The Amazing Math behind Colors!

[@rsa5991]

There is one important thing, that is easy to miss: the values 0..255 in "RGB" are *not* true RGB values - they are square roots of RGB values! That means, that the "middle" value of 128 is not 50%, but only 25% brightness. If you mix colors in that non-linear "RGB", you'll get darker colors, than they should be! The reason for that is CRT monitors, that had quadratic response to input voltage. To save money on consumer side, they decided to put correction on the production side. Also, human perception is more sensitive to darker colors, so it was also a kind of proto-compression. This is the #1 mistake of programmers, who work with colors - it has even snuck in a common software, like browsers. If you mix two RGB values, you should always square them first, mix, and then sqare root them. * To be exact, they are not even square roots, they are 2.2-degree roots.

[@mina86]

To be extra pedantic, they aren’t even 2.2-degree roots. sRGB gamma compression function is piecewise of a linear function at low values and exponential with 2.4 power. ;)

[@bob-ny6kn]

Interesting. What is your preferred source?

[@aaabbb-gu5pz]

Interesting and important information, please recommend some book with detailed description!

[@rsa5991]

@@aaabbb-gu5pz ​ @bob Sorry, cannot help you, as I did not get this information from a book. But searching for the term "sRGB" should point in the right direction.

[@aaabbb-gu5pz]

@@rsa5991 thank you, will research more and this video is excellent guide.

[@notexactlysiev]

This is probably the best explanation of color on the internet. And believe me I've watched/read so many. But none of them answered all the questions I had about color vision and color spaces as clearly and as detailed as this one. Brilliant. Looking forward to watching the rest of your stuff!

[@user4241]

Yeah, but this video has some important mistakes. For example, cyan actually *is* in the visible color spectrum, it's just that the picture is wrong.

[@BogdanBaudis]

@@user4241 Be careful when you say "spectrum", because it may mean the part of electromagnetic field oscillations (photons) which human eye can detect or the gamut of colors which people sense. Both overlap but not in a simple way; for example: people sense colors which they cannot find in the physical spectrum. Sensed color is a psycho-physiological phenomenon, a result of physical stimuli but only after many stages of processing. There is some evidence that that it may be even social. Quite often people cannot agree of what color some thing actually is ...(remember the Great "Blue" Dress Debate?)

[@FuriousTortoise]

Kuvina explained this in the video so it’s likely user4241 made it 5:20 into this 42:34 length masterclass, threw their hands up, and bounced. The “spectrum” is the slice of visible wavelengths along the electromagnetic spectrum (wavelengths are monochromatic by definition). Kuvina explained this is the reason we utilize normalized responsivity to construct the “visible gamut” from perceived color. The vast majority of colors we perceive in everyday life are not single wavelengths so this derived gamut allows us to populate the rest of that color space in a mathematically sound way. Bonus that it maps onto our “Newton’s prism spectrum” in a way Newton would likely nut over. TLDR: Kuvina explained that the band of color dispersed from a prism are not monochromatic (unlike a mathematically exact nm spectral chart) and this dispersion and subsequent retinal perception creates that cyan (and many others) user4241 said Kuvina left out.

[@BogdanBaudis]

@@FuriousTortoise You correct. In fact 40 or so minutes is way not enough to cover the subject of color perception and production. My 1st experience with it was reading a (East?) German (translated to Polish) book on the subject a long time ago, but with beautiful illustrations, it was "only" 400 pages long and it did not cover yet the computer vision or the newer neuroscience. But it went deep in the reproduction of the color in print and photography. Unfortunately I cannot recall the title ... Long story short this subject calls for at least a two-semester course 🙂

[@FuriousTortoise]

@@BogdanBaudissure is! Maybe even a lifelong pursuit 😉. I have a bunch of color theory and vision books. My prize is first edition “A Color Notation” by Munsell with all the plates. I’ve got some key books by Itten, Josef Albers, Gage, and James Gurney too. Beyond that we have a new wealth from graphic designers and CGI experts! They’re arguably more in tune with color than most painters in physical media because of how demanding their job is over realistic representation.

