Where to Find the Colors Your Screen Can't Show You

https://moultano.wordpress.com/2026/06/19/where-to-find-the-colors-your-screen-cant-show-you/

by moultano • 1 month ago

495 132 1 month ago

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pphysch• 1 month ago

What an truly incredible article, particularly the way the color space diagrams are used to gradually tell the story (and the prose is great too). I actually want to read it again tomorrow morning in more depth.

lefra2• 1 month ago

Really nice article, I'll look closer to green lights next time I see one.

The most striking experience I had was working with a blue laser (430nm). The best way I found to describe its color is that it was screaming "blue" at me. Since then, I'm always disappointed when looking at a screen displaying #0000FF.

tomaskafka• 1 month ago

Sounds like we need the next VR glasses to shine colorful lasers into our eyes instead of screens.

high_priest• 1 month ago

"Destroy them with lasers!" https://youtu.be/u6-U-apEUZI

functionmouse• 1 month ago

it'll be awesome, once

TeMPOraL• 1 month ago

If we could get that to work, then we'd be much closer to VR without a headset - a device able to paint arbitrary images directly onto users' retinas could be stationary and handle multiple users - giving us a holodeck, just without the tactile parts.

olejorgenb2• 1 month ago

"This is a good time to spare a thought for our red-green colorblind brethren. [...] it is to them that we owe the beautiful color of green traffic lights. The spectral requirements that make the green signals distinguishable from red in their eyes make them beautiful in ours."

thinkingemote• 1 month ago

Can these colours be replicated or captured using ink, paint or traditional film photography?

orthoxerox2• 1 month ago

Ultramarine pigment is too blue for your screen to replicate properly, for example. I don't know if there's a pigment that reflects only 520nm light, though.

carlosjobim2• 1 month ago

Many colours outside of the electric screen spectrum can be made with ink or paint. You probably have a bunch of objects in your own house with colours that can't be shown as full on your screen.

lukewarm7072• 1 month ago

yes, using a photo printer. with varying levels of price and gamut.

WillAdams• 1 month ago

Should be.

For printing there was PANTONE's Hexachrome which used 6 ink colours to greatly extend the possible colour range --- but the only printer I know of who made great use of, and profited by doing so, used it only for its increased range's covering of additional spot colours --- so they basically persuaded every printer w/in driving distance to sub-contract spot colour work to them (for those colours which fit in the Hexachrome gamut), then used fancy software to gang up jobs onto a plate, run as many copies as were necessary, cut and stack, and then send out the jobs and run the next plate, no need to wash down the press and change inks.

I tried to sell the idea of implementing it for high-end photo pieces at a printer I worked at, but no real interest because it was difficult for sales to communicate, and no one wanted to spend money printing a sample/researching images which benefited from it.

anfilt3• 1 month ago

I do think it would be awesome if something like offset printing was more accessible. The number of stages/steps for a press that can used for a color or effect is often just limited by floor space. Although some presses can't have an other stage as easily added depending on the manufacture.

TheAceOfHearts• 1 month ago

I took up acrylics painting a few years back and I've been surprised by how much is lost in photos and videos. The two colors with which I've noticed this the most are ultramarine blue and prussian blue. I don't think it's just the color though, part of it comes down to how light is reflected off the painting and where you're standing, as well as the texture and the brush strokes. I have a few paintings hanging in my room and occasionally I'll look at them for a while and it'll reveal a new perspective to me that I had previously missed, despite being the one who made it.

This post is making me feel a bit inspired to go outside and immerse myself in the forest to take in the greens. Thanks for sharing.

jakzurr• 1 month ago

Thanks mentioning acrylics. Now I'm wondering if new technology will eventually improve our printing to allow better colors in news media, and even in prints in art exhibits?

Does anyone have any comments on the future of printed media?

m30473• 1 month ago

The way this is done (has been done) is printing with custom colors. Standard printing is done with CMYK (three colors and black). Purportedly high-end printers (I don't care if the printer is gold plated and diamond studded, if the driver / host-based preprocessor was written in 1999 using Visual BASIC then the printer is sh*t) have had an extra blue, or an extra red, for years.

In the back of my mind, I find it oddly surprising that we have 3D printers but I haven't seen a printer where you can mix your own pigments and print with them.

