How software gets color wrong

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2021-05-26 04:00:05

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

As you can see, the sRGB example looks quite different. As the colors blend they shift to be much darker and bluer. Why is the standard way for blending colors different from both human perception and the physical behavior of light?

As it turns out, the reason is that the color representation used in most software is based on how CRT displays in the 1990s worked. How color processing works is just a consequence of that representation. Because of this, working with color in software is harder than it needs to be and there are many unnecessary pitfalls working with image processing.

The rest of this post will cover the basics of how color perception works, how it is modelled in software and how almost all software, doing any sort of color manipulation, gets color wrong.

Color is a peculiar thing. Everyday and all around us we perceive color. It wouldn’t be odd to expect color to be simple to explain and that relating it to the world around us would be easy. Instead color perception is a complicated process that takes a spectrum of light through complex and non-linear transformations. Thankfully, centuries of research has produced a decent understanding of this process and models for predicting perception exist.

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