[@chair547]

I've heard claims floating around that you can see invisible Colors by abusing the fact that when neurons fire too often their outputs are ignored by the brain. The idea is, for example for hyper green you can stare at a red image for a long time until the neurons that carry short cone information are deactivated and then quickly switch to a green image while those neurons are still deactivated and that will let you see hyper green but I don't know how true it is

[@frechjo]

It is true, you can try it, it's easy to do. And there are other weird color phenomenons you can experience in similar ways, like seeing something simultaneously as two opponent colors. Super fun.

[@scottwilliams8851]

Since it's all in your head, you get to decide what it is. Have confidence in your choice, because no one can prove you wrong unless you let them. You will find some people will agree with your interpretation and some won't. Only listen to opinions that are based on emotion if they come from people whose emotions are more important than your own. For them, you can state, "With limited exceptions, this is the truth" and continue to think the way you do now. If people argue with you and they have numbers rather than emotions on their side, be open to what they say and let it percolate in your mind. You get to choose whether your opinion has changed, remains the same, or is enhanced based on what you recently learned.

[@PeterHarveyUK]

I am approaching the age of seventy. I have found myself confused over the course of my conscious life by every account of colour that I have ever come across. This is the very first account of colour which I have found comprehensible. It is the best thing on the subject I have ever seen. I learned an immense amount from this video, the conistent quality of which astonishes me. I salute you, Kuvina Saydaki. Thank you, thank you, thank you!

[@davidhawkeye2298]

A year on and I find myself in a very similar position with regard to colour science. I agree completely with your sentiments.

[@haipingcao2212_.]

You're -old-

[@demikweer]

I was going to comment exactly that, superb quality explanation

[@NORMAL_ACCOUNT...]

you look like the kfc logo

[@PeterHarveyUK]

@@NORMAL_ACCOUNT... Thinner, I'd say. Probably attributable to my avoiding KFC.

[@Kavukamari]

ive been reading stupid scientific papers about CIELAB and all these color spaces for months but this is the first time ive genuinely felt like i had an intuitive understanding on this topic. Thank you.

[@TheOneMaddin]

Interestingly, the light from the sun is not just white by coincidence. But we evolved to see it as white. If the sun would be hotter, therefore more bluish, we would probably have evolved to still see it as white. Same with more red stars.

[@ace4x3]

I'm so happy this got recommended to me. This video is criminally underrated!! The quality is insane. Thank you for making this. It was a very interesting watch. You have a very good sense for explaining things :D

[@aaabbb-gu5pz]

And I'm shock about the youtube recommendations. It simply HIDEs the information that the customer searches! Why, google?! 😈😡

[@MrFloydian]

As a colorblind person, I cannot understand why a color has two names, red and green.

[@PeterNerlich]

This is so amazing, I'm not even halfway through but this is exactly what I need. I've been learning a lot how to think about colors not only in RGB/HEX values for websites but for print over the last year, but I knew I was missing some solid fundamentals. I'm at the CIE 1931 xy Cromaticity Diagram right now, I think once I reach the end of the video I'll be totally enlightened :D

[@Kuvina]

thank you! I'd like to think my videos are things people didn't know they needed.

[@MrApolloTom]

A really excellent video. As a painter I would like to add a bit about subtractive mixing. C, M, and Y are a good compromise set of primary subtractive colours but don't really make the definitive three primaries in the same way that additive primaries do. One reason is that when they're mixed, there's a loss of saturation, so while you can make a version of every hue with CMY, you can't mix every colour at full saturation. For this reason painters will often choose different primaries in their palette. With orangy red and a yellow you can make a more saturated range of oranges, but won't be able to make a strong purple with the red. With magenta, yellow, and an ultramarine blue you can make a better range of strong purples than CMY but only a duller orange or turquoise. The second issue with subtractive mixing is that you get the wavelengths that the two primaries share in common. If you had a hypothetical red pigment that reflected a pure red wavelength only, and an equivalent blue, they would mix to black! But you could have a red and a blue that look exactly the same to the eye, but that reflect more of a mix of wavelenths. These would mix to a purple of some sort. The conclusion is you can't predict exactly how subtractive pigments will mix just by their visual appearance! Thanks and best wishes, Tom

[@user4241]

In theory, mixing CMY pigments shouldn't make the colors loose saturation. In practice and in my experience (with my printer, lol) blues and greens usually loose saturation, but reds and pinks are excellent. It would be interesting to see the result of mixing high-purity cyan, magenta, and yelllow pigments.