Many years ago I knew someone in Seattle who made microprints with burnished copper plates, some of them with a dozen different colors. He designed a couple of commemorative postage stamp-like objects, and that somehow got him hired by an eastern european country as an anti-counterfeiting advisor and then he disappeared.

rvba• 1 month ago

Ive been on a meeting with a painter who paints on acrylic and she said that acrylic paints are relatively new, thus nobody knows how long will the paintings last. Of course modern varnish is applied, but it is unclear what will happen in the future.

AgentMasterRace• 1 month ago

Tl;dr.... It's LSD.

Sophira4• 1 month ago

That was incredibly well-explained. Kudos.

I do have a question that the article doesn't seem to attempt to answer, though. The article says (paraphrased in my new understanding) that any spectra which makes the cones in your eyes react the same way will result in seeing the same colour. Do we know of any examples of this?

(Colour-blindness seems like an obvious example; I'm curious though if there are any examples of two common scenarios where it can be demonstrated that there are different spectra in each, and yet most people will see them as the same colour.)

frotaur2• 1 month ago

Well, the most common example si precisely screens, no? A screen displaying the color yellow is actually a spectrum of red and green peaks, stimulating your red and green cones just like a spectrum containing a single frequency of the color yellow.

Sophira4• 1 month ago

Oh right. I feel silly for forgetting about that even though it's mentioned in the article. Thank you!

grumbelbart2• 1 month ago

This is called metamerism. It can be a practical issue if two pigments have the same color under one light source, but a different one under another. You want your artificial teeth to have the same color as your real teeth in sunlight, led light, and a classic lightbulb for example.

clort• 1 month ago

Well, now that you mention it, I'd just like to remind you that people are a lot weirder than you might think! Having incisors to be a different colour (say, a brilliant red) under artificial lights could definitely be a thing people desired..

317070• 1 month ago

A flower, a picture of the flower in print and the picture shown on a screen will all have different spectra, but look the same.

See the first minutes of this video, where he has a spectrum analyser: https://youtu.be/-DyrBDsKA5s?si=mRJPT2ecy6NqpB4N

Sophira4• 1 month ago

That video was super interesting, thank you!

somat• 1 month ago

Would not the definitive answer to this be a computer screen.

On one side you have an apple, illuminated by natural sunlight. it fills your eye with a rich texture of subtly mixed frequency's covering the whole gamut of visible and invisible light. On the other a picture of an apple composed of brutal pure frequencies only emitting at 430, 540, 570 Nm. Can you tell the difference?

Sophira4• 1 month ago

That makes sense. I feel a little silly that that's not something I considered despite the article saying exactly that. I think I got caught up in the details.

addaon• 1 month ago

Everyone is pointing out examples around image reproduction, which are valid and interesting… but the case that comes up in nature is violet (beyond blue in spectrum) vs purple (mix of red and blue) pigments.

olejorgenb2• 1 month ago

Off topic, but the other articles are well made too. I enjoyed this one: https://moultano.wordpress.com/2025/02/24/you-should-make-cr...

orthoxerox2• 1 month ago

ACES AP0 is the only color space I know that is designed to represent all possible visible colors. It's a purely theoretical color space, though. The widest color space designed for actual implementation, Rec. 2020, still can't faithfully show most of the natural greens and cyans, like your green laser pointer.

frotaur2• 1 month ago

Its unclear to me why the color space is 2-dimensional. Why wouldn't it be a 3-dimensional space, indexed by how much each of the 3-cones is activated ? Not clear to me from the article!

psd1• 1 month ago

It is, inasmuch as we have 3 types of cone, which is an inherent orthogonality. It is also not, inasmuch as each cone is a wavelength in the same spectrum.

Either way, you can project a volume onto a plane, which is great for communicating visual data on paper or screen.

The interesting question is "why that arc in particular"; my ignorance will shine through if I speculate.

I assume that the projection encodes something about our relative perception of each cone's band, hence the big green corner.

carlosjobim2• 1 month ago

It is 3 dimensional, because in our perception we see the third dimension of magentas and purples, which do not exist in physical reality on the spectrum.

HappyPanacea• 1 month ago

I guess it is the 2-dimensional section such that it have constant total brightness. You can then multiply later by your desired brightness.

isoprophlex• 1 month ago

There are three cones, but there is an additional constraint that we plot the colors at maximum summed luminosity. So for one cone you would just have a point; two would show a line from 0% cone A+100% cone B -> 100% cone A; three is a plane

krackers• 1 month ago

This sounds similar to barycentric coordinates?

audeyisaacs• 1 month ago

indexed by how much each of the 3-cones is activated

This will actually differ from person to person. If you look at a pure yellow wavelength light next to a red/green light mixed such that they create the exact same perceived yellow to you, it will look different to another person.

