Humanity
has long held the ability to see in high regard. Visual descriptions invade
language, entertainment, art (obviously), and numerous other areas. Someone is
blind? Help them learn what a visual is, then proceed to describe everything in
visual terminology. How does one see “correctly” without being able to “see”?
But that’s not the point. The point is, that visuals are very important to
humanity. But one of the most important aspects of these visuals is the color.
Here’s a cave painting… the color has degraded so now only the ash is left. So
there was color even in the earliest moments of humanities struggle to become
relevant. But if a visual is so important, and color is an important aspect of
visuals, then would not color be the most important?
Indeed
it would. An easy example being the colors used by royalty, such as purple, as
it was expensive and hard to produce. So is color standardized? Very much so,
but it is young in the realm of visual development, coming to fruition in 1931.
The challenge with color is that physics has already defined it as a wavelength
of light that is perceptible to humans. There are also standards in pigments
used in clothing, art, and numerous other fields. Lastly, its 1931, numerous
years have already been spent on defining colors and much of society has
already come to agreement on what is certain colors.
The
standardization of color has instead become a definition of what a visual
wavelength of light can be perceived as. This is primarily because color is both a physical property and a
physiological one. Between various individuals who pioneered light research
such as Thomas Young and James Clerk Maxwell defined the colors that the human
eye can actually identify as being red, green, and blue. Originally, Isaac Newton had deducted that
red, yellow, and blue were the primary colors and, while evidence exists that
yellow is not a primary, it has remained dogma within art and color theory.
Red,
green, and blue became a standard for color definitions, at least informally. But
this standard only applies to humans, as animals may/do see different
wavelengths of light and thus different colors then humans. For the sake of
simplicity, only the human spectrum of visible colors were used for what became
known as CIE 1931 RGB color space. This is actually used to derive, and used as
a basis for CIE 1931 XYZ color space, which eventually encompassed the RGB
color space. What XYZ is defined as is the visible light spectrum, as perceived
by humans, onto a 3D plane and visualized as a 2D deformed triangle.
What
made this important, is that there is now a mathematical definition for what we
see. Since that time, any electronic device can visualize a specific range of
that color. Pigments and colors used in print and any non-electronic device now
have a reference color range they can fall back to. An person can look at a
computer and say “this is red”, give it to an artist who will say “this is red”,
have their car painted and go “this is red” and then, give it to a scientist
who will say “this is red”. But it isn’t an interpreted red or a shade or red,
it is “red”. The finite mathematical definition of red. If it cannot be mapped
to this weird triangle, it cannot be viewed by a majority, if not all of
humanity and possible not even by animals.
This
standard has become the basis for numerous other color standards such as CIE
RGB, used for computers, CYMK, used for printed media, YCbCr, used for TV,
movies, etc., L’A’B’, used by physicists and scientists, and numerous others.
As someone who has been doing a lot of work lately with pictures and how to
change them from one form to another, without you, the viewer, knowing the
images are different, I’ve had to do a lot of studying of this to make sure
that everything looks correct and works correctly. It’s not exactly an exciting
work, but because of the standard of colors, CIE 1931 XYZ, and the derived
color spaces, you’ll never know that any of this is happening, but you’ll also
never see it differently across print, electronics, or wherever else you see
anything that is colored. Heck, when you close your eyes, the “color” you see
is defined and can be visualized too…
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