COLOR

  • Björn Ottosson – How software gets color wrong

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

     

    Most software around us today are decent at accurately displaying colors. Processing of colors is another story unfortunately, and is often done badly.

     

    To understand what the problem is, let’s start with an example of three ways of blending green and magenta:

    • Perceptual blend – A smooth transition using a model designed to mimic human perception of color. The blending is done so that the perceived brightness and color varies smoothly and evenly.
    • Linear blend – A model for blending color based on how light behaves physically. This type of blending can occur in many ways naturally, for example when colors are blended together by focus blur in a camera or when viewing a pattern of two colors at a distance.
    • sRGB blend – This is how colors would normally be blended in computer software, using sRGB to represent the colors. 

     

    Let’s look at some more examples of blending of colors, to see how these problems surface more practically. The examples use strong colors since then the differences are more pronounced. This is using the same three ways of blending colors as the first example.

     

    Instead of making it as easy as possible to work with color, most software make it unnecessarily hard, by doing image processing with representations not designed for it. Approximating the physical behavior of light with linear RGB models is one easy thing to do, but more work is needed to create image representations tailored for image processing and human perception.

     

    Also see:

    https://www.pixelsham.com/2022/04/05/bjorn-ottosson-okhsv-and-okhsl-two-new-color-spaces-for-color-picking/

    Read more: Björn Ottosson – How software gets color wrong
  • Photography Basics : Spectral Sensitivity Estimation Without a Camera

    https://color-lab-eilat.github.io/Spectral-sensitivity-estimation-web/

     

    A number of problems in computer vision and related fields would be mitigated if camera spectral sensitivities were known. As consumer cameras are not designed for high-precision visual tasks, manufacturers do not disclose spectral sensitivities. Their estimation requires a costly optical setup, which triggered researchers to come up with numerous indirect methods that aim to lower cost and complexity by using color targets. However, the use of color targets gives rise to new complications that make the estimation more difficult, and consequently, there currently exists no simple, low-cost, robust go-to method for spectral sensitivity estimation that non-specialized research labs can adopt. Furthermore, even if not limited by hardware or cost, researchers frequently work with imagery from multiple cameras that they do not have in their possession.

     

    To provide a practical solution to this problem, we propose a framework for spectral sensitivity estimation that not only does not require any hardware (including a color target), but also does not require physical access to the camera itself. Similar to other work, we formulate an optimization problem that minimizes a two-term objective function: a camera-specific term from a system of equations, and a universal term that bounds the solution space.

     

    Different than other work, we utilize publicly available high-quality calibration data to construct both terms. We use the colorimetric mapping matrices provided by the Adobe DNG Converter to formulate the camera-specific system of equations, and constrain the solutions using an autoencoder trained on a database of ground-truth curves. On average, we achieve reconstruction errors as low as those that can arise due to manufacturing imperfections between two copies of the same camera. We provide predicted sensitivities for more than 1,000 cameras that the Adobe DNG Converter currently supports, and discuss which tasks can become trivial when camera responses are available.

     

     

     

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    Read more: Photography Basics : Spectral Sensitivity Estimation Without a Camera
  • A Brief History of Color in Art

    www.artsy.net/article/the-art-genome-project-a-brief-history-of-color-in-art

    Of all the pigments that have been banned over the centuries, the color most missed by painters is likely Lead White.

    This hue could capture and reflect a gleam of light like no other, though its production was anything but glamorous. The 17th-century Dutch method for manufacturing the pigment involved layering cow and horse manure over lead and vinegar. After three months in a sealed room, these materials would combine to create flakes of pure white. While scientists in the late 19th century identified lead as poisonous, it wasn’t until 1978 that the United States banned the production of lead white paint.

    More reading:
    www.canva.com/learn/color-meanings/

    https://www.infogrades.com/history-events-infographics/bizarre-history-of-colors/

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    Read more: A Brief History of Color in Art
  • 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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    Read more: What light is best to illuminate gems for resale

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