Aside from that, not really sure what a 3d view with the dimensions being r,g,b would actually offer

SideQuark• 1 month ago

It is 3 dimensional. That commonly repeated CIE diagram is a 2d slice of the color volume. Since 1931 that diagram is obsolete, misleading, and fails at a lot of modern color science, and has been replaced many times, but is what many people go to. The most recent replacement (well, by CIE), is CIE 2015. Comment on it [1]

Modern color modeling is much richer then 3 parameters, because human vision is much more complex than simply color frequencies. CIE 1931 was low brightness, 2 degree field of vision, center of vision derived. As brightness increases, color perception shifts. Colors are NOT linear; sRGB and CIE 1931 chose such a small section of human vision that they approximate that section with a linear assumption. Modern CIECAM models are not linear, are not 3 parameter, because color is not linear (CIECAM02 is 6 parameter [2], there are several after that one). A century of experiments, wide color gamuts, HDR, have thrown out CIE 1931 as a good model. It’s only momentum now, and slowly higher end things are replacing it.

A good introduction is Color Appearance Models, by Mark Fairchild, also any of his technical papers give a starting point into the science.

[1] https://community.acescentral.com/t/cie-2015-cmfs-what-would...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIECAM02

ralfd2• 1 month ago

CIE 2015

Does that look like 3d?

adrian_b4• 1 month ago

While it is true that some saturated blue-green colors will never be reproducible with only 3 primary colors, the CIE 1931 chromaticity diagram used in TFA overemphasizes their importance, because human vision cannot distinguish many colors in that area of the diagram.

In reality, the greatest defect of the sRGB color space, which is still too frequently the default color space, is that it is not able to reproduce many saturated orange/red/purple colors, which are very frequently encountered around us, e.g. in flowers, fruits and clothes.

The missing orange-red-purple corner appears small in the diagram in comparison with the missing blue-green corner, but in reality humans perceive much more different colors in the orange/red/purple corner, so the relation between those areas would be opposite in a uniform color space.

The Display P3 color space is much better than sRGB for reproducing orange/red/purple colors and now it is available even in many cheap monitors. However many monitors that can reproduce Display P3 come configured by default to use just sRGB. Such monitors should always be reconfigured to use Display P3.

Monitors that can reproduce an even greater part of the Rec. 2020 color space are obviously better than those that can do only Display P3, but such monitors with a higher color gamut are usually more expensive. The full Rec. 2020 color space can be reproduced only with laser projectors, because it uses monochromatic primary colors.

red75prime2• 1 month ago

the relation between those areas would be opposite in a uniform color space.

If I understand correctly fig. 3 in [1] should be perceptually uniform. The bluegreens missing from sRGB, but present in BT.2020 comprise a sizeable chunk comparable to redyellows.

[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/345252499_Evaluatin...

adrian_b4• 1 month ago

Indeed, "Figure 3" from that article should be a realistic depiction of the differences between sRGB, Display P3 and BT.2020.

It is true that both the red and green primary colors of sRGB are bad (because they correspond with obsolete CRT phosphors that have not been used for decades), but in practice the defects of the green primary color are much less important, because the objects with saturated green colors are more rarely encountered.

Like I have said, objects with saturated orange/red/purple colors are very frequently encountered, even in most homes, e.g. flowers, fruits, clothes, blood.

Photographs or movies showing such objects that have been recorded using a wider color gamut look extremely differently on an sRGB monitor vs. a monitor supporting Display P3 or an even wider color gamut.