[@scottwilliams8851]

Some ancient artists mixed ground up glass into their paints. Light reflects off it and makes the color look brighter.

[@AJMansfield1]

This is an excellent introduction to color math! I would love to see a part 2 to this as well, covering things like Color Rendering Index (CRI), perceptual color spaces (CIELAB, HSLuv, etc), and the different types of colorblindness. Colorblindness especially is something that's often misunderstood as a complete lack of color-processing ability, where in the most common forms just have a slight shift in the response curves for M cones (as in deuteranomaly) or L cones (as in protanomaly) so they overlap way more -- effectively, making the red-to-green side of the chromaticity chart "shorter".

[@vaclavtrpisovsky]

Yes, the CRI being left out is a bit unfortunate, as is the omission of white LEDs. Otherwise, this is a great source for the basics of how color _actually_ works, and I understand that conciseness was the priority this time.

[@LumenPlacidum]

For years I gave a project to my Linear Algebra classes to research and describe how vectors and linear transformations have to do with supposed "color spaces". Congratulations! You've beaten them all 😂. This is officially one of my favorite videos on KZbin.

[@jacksong8748]

Wow, this video really unified my understanding of color! Not just on screens, but in general. The explanations of the relationships between the ways we represent and model color were succinct and clear. I came in with a decent grasp of most of these concepts, but this really drove home the connections between them all, thank you!!

[@xanderlinhares]

This is so good. You don’t know how many times I’ve tried to fully understand a chromaticity diagram. Well done!

[@athko]

this is so well made :D

[@Kuvina]

thank you!

[@jan_Eten]

@@Kuvina Ðe binary says *:) i love you

[@Kuvina]

@@jan_Eten Thank you! I believe you're the first one to translate it!

[@jan_Eten]

@@Kuvina I love your videos, and are excited for Explaining Every Sorting Algorithm (part 3). I use ðe set of colors wiþ 3-depþ (where r, g, and b can all be eiðer 0%, 50%, or 100%), but will use ðe colors wiþ 5-depþ (adding 25% and 75%) when necessary. My favorite color is azure (#0080FF). Also, my pfp is my own personal flag.

[@HopefullyJustMe]

@@jan_EtenYou use þ and ð intentionally? Absolute legend 🫡

[@StellaByLuna]

Congrats on being one of the SoME2 honorable mentions! This video was fantastic as are the rest of your videos, I hope you make many more in the future

[@Kuvina]

thank you so much!

[@nathanruiz3424]

I love these kinds of in depth videos. Litterally everything you know about colors is in this video. You have answer all my questions I had about color, introduced new questions, then solved those as well. Great Job!

[@lishlash3749]

Excellent analysis of chromaticity and RGB color theory, which explains the physiological response of the eye to visible light. For your next project, I'd suggest an exploration of Opponent Color Theory, which explains the brain's psychological response to color and the phenomenon of metamericism. Briefly, the optic nerves between the eye and brain combine the RGB components from the cone cells into sum and difference vectors which the brain interprets as a pair of orthogonal color axes: a red-green axis and a yellow-blue axis. Each distinct area of color in the visual field is mapped into a position on each axis according to its chromaticity relative to its perceived background. These two-axis coordinates are interpreted by the brain as the metamerical hue of each perceived area of the visual field. Opponent color theory explains how different RGB combinations can produce the perception of the same psychological hue. Also why we can perceive shades such as greenish-blue and reddish-purple, but not yellowish-blue or greenish-red.

[@davehowe6685]

You’ve answered so many of the questions I’ve collected over decades of work with color in information technology! I finally understand how a spectral range from red to violet is perceived/represented in a color wheel. You’ve even answered questions I hadn’t considered. Thank you!

[@ItsRyanStudios]

This is awesome I'm a scientist/ engineer and also an oil painter. I'm fascinated by the intersection of the two. Having an understanding of color science has made painting much more intuitive, while having an artistic eye for color has made life so much more interesting, since every play of light and color in daily life, is so much more apparent.

