixel.

     

    When referring to a pixel, the concept can be defined as bits per pixel (bpp).

     

    When referring to a color component, the concept can be defined as bits per component, bits per channel, bits per color (all three abbreviated bpc), and also bits per pixel component, bits per color channel or bits per sample (bps). Modern standards tend to use bits per component, but historical lower-depth systems used bits per pixel more often.

     

    Color depth is only one aspect of color representation, expressing the precision with which the amount of each primary can be expressed; the other aspect is how broad a range of colors can be expressed (the gamut). The definition of both color precision and gamut is accomplished with a color encoding specification which assigns a digital code value to a location in a color space.

     

     

    Here’s a simple explanation of each.

     

    8-bit images (i.e. 24 bits per pixel for a color image) are considered Low Dynamic Range.
    They can store around 5 stops of light and each pixel carry a value from 0 (black) to 255 (white).
    As a comparison, DSLR cameras can capture ~12-15 stops of light and they use RAW files to store the information.

     

    16-bit: This format is commonly referred to as “half-precision.” It uses 16 bits of data to represent color values for each pixel. With 16 bits, you can have 65,536 discrete levels of color, allowing for relatively high precision and smooth gradients. However, it has a limited dynamic range, meaning it cannot accurately represent extremely bright or dark values. It is commonly used for regular images and textures.

     

    16-bit float: This format is an extension of the 16-bit format but uses floating-point numbers instead of fixed integers. Floating-point numbers allow for more precise calculations and a larger dynamic range. In this case, the 16 bits are used to store both the color value and the exponent, which controls the range of values that can be represented. The 16-bit float format provides better accuracy and a wider dynamic range than regular 16-bit, making it useful for high-dynamic-range imaging (HDRI) and computations that require more precision.

     

    32-bit: (i.e. 96 bits per pixel for a color image) are considered High Dynamic Range. This format, also known as “full-precision” or “float,” uses 32 bits to represent color values and offers the highest precision and dynamic range among the three options. With 32 bits, you have a significantly larger number of discrete levels, allowing for extremely accurate color representation, smooth gradients, and a wide range of brightness values. It is commonly used for professional rendering, visual effects, and scientific applications where maximum precision is required.

     

    Bits and HDR coverage

    High Dynamic Range (HDR) images are designed to capture a wide range of luminance values, from the darkest shadows to the brightest highlights, in order to reproduce a scene with more accuracy and detail. The bit depth of an image refers to the number of bits used to represent each pixel’s color information. When comparing 32-bit float and 16-bit float HDR images, the drop in accuracy primarily relates to the precision of the color information.

     

    A 32-bit float HDR image offers a higher level of precision compared to a 16-bit float HDR image. In a 32-bit float format, each color channel (red, green, and blue) is represented by 32 bits, allowing for a larger range of values to be stored. This increased precision enables the image to retain more details and subtleties in color and luminance.

     

    On the other hand, a 16-bit float HDR image utilizes 16 bits per color channel, resulting in a reduced range of values that can be represented. This lower precision leads to a loss of fine details and color nuances, especially in highly contrasted areas of the image where there are significant differences in luminance.

     

    The drop in accuracy between 32-bit and 16-bit float HDR images becomes more noticeable as the exposure range of the scene increases. Exposure range refers to the span between the darkest and brightest areas of an image. In scenes with a limited exposure range, where the luminance differences are relatively small, the loss of accuracy may not be as prominent or perceptible. These images usually are around 8-10 exposure levels.

     

    However, in scenes with a wide exposure range, such as a landscape with deep shadows and bright highlights, the reduced precision of a 16-bit float HDR image can result in visible artifacts like color banding, posterization, and loss of detail in both shadows and highlights. The image may exhibit abrupt transitions between tones or colors, which can appear unnatural and less realistic.

     

    To provide a rough estimate, it is often observed that exposure values beyond approximately ±6 to ±8 stops from the middle gray (18% reflectance) may be more prone to accuracy issues in a 16-bit float format. This range may vary depending on the specific implementation and encoding scheme used.