Only very rarely I have seen examples with obvious differences between monitors when showing green objects, e.g. some documentaries with certain vividly colored animals, like some insects, birds, frogs or lizards.

fmajid4• 1 month ago

Not to mention the Color Rendering Index (CRI) metric Ra does not weigh the R9 (deep red) so many forms of lighting don't try to render it correctly to save costs.

klabb32• 1 month ago

This is truly an (accidental?) setback of color reproduction as it has progressed over time. For LED lights R9 is also crucial for skin tones which makes it so bad to just leave that out. Now, the mass produced LEDs are even optimized for CRI at all are virtually all excluding R9, which may be one of the main quality issues that many people perceive with LEDs vs eg incandescent. There’s of course more to it but R9 probably has a disproportionate effect for being a ”minor detail”.

ksec• 1 month ago

Ugh. CRI doesn't include R9, so CRI 100 doesn't mean 100% replicating sun light / Incandescent Light bulb? Are there any LED that actually does a decent job in colour representation?

szmarczak• 1 month ago

There's color space and there's color depth. You may be using D-P3 with 8 bit, which is worse (less accurate?) than sRGB with 8 bit. And there's bandwidth. Your monitor may not be able to handle 4k 240fps 16 bit.

adrian_b4• 1 month ago

You are right that I have not mentioned this, but indeed wide color gamut monitors should also support 10 bit or better resolution per color component.

Software that does color processing should convert all input pixel formats into BT.2020 linear FP16 color components, do whatever processing is desired and convert from linear FP16 to whatever pixel format is sent directly to the monitor through DisplayPort/HDMI, as the last step.

I have not looked on the market to see how widespread are different kinds of monitor specifications nowadays.

I am using relatively cheap monitors, but not the cheapest, e.g. some common types of Dell monitors. There are more than ten years since my minimal requirements for a monitor have been 4k resolution, 10-bit color components and Display P3 color gamut and 60 Hz at 4k and 10-bit.

So I believe that, especially after a decade, it is easy to satisfy these minimal requirements or better, except that not everybody checks the monitor specifications when they buy one.

Aurornis• 1 month ago

Your monitor may not be able to handle 4k 240fps 16 bit.

10 bits per channel is the common target for higher color depth. The formats with 16 bits per channel are generally for image storage and allowing more bits for downstream transforms to avoid quantization. I don’t even know if there are video cards that would output 16 bits per channel, let alone panels for it.

ComputerGuru2• 1 month ago

These days cheaper monitors with only 8bpc support advertising higher color support use FRC to flicker between different 8-bit colors at a high enough rate to trick the vision receptors to seeing a mix between the two.

Separately, sorry to nitpick, but while wide gamut colors with only eight bits of data have lower resolution than sRGB, that doesn’t make them an inferior option. You might not be able to specify the exact shade but a) your effective accuracy is still greater and b) you trade that for greater range.

Just as an example, assume you have buckets of granularity 1 (sRGB) and 0.5 granularity (wide gamut). With only eight bits you can precisely select any individual bucket of granularity 1, whereas with only eight bits you sometimes miss the intended wide gamut 0.5 precision bucket and hit its neighbor instead (as if you had a granularity of 1 in this specific worst case). That doesn’t make it worse; you just aren’t taking full advantage. On top of that, your range with granularity one is, say, 200 to 800 while your “range” with the wide bucket is 0 to 1000 (just as an example).

There’s a reason photos or graphics saved as eight-bit png or jpeg still manage to look ten times better in a wide gamut profile than in sRGB (on a better-than-sRGB display).

rbanffy3• 1 month ago

4k 240fps

As a cinema enthusiast, I say 24 fps ought to be enough for anyone.

js22• 1 month ago

The full Rec. 2020 color space can be reproduced only with laser projectors, because it uses monochromatic primary colors.

All of the non-commercial triple laser projectors I'm aware of are single-chip DLP, so they suffer rainbow artifacts and have poor black levels. They're also liable to laser speckle[^1] if you're not careful on your screen selection.

The JVC (LCoS), Sony (LcoS) and Epson (LCD) laser projectors all use a single blue LED laser and phosphor wheel to make white light, then use prisms and filters to split it to RGB and can only get 87-98% of DCI P3. They have better blacks and no rainbow artifacts, but the color reproduction is not as complete.

Which is to say, it's still a compromise in projector land, unless you've got $400K for a https://www.christiedigital.com/products/projectors/all-proj...

[^1]: https://www.valerion.com/blog/triple-laser-speckle

drumdude• 1 month ago

Cinema RGB laser projectors are around $50,000. The cheaper non cinema versions are probably around $20,000.

jfengel• 1 month ago

As I understand it, JPEG cuts out a lot of detail in the blue range, because we don't see it as well. Is that due to the same thing as you're saying here?

