Nathan Willis

Nathan Willis at

I think there are people out there who genuinely think that RGB captures every possible color value.
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I'm just gonna start with this: who said anything about the rods or cones in the human eye?

Nathan Willis at 2017-07-05T23:07:22Z

If you didn't mean "is able to reproduce every possible sensation of color in the human eye" but literally "is able to represent every frequency of light" then yeah, they're way off.

clacke@libranet.de ❌ at 2017-07-06T07:00:02Z

I want to be able to use the sliders on my photo editor, so that when I start with a shot where something in the shadows was too dark for my eye to see, I can still slide the brightness up and recover color. So that's imperative.

Moreover, a "color" is not simply an electromagnetic frequency. A color that is recorded by any receiver (living or mechanical) may be the combination of many light sources of different types (and frequencies) reflecting off of the same surface. Which is why lightbulbs get rated with CRI numbers that (allegedly) tell you that your deep orange retro-Edison bulb will make everything in your house look different than your Phillips Daylight LED bulb.

Nathan Willis at 2017-07-06T08:28:14Z

(You actually also don't have 'red cones' and 'green cones'; that's a confusion just caused by the fact that there are three of them. The sensitivities overlap considerably, and the opponent process in the brain compares and contrasts them to arrive at the signal that you ultimately see. But all that's a side issue, apart from the fact that if you actually look at a chromaticity diagram, it isn't triangular.)

Nathan Willis at 2017-07-06T08:43:52Z