[@Creepystutorials]

This video blew my mind!! Everything there is to say, everything there is to explain in ONE VIDEO! Spittin' out facts and entire collections of knowledge like a waterfall, just as you go. Incredible.

[@knave369]

I am currently learning about art, color theory and its use in painting. I have a lot of professional books and I have searched half the internet to understand what exactly causes the impression of value in color. Although your video does not deal with it in detail, it was the only one that allowed me to come to the right conclusions myself. Incredibly professional approach to the subject! Thank you! 💚

[@markbordelon1601]

The pace, scope, sequence of presentation are perfect in this video. Would that all instructional videos were like this! You would be that person who could adequately and succinctly explain quantum mechanics in a video.

[@jimmylightfinger1216]

This was a great submission...so much ground to cover on a subject of great complexity and some subjectivity. I much appreciate how it was concluded with the cone representation: neat amd tidy.

[@mdlhvn]

This video is greatly helpful for me and my students in the course "Chemistry and Physics of Colors" at Soka University of America. Thank you very much!

[@kevin.stiller]

One of the most thoughtful and comprehensive videos on KZbin about color. Amazing!

[@Kuvina]

Thank you so much!

[@chengong388]

This is the best explanation of color space, especially how there are areas with a corresponding LMS activation values but impossible to see, always wondered about those.

[@elidoz9522]

in the video is mentioned the super-green which is impossible to see in theory, but actually you can. you can look into a magenta color with high value and high saturation to get the red and blue cones tired, then you look at green, and there won't be those red and blue cones in your way (not as much, it's still impossible, but you can get close to it)

[@TupperWallace]

@@elidoz9522 Very interesting idea! So afterimages formed by selective color viewing could open up a whole new perceptive color gamut. Someone with understanding of cone-tiring could make a unique video of impossible colors by alternating certain bright colors with a white screen. New frontiers in psychedelics!!

[@JeffHanke]

Great video! I'll add one thing I discovered while looking into colors: painters refer to a color mixed with white a "tint" (e.g. ice, mint, ivory, etc. in the diagram), with gray a "tone", and with black a "shade" (e.g. navy, burgundy, pine, etc. in the diagram). They can be useful when designing a color scheme.

[@LuisAldamiz]

Very nice and complete explanation, TY. I must say that I'm so familiar with RGB that HSV is a puzzle to me, totally non-intuitive. But to each one their own.

[@renegadethesandwing02050]

this is by far my new favorite math channel 11/10 videos

[@Zero-4793]

this video validates so many of my thoughts, and complaints. i absolutely agree with you about ROYGBIV and i didnt know the history. i always wondered why they ignore cyan.

[@gregmark1688]

The very moment I was thinking "Is he going to leave _anything_ out?" you broke out an explanation of converting hex to decimal. It just doesn't get any better than this.

[@SoloOfficial95]

blud they're non-binary

[@strawberry_cake1703]

​@@tenebrae711you're so sad

[@HopeOrLunarEclipse]

@@tenebrae711Well you still should respect their pronouns. SoloX_official was just trying to inform someone who may not have known. I do like your profile though.

[@m_affiliates]

@@SoloOfficial95as someone who has read the channel description I can confirm they use they/them

[@angrymidget4728]