Dwedit• 1 month ago

That has more to do with RGB -> YCbCr conversion, and how much blue contributes to Y (brightness). If you quantize YCbCr down to 8-bit range (0-255 range), you'll get RGB colors that can't survive a round trip back between RGB and YCbCr, but I don't think blue is particularly worse there.

JPEG is a different thing, first it does RGB -> YCbCr conversion, then it splits the image into blocks. Wikipedia article shows a good diagram of the 64 possible DCT blocks. Each image block becomes a linear combination of the DCT blocks. You did that for the Luma channel, then you do the same thing for the Chroma channels. It's even common to reduce the resolution of the chroma channels (chroma subsampling).

Then JPEG means that you are deleting information that is less popular after you've made your blocks. Often throwing out more information in the chroma channels than the luma channel. You're left with ringing (high frequency noise to fill the block), and blocking (differences between edges of adjacent blocks). Better compression codecs have ways of mitigating blocking and ringing.

kadoban• 1 month ago

Stupid question: does the computer or whatever the monitor is hooked up to need to know to do something special to then show those colors, or it's just normal rgb color levels and in a less-good-color-space monitor those would have been shifted to less accurate colors?

arendtio• 1 month ago

So I need a better setup to see HN with all its true colors?

SCNR

blincoln3• 1 month ago

The missing orange-red-purple corner appears small in the diagram in comparison with the missing blue-green corner, but in reality humans perceive much more different colors in the orange/red/purple corner, so the relation between those areas would be opposite in a uniform color space.

Do you know if this is why looking through a true green-blocking (pure magenta or purple) filter (e.g. Wratten 32, 33, or 34A) is such a different experience than a digital photo taken using the same filter?

Looking through those filters is extremely surreal for me, but I've not been able to capture anything like it with any camera.

rollulus• 1 month ago

What I missed in the article: the curves of the three “cone kinds” overlap. What if you could stimulate kinds of cones individually to see entirely new colors? Some people shoot layers at them into eyes. But you can also try this website: https://dynomight.net/colors/ (previously on HN but search fails me).

limbicsystem• 1 month ago

Through the magic of liner algebra it turns out that you can stimulate cones independently even with normal displays. Search for 'silent substitution'!

ProllyInfamous2• 1 month ago

Also search for "impossible chimerical colors"

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impossible_color#Chimerical_co...>

lefra2• 1 month ago

Last year a research group managed to do just that, see https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adu1052 for details.

mr_toad• 1 month ago

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

circadian• 1 month ago

I once abseiled into a crevasse while in Antarctica. The colours I saw in there were utterly breathtaking and I never knew why. Now I do, and this also tells mewhy the photos don't even remotely do it justice (aside from not being as big and three dimensional!)

Thanks for such a beautiful article about not looking at a screen: I'm off outside... :)

oersted• 1 month ago

Such a cool article chock-full of cool facts!

Nearly every species of scorpion intensely fluoresces under UV light. […] Scorpions have photoreceptors in their tails, separate from their eyes. […] It is hypothesized that a scorpion uses this fluorescence to tell whether any bit of its body is left exposed from its hiding place. Its tail “looks” down at its body, and if it sees its own fluorescence, it knows it is exposed to light, and in danger.

And a special call-out to the “Andean Cock-on-a-Rock” :), see a photo in the article.

sam_lowry_• 1 month ago

Impressionist paintings used a lot of synthetic ultramarine, they look very different IRL. There is a whole room in the Orsay museum where paintings seem to glow from the inside in the dark.

Sharlin• 1 month ago

Great article. Small nitpick though: while I understand that P3 deserves specific mention because it’s so ubiquitous now, it’s not like Apple invented the idea of wide-gamut displays. Adobe RGB, commonly used by wide-gamut computer monitors, in particular is noteworthy in the context of this article because it extends further into the blue-cyan-green than P3,

Stitch4223• 1 month ago

The phosphor screen of a B&O MX8000 TV (a Philips tube) was unlike any I’ve ever seen in terms of cyan intensity. That was in 2020 while the tv is from the 1980’s. Playing Donkey Kong on it was totally different than any other screen. It was like a Morpho butterfly, but in the article it is pointed out that phosphor screens have limited color range.

Triangles between screens may differ with tuning, but I suppose they all are limited in range. I’ve yet to experiment if this experience was a “brand experience” because I liked the TV or that the colors are indeed more intense than even some HDR/DV flat screen from the past few years.