     

    To summarize, the drop in accuracy between 32-bit and 16-bit float HDR images is mainly related to the reduced precision of color information. This decrease in precision becomes more apparent in scenes with a wide exposure range, affecting the representation of fine details and leading to visible artifacts in the image.

     

    In practice, this means that exposure values beyond a certain range will experience a loss of accuracy and detail when stored in a 16-bit float format. The exact range at which this loss occurs depends on the encoding scheme and the specific implementation. However, in general, extremely bright or extremely dark values that fall outside the representable range may be subject to quantization errors, resulting in loss of detail, banding, or other artifacts.

     

    HDRs used for lighting purposes are usually slightly convolved to improve on sampling speed and removing specular artefacts. To that extent, 16 bit float HDRIs tend to me most used in CG cycles.

     

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  • Polarised vs unpolarized filtering

    A light wave that is vibrating in more than one plane is referred to as unpolarized light. …

    Polarized light waves are light waves in which the vibrations occur in a single plane. The process of transforming unpolarized light into polarized light is known as polarization.

    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polarizing_filter_(photography)

    The most common use of polarized technology is to reduce lighting complexity on the subject.
    Details such as glare and hard edges are not removed, but greatly reduced.

    This method is usually used in VFX to capture raw images with the least amount of specular diffusion or pollution, thus allowing artists to infer detail back through typical shading and rendering techniques and on demand.

    Light reflected from a non-metallic surface becomes polarized; this effect is maximum at Brewster’s angle, about 56° from the vertical for common glass.

    A polarizer rotated to pass only light polarized in the direction perpendicular to the reflected light will absorb much of it. This absorption allows glare reflected from, for example, a body of water or a road to be reduced. Reflections from shiny surfaces (e.g. vegetation, sweaty skin, water surfaces, glass) are also reduced. This allows the natural color and detail of what is beneath to come through. Reflections from a window into a dark interior can be much reduced, allowing it to be seen through. (The same effects are available for vision by using polarizing sunglasses.)

     

    www.physicsclassroom.com/class/light/u12l1e.cfm

     

    Some of the light coming from the sky is polarized (bees use this phenomenon for navigation). The electrons in the air molecules cause a scattering of sunlight in all directions. This explains why the sky is not dark during the day. But when looked at from the sides, the light emitted from a specific electron is totally polarized.[3] Hence, a picture taken in a direction at 90 degrees from the sun can take advantage of this polarization.

    Use of a polarizing filter, in the correct direction, will filter out the polarized component of skylight, darkening the sky; the landscape below it, and clouds, will be less affected, giving a photograph with a darker and more dramatic sky, and emphasizing the clouds.

     

    There are two types of polarizing filters readily available, linear and “circular”, which have exactly the same effect photographically. But the metering and auto-focus sensors in certain cameras, including virtually all auto-focus SLRs, will not work properly with linear polarizers because the beam splitters used to split off the light for focusing and metering are polarization-dependent.

     

    Polarizing filters reduce the light passed through to the film or sensor by about one to three stops (2–8×) depending on how much of the light is polarized at the filter angle selected. Auto-exposure cameras will adjust for this by widening the aperture, lengthening the time the shutter is open, and/or increasing the ASA/ISO speed of the camera.

     

    www.adorama.com/alc/nd-filter-vs-polarizer-what%25e2%2580%2599s-the-difference

     

    Neutral Density (ND) filters help control image exposure by reducing the light that enters the camera so that you can have more control of your depth of field and shutter speed. Polarizers or polarizing filters work in a similar way, but the difference is that they selectively let light waves of a certain polarization pass through. This effect helps create more vivid colors in an image, as well as manage glare and reflections from water surfaces. Both are regarded as some of the best filters for landscape and travel photography as they reduce the dynamic range in high-contrast images, thus enabling photographers to capture more realistic and dramatic sceneries.

     

    shopfelixgray.com/blog/polarized-vs-non-polarized-sunglasses/

     

    www.eyebuydirect.com/blog/difference-polarized-nonpolarized-sunglasses/

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LIGHTING