This is single handedly the best, most robust, comprehensive and informative video about colors in all of the internet! I hate that the algorithm took 10 freaking months to bring this to my feed! I was geeking out throughout the whole thing. The marriage of the topics of arts (color), physics (waves), biology (perception), chemistry (pigments), astronomy (stars), computer science (hex & HSV) and math has never been this seamless and well connected in any video I've encountered. It clearly shows how much you yourself have been intrigued in these topics and how much you've thought about the relationships between it all, and as someone with shared interests, I literally turned into the neuron activation and pointing rick dalton memes every other minute. Not only that, but every time you went onto a small tangent, you made sure to sprinkle in a "well, no, actually" and proceeded to make the viewers informed about the intricacies of the tangent instead of simplifying it too much and moving on. (For example, fact about responsivity and normalized was new to me. And also Newton taking a dumb liberty + supernumerary bands forming purple. And also how Sun's spectrum isn't ideal due to non-uniformly traveling light.) Absolutely outstanding job! If I were to provide some suggestions, the first would be at about 11:45 where you start introducing colors (purple) outside the curve. You could've sprinkled in stuff like how the light waves, the conversion of light to signals, and the interpretation of signals to color are independent phenomena. Meaning, the brain doesn't care whether it is sensing 'light', but only that it's receiving some kind of 'signal' about the environment. Consequently, if the brain is receiving a signal that peaks at the short and long cones, it will find a way to interpret that as well. But how would the eye even manage to sense receive light that simultaneously triggers both cones if all the wavelengths in the visible spectrum only trigger colors in the curve? And the answer to that would your explanation for monochromatic and polychromatic light. I think it would be a great transitional segment to your excellent presentation. There's nothing wrong with your explanation. It's just that as someone who has studied this topic, I can fill in the gaps with my own knowledge, but a beginner might not. I think it would be cool to let viewers know that not only are colors non-existent/imaginative in nature, but also that the color purple quite literally doesn't even exist! Like, it's not even an interpretation of wavelengths by the brain but something the brain just made up! *cue exploding brain* The second suggestion would be at 30:10 where you brush over the luminance part. I am personally not well-informed about the details in this specific part, so I just accepted it as is. A bit more could've been nice. And also about how light polarization is utilized in LEDs. Anyways, this comment is long enough and you probably won't even see it. I just wanted to express my appreciation for the work and informative quality you've put into this video. You've made my day!

[@Kuvina]

Thank you so much! I do in fact read every comment, and this is possibly the most comprehensive one I've received!

[@savagesarethebest7251]

LED does not need to utilise polarisation, LCD does. In a short version you could say it is a bastardisation of subtractive and additive colours.. 🤔 An LCD works by shining white light through a liquid crystal, and because of the polarisation that is applied by that sub pixels value it will be blocked by the fixed polarisation filter. A fun thing to do if you have such eye glasses you can remove the filter from a display and other people will just see more or less that you stare at a pure white screen 👓 🤓😎

[@koacado]

Came here after watching the Technology Connections video on Brown. You did an amazing job especially explaining how the different eye cells react to wavelengths to produce our perception of color, I understand that much better now. Thanks for the amazing work!🎉❤

[@DaveDomonoske]

This is an unbelievably high quality video. Thanks.

[@murraypearson2359]

This video is astonishing. In addition to being a bona fide colour expert (a journeyman pre-press technician since the 1990s), I have a solid background in physics and quantum mechanics. And yet, I don't think there was s single minute in this video in which I did not learn something new, or clear up a misconception that I have carried for a long time. Bravo!

[@murraypearson2359]

Here's a discovery I made about real-world subtractive colour, which astonished me. After a long time in prepress, I decided to empirically determine the ratio of CMY that will make a (horrifically unstable) neutral grey. I expected some weird combination of arbitrary-looking percentages that would be not obvious at all, so imagine my surprise when, after long long experimentation, I concluded that 40%C, 30%M, 20%Y is DEAD NEUTRAL. It's so accurate that I began inserting 40/30/20 patches in dead space on press sheets (gang printed cards of all sorts) and told the pressman to make those neutral grey. Hey presto, reliable on-press CMYK calibration, it saved my employer a ton of money in avoided reprints for bad colour.

[@nice3294]

I love how it starts with the details of how light is percieved before introducing how colour systems work

[@jimhueston9731]

As a colour blind engineer, I found this excellent explanation fascinating because the math helps me understand something that never made sense to me. This leads me to a question about fashion…Are frequencies of colour similar to sound in that some sounds are not appealing, like if I tried to select several keys on the piano to form a chord. If a musician played the piano, they know what keys form chords and those chords may make you feel different emotions, ie major chords vs minor chords. Are colours similar? My wife will often tell me the colours I have chosen for my shirt don’t “work” with the rest of my clothes. Have I just chosen materials that reflect light that for mathematical reasons are noise, like random keys played together on the piano? Or are colours that go together just a current fashion trend where right now they are acceptable, but in a few years of months they would not be worn together?