This article was so well written that it gives a lot of energy to make this comparison for real. Absolutely masterful writing and all of the plenty examples make me want to look for colors I’ve missed out on while watching so many screens.

What the article does very well is vibrantly describe what you are missing and then post an image of it, such as a beach. Looking at that image, it falls absolutely flat compared to memories and the imagination of those places. This makes it tangible how limited screens really are.

Edit: added last paragraph

strogonoff• 1 month ago

I’m not sure it’s possible to truthfully describe what we are missing in reality with a photo.

You can publish a photo with default automatic JPEG processing, say by a phone, and it will certainly look flat. You could also present a masterful interpretation of raw sensor data that uses the most out of the available display space, and the impression might be different.

There is no objectively correct way to represent reality in a photo; even the concept of neutral grey is not a real thing as soon as perception is concerned. A default camera interpretation of light is baseline and safe to maximally avoid awkward edge cases. We all know that time we photograph a bright pink sunset but our phone renders it as pale yellow or orange. However, give the same shot human attention, and even though it may never be as pink as what you have perceived in reality it will pop enough that the viewer will have a similar response.

It is photographer’s job to work raw data in specific ways and make what impressed you stand out to your audience, arranging colours both relative to each other and in absolute display space, however limited it is. Human eyes are incredibly adaptive: we lower our relevant thresholds, adjust our idea of neutral grey—in short, we adapt to given display medium, to given photographic style, etc., and in the end perceive a true lush lagoon in a photo even if our eyes only receive a truly minuscule amount of colour range present in the scene.

Giefo6ah• 1 month ago

The original 1953 NTSC standard specified phosphors with a way bigger gamut than sRGB, that were chosen to approximate the gamut of film projectors.

Original NTSC cyans are more saturated than even DCI-P3 cyans.

Typical CRTs use the cheaper, brighter phosphors specified by SMPTE C (the basis for the sRGB gamut) and a circuit that pumps the saturation to compensate.

It's likely your screen uses the better phosphors instead of a colour correction circuit.

arbourtrary• 1 month ago

Very well written, super interesting topic. I never understood all these natural reasons why real life colors feel so much more vivid. I guess when I look outside of the rgb triangle in the graphic, the cyans/blues/greens shown (since I'm seeing this on a screen) are sort of shadow colors? Approximations without the full vibrancy?

Macha2• 1 month ago

I guess when I look outside of the rgb triangle in the graphic, the cyans/blues/greens shown (since I'm seeing this on a screen) are sort of shadow colors? Approximations without the full vibrancy?

So there's 3 options you have for rendering the colours outside the sRGB space in this kind of image.

1. Don't. This is usually the most honest, and what all but the first diagram in this article opts for.

2. Clamping. You just set the green component to 255 for every colour beyond green=255, which effectively looks like you extend the edges of the triangle to the edge of the visual range. This is the most common, and the approach used in the article's first image, but it's basically a lie. Some articles will dumb the out of range colors to make it clear they're not the real colour, but this article's first image doesn't.

3. HDR: If the author uses an image format capable of decoding HDR data, and your browser, OS and monitor, and the author's authoring pipeline are all correctly configured to pass through that HDR data, you can get a bit more colour, depending on your monitor. Not the full visible gamut, but up to whatever colorspace your monitor is using.

card_zero• 1 month ago

My debatable factoid is that all vision is movement-dependent, including human vision, and so the bigness and wonderfulness of the tyrannosaur's eyes is beside the point of whether it needed its prey to move around in order to perceive it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stabilized_images , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixation_(visual) , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsaccade

We fake the movement of anything we're staring at, by means of tiny automatic eye movements, in order to remain able to see the thing at all.

kowbell• 1 month ago

These are really interesting.

I've noticed when I'm spacing out and staring at a single point for a while that there's some kind of "tunnel vision" that develops, where everything besides the small point I'm looking at starts to darken and if I shift my body suddenly everything that was fading will "refresh." I always thought it felt similar to when a particularly bright light "burns in" your vision for a moment. Sounds a lot like the phenomenon described in the Stabilized Image article. Neat stuff!

fmajid4• 1 month ago

Today, on your way home, look at the “green” light on a traffic signal. It’s not green.

Independently from this, the names for colors are culturally determined.

The Japanese call green traffic lights as 青 "ao", blue.

