Towards richer colors on the Web | Darker Ink

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2021-07-01 22:30:06

This article will talk about the ongoing efforts to specify richer colors on the Web platform, plus some ideas about directions for future development on Blink/Chromium.

The study of color brings together ideas from physics (how light works), biology (how our eyes see), computing, and more. There is a long and rich history following the desire to be able to use richer materials and colors when creating visual art, and the same is true of the Web today.

A color space is a way to describe and organize colors so they can be identified and reproduced with accuracy. Some color spaces are more or less arbitrary (e.g. the Pantone collection) but the ones that we will focus on are based on detailed mathematical descriptions.

These color spaces consist of a mathematical color model that specifies how colors are described (i.e. as tuples of numbers) and a precise description of how those components are to be interpreted.

The range of colors that a hardware display is able to show is called its gamut. When we want to show an image that uses a larger color space than that gamut, its colors will have to be mapped to the ones that can be actually displayed: this process is called gamut mapping.