[@scottwilliams8851]

Culture plays a big part in sound and light perception. To western ears, polytonal middle eastern music sounds, well, it gives me a headache. To people raised in that culture it sounds beautiful. As one becomes more educated about music, sounds that once sounded dissonant turn into sounds that add flavor, which turn into sounds that reach into our hearts and change how we think about everything. To many/most western eyes, people with dark hair and skin without obvious golden tones look horrible in orange. To people in India, the most populated country in the world, whose people mostly have dark hair and eyes without golden tones, they loooove orange. My father was color blind. He rarely talked about it, and when he did it wasn't in depth. Ironically, I'm working as a color consultant for a global cosmetics company, and I've been pondering proposing something about how to tell if a man is color blind (without asking) and what can you do to become more attractive if that's what you want. On second thought, I just looked at some of my work through a color blind simulator, and changing makeup is not going to help. Everyone looks kind of greenish. That just leaves being healthy and nice as thinks one can do to attract a color vision deficient person. The question of what goes with what is more complicated. There are tints (color + white), tones (color + black) and shades (color + gray). When your wife says your shirt doesn't work with the rest of your clothes, if could be for many reasons. For example, if the colors of most of your clothes are subdued or desaturated, maybe you picked out something that's very bright and attention grabbing. Or maybe it triggers something subconsciously from her past. Sometimes wives pick out unflattering colors for their men, especially if they're very good looking, because they're afraid some other woman is going to steal their man because he wore a nice shirt that one time. It's more likely that she loves you and wants you to be happy, and it's hard to be happy when people are ridiculing you behind your back. In any event, your skin in your profile pic is one of the impossible colors. Human skin falls within the orange range, being comprised of red (from blood) and pale yellow (the skin surface). If you have Photoshop or another program that has a color picker, your photo skin hue is less than 360 degrees. It should be somewhere between 0 and 40. If you send me the original photo, I can fix it for you.

[@utubespazum]

This was a really good explanation. You deserve way more views on this video. I studied Physics but have recently started trying to learn to paint, and I think for this reason the KZbin algorithm recommended me your video. And it was actually exactly what I wanted, without even knowing I was looking for it. An easy to understand but mathematically vigorous explanation of colour. I actually can't believe this video was suggested to me, it has been so useful!

[@christopherrice891]

I love the scent of complicated Math concepts in the morning😌 I've been trying to wrap my mind around connecting colors and Math but until just now, i had no KZbin video to teach it to me. You just made my day! Please respectfully go into as much detail as you want about color+Math.

[@jonahansen]

This is a fantastically detailed and accurate treatment of the physics, biology, and psychology of color perception. I've never seen anyone bring it all together like this. What a great production!

[@JDMDPHD]

Excellent excellent video, simplified but without unnecessary reduction that obscures the bigger picture.

[@OmegaFalcon]

This is the video about color I've ALWAYS wanted!!! Such a beatiful explanation of it all 😍 Omg you even named the 12 main colors around the hue circle, and now i finally have good a word to call each of them!

[@CompilerHack]

I have been obsessing over colours for the past month and I must say, this is the best video on the matter, possibly the best internet resources short of actual books and even then it's good cuz of the video visualisations! Thank you so much

[@AaronJarecki]

This was obviously a ton of work. Thank you so much. Literally every bit of information you provided was interesting, which is remarkable for a video of this length.

[@DigitalJedi]

I love the math behind colors. I'm colorblind (defective S-cones), so in a way it's my only way of working with all the colors. I've been working on some image recoloring shaders, including ones that treat each color value as a probability of the pixel still having that color.

[@chinarin]

astonishingly & beautifully explained: methodical, complete, the points explained in a good order, with distinction between what's actually happening vs what's perceived. ahh and the explanations are so clear and presented well graphicallyyyy! and there's the underlying light-hearted vibe tops it off. honestly, one of the best presentations i've ever seen on anything.

[@tesseralis]

I've similarly been obsessed with colors through my life (including making a color system similar to yours!) but this is the best explanation for how colors work I've ever seen!