Russians have different terms for different shades of blue.

qingcharles• 1 month ago

This is a good point. Here's the article on the weirdness of blue/green in different cultures:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue%E2%80%93green_distinction...

analog8374• 1 month ago

Colors on the screen are like symbols. Like words. they aren't the actual experience. They evoke the experience. Your mind connects the color to a memory and then it's the memory that you experience.

That's screen reality. 1% evocative symbols and 99% in your head.

icemelt8• 1 month ago

what a beautiful article, thoroughly enjoyed reading it.

dkeners• 1 month ago

This reminds me of a video [1] going over the use of structural color photography, where theoretically what you see in real life is what you get in your final image. It cover some of the same topics, but goes more in depth about the process of structural color and some animal examples, like the butterfly mentioned in the article. If you have an interest in chemistry or film photography it is a great watch! This process was also, to my knowledge, the stepping stone for holograms, which we can now see structural colors everyday on IDs and licenses.

[1] (18 minutes) https://youtu.be/-DyrBDsKA5s

gumboshoes• 1 month ago

"The eyespots on a peacock’s train are super cyan, so when the peacock spreads its train feathers it is going super saiyan super cyan." Haha.

lukewarm7072• 1 month ago

interesting, nicely written article. if you want to replicate the colors, you can use wider gamut end to end:

- use raw format on the camera

- edit raw eg pro photo rgb

- send this to a wide gamut printer with a large set of inks to view the image

the printer would replicate the color outside the srgb space

there are such inks as cyan, light cyan, orange

krick• 1 month ago

Really enjoyed the article, even though it's not a new topic to me, but still it was very interesting, very nicely written and I still managed to pick up a couple of new details.

To be fair to Jurassic Park, though, at least in the book the quirks of T-Rex's vision were explained by the details of genetic engineering (the base DNA used was some kind of amphibian, that allegedly had this problem — still not very scientifically plausible, but not quite as silly as in the movie). It goes a long way to emphasize that in the end these are not real dinosaurs, these are human-made abominations.

ralfd2• 1 month ago

Doesnt Dr Grant scare a kid in the beginning with the Velociraptor and say there that T Rex vision was movement based? I wonder if Chrichton made that up or if it was a real theory by paleaologists?

fortran77• 1 month ago

I'm having an amazing time seeing colors now because I just had cataract surgery on my right eye (left eye next month) and have a clear lens again. If I compare my new right eye to my old left eye, I'm seeing colors I haven't seen in decades. Skies look blue with my right eye, gray with my left.

It's odd he noted Apple monitiers were "better". Maybe but marginally. Many options for other platforms, like Asus Pro Arte, beat it handily. And profressional color graders use Sony BVM series (Trimaster HX / OLED) for HDR or Flanders Scientific (FSI) DM/XM series or Eizo ColorEdge CG series. You won't see a single Mac at a movie studio for movie editing or color grading.

blincoln3• 1 month ago

If you haven't already, you should do some tests to see if you can see UV-A now. Some replacement lenses are UV-transparent.

Dandelions in sunlight are an easy option, at least in my part of the world. If your replacement lens is UV-transparent, dandelions should have a very distinct colour difference between the center and outer parts of the petals, instead of a mostly-uniform yellow.

pcrh• 1 month ago

Very well-written!

I wonder if the inaccurate representation of colors by screens, etc, in any way underlies the distinctive color palette of many AI image generators?

ProllyInfamous2• 1 month ago

When reading the article, 520nm light is closest in color reproduction to the "yellowgreen" Crayola color, as seen within their 64-pack.

divvsaxena• 1 month ago

Reading this made me realize how much of my day is spent looking at screens. It's weird to think there are colors in the world that I've technically seen before, but have never actually been able to capture or reproduce digitally.

Yinameah• 1 month ago

Incredible article. I used to work as a light designer and therefore spent lot of time thinking about colors and training my eyes to see them more precisely. I lost some of this competency surprisingly quickly, but this article brought many great feelings/souvenirs back.

Thanks to the author

AdamH12113• 1 month ago

My favorite color in all the world is the green of a mineral called dioptase. It's a deep, dark green, richer than an emerald. It looks amazing in real life and utterly boring on an RGB display. The Houston Museum of Natural Science has a large sample; every time I'm there I go stare at it for a while.

whiw• 1 month ago

If we had a display with n (n>3) pixel colours, say (red, green, cyan, blue) for example, we could display more of the colour space. Shopping list: 4 colour channel display, 4 channel GPU, 4 channel software. Why isn't this a thing already?

mceachen• 1 month ago

More than 3 channel displays have been attempted by several companies, but I suspect they fail due to:

1) trying to convince content makers to use new custom high-gamut hardware to capture the new spot colors

2) you'd need a full video content production pipeline that can render to that color space

3) finding enough people to care enough to pay the (substantial) premium for niche production numbers.

4) Most content just doesn't warrant high gamut unless it's narrated by David Attenborough.

So, you have both a chicken and egg problem, and not that big of a TAM to warrant the struggle.

zahlman2• 1 month ago

5) You'd need image formats that record those channels, and that in turn would cause problems for raw bitmaps with alpha (they either get twice as big or the pixels are no longer aligned).

garaetjjte• 1 month ago

I hate that type of diagrams. Why sRGB-encoded image, pretends to show any color outside of sRGB region? It doesn't make any sense! (and when these diagrams attempt to illustrate sRGB, often actual colors encoded are narrower than full sRGB)

ricardobeat• 1 month ago

Many modern triple-laser projectors can reproduce or exceed the Rec. 2020 color space. It's still not full coverage but much larger than P3.

zahlman2• 1 month ago

Couldn't we capture more of it by just using a slightly bluer green phosphor?

thadk• 1 month ago

Somewhat related, but TIL the macOS Screenshot.app utility (and the system wide keyboard shortcuts) in Sonoma got HDR capability to help re-convey just a bit more fidelity. Even in PNG, it keeps the display profile, just not HDR.

Open Utilities->Screenshot.app Options->Capture/Capture Format->HEIC. Note, it changes the system screenshot default away from PNG too.

mrgaro• 1 month ago

Great article! After reading I started to think there must be some purchable items which would demonstrate colours outside P3 colorspace. It would be cool to hold one on your hand and experience how a photo of it just cannot do justice.

Anybody know any links to webshops for such items?

Macha2• 1 month ago

There's a few dyes (mostly pinks and cyans) that are outside sRGB space (though once you apply them to a material, that combination of material and dye might be fine), Tom Scott had a video a few years ago, though I don't know if that particular dye/seller is still going:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_NzVmtbPOrM

There's also Vantablack and similar ultra-black dyes which are a somewhat adjacent phenomena but in the same category of "colors your screen can't display". The most black a pixel can be is "off" (and that's only achievable if the display is on if your screen is an OLED), and the back coating of your screen is probably not as black as those dyes.

hyttioaoa• 1 month ago

My two most favorite and most seldomly seen colors are near uv. One of them is a blue sky at an altitude of over 3000m. The other was a powerful deep blue laser in a microscopy lab, just on the end of the visible spectrum

m30473• 1 month ago

One of the things which is unaccounted for in both printing and lighting is florescence.

anfilt3• 1 month ago

I can tell you there are some places people do notice that a screen can't reproduce all the colors they can see.

Anyone who has mixed paint at hardware store or paint store with a modern paint machine will eventually notice this. A of lot them have a spectrometer to match color from a sample. The software often has a preview that appears on a screen of the sample color. That preview color is often not quite the same and it's often either the limit of the sRGB color space or the monitor.

The data from the spectrometers is eventually converted to CIELAB color points with a D65 white point. Then that little preview needs to be converted to sRGB to display it or some colorspace the system supports.

There also some problems with the LAB colorspace, but they are minuet compared tot the limits of sRGB and display hardware.

m30473• 1 month ago

From the person who brought us Dark Breakfast!

assimpleaspossi• 1 month ago

Can you see them with film? Either projected or on photographic paper.

gwbas1c2• 1 month ago

What about equipment with more than three primaries: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_depth#More_than_three_pr...

gwbas1c2• 1 month ago

A lot of this comes across similar to describing how the upper range of human hearing is 27khz, not 20khz and commonly believed, and where to hear these.

Hint: If you listen to a live orchestra without amplification, and the sound "sparkles", it's because of the frequencies slightly above 20khz that are normally filtered out of audio CDs and streaming music.

jackbucks• 1 month ago

Humans have no color memory.

Seeking out obscure colors or unique ones is a fools errand.

rustcleaner• 1 month ago

Can't this be fixed by adding a cyan to RGB, making RGcB? Or, even adding yellow and magenta for RyGcBm?

Where to Find the Colors Your Screen Can't Show You

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