[@user4241]

What do you mean? He didn't create any system, he is just explaining them.

[@BS-bd4xo]

I love #SoME2. So many new chanels that bring such high quality content! I've always really wanted to know about how colours actually work and this video was such a good explainer! Thanks

[@lordnessa5893]

Nitpicky detail, at 25:49 I think indigo isn't totally wrong. I checked on Wikipedia: the indigo powder can have that color, not exactly but it is in the darker blue. Great video, I enjoyed watching it!

[@PretzelBS]

Literally everything you could ever want to know about colours. Now I wanna build flashlights with specific wavelengths and combine them to see the forbidden colours

[@Incandescentiron]

Well done! I encourage you to look into McAdams ellipses which delves into the perception of color difference. The later CIE u'v' color space is distorted in an attempt to represent the ellipses as circles. This is the color space we use for perceived color variations. I've not seen before the transformation from three-dimensional color space into the two-dimensional CIE color space. You are an exceptional instructor! I will subscribe to your channel.

[@Incandescentiron]

I work in the lighting industry with LED sources. I've used the CIE diagram(s) for years. I never saw the transformation from the three-dimensional color space to the two-dimensional color space. Thank you, so very much! And, very well done!

[@tanzimulemam5820]

Honestly one of my favorite videos ever. Amazing job!

[@mrigeoy]

What a great video! I had a very superficial idea of how colour space works but this has clarified things enormously and tied what I already knew together. Thank you!

[@RoySATX]

Thank you, all my 60-years I've seen examples of all of this but always as singular concepts, or parts of a whole, never combined in any rational way that I could grasp. Still my grasping has left some that squeezed out, the stuff that would allow me to prove to anyone I got this mostly, but I got enough for me. Thanks to this video I'll never again look at my color picker with contempt.

[@plantnt489]

This is the most complete and easy to understand video about colors I've seen

[@James-bv4nu]

What about colors you've never seen?

[@astra1288]

I looked for a video on this exact topic about a month ago and was super bummed to not be able to find stuff aimed at beginners to these concepts like me. I resolved to just not understand any of this until youtube did its job for once and recommended this fantastic video to me. Many thanks!!

[@null6757]

This is by far the most comprehensive and easy to digest explanation of color I've seen. Great work!

[@Mikelaxo]

All of this information compiled into a full course would be awesome

[@Red-mq2no]

Thank you for this video! I was searching for a fun, detailed, and audience focused primer on the science of color after stumbling upon a technical presentation video of Colorimetry by Radiant Vision Systems that, while informative, had sub-optimal sound quality and narrative design. Your video was just perfect for me! The concept flow and explanations were well architected, it was engaging, and most of all I had fun while enjoying learning about this subject. You clearly put a lot of love, knowledge, and thought into these video. Thank you for sharing your artistic creation and making these concepts more accessible. I'm now subscribed and will be working my way through your other videos. 💜😊

[@gabrielanschau3864]

I love when a good explanation of something leaves me confused about a related subject I thought I understood but actually didn't. How tf does colorblindness work?

[@johnchessant3012]

I had no idea this was gonna be so interesting!! Really great video covering so many different topics in that intersection between your passions of math and color!

[@AnarchistArtificer]

This is one of my favourite video essays on KZbin. I have shared this with many of my friends, which is a testament to how well you walk the balance between "simple enough to be accessible" and "informative enough to have something to offer to people from a range of backgrounds (i.e. my physicist friend and my artist friend both learned stuff)". That's a difficult balance, well done

[@feelshowdy]

As a hobbyist digital artist and graphics editor, some information in this video is familiar to me, such as: RGB cube, RGBHEX conversion, and the triangular HSV color picker. However, things like LMS, gamut of CRT, how HSV is constructed (and the cone is indeed lovely!), and the science behind how our brain forms these colors have all been fascinating to learn! This is a brilliant video. I am also reminded of that old Tumblr meme about how there's "no such thing as magenta(light)" and it tickled me when you mentioned it is among your favorite colors. Here's to hoping you'll consider a sequel to this video that touches more upon any of the following: -other impossible colors -speculative ways of visualizing other segments of the EM spectrum -alternative models of color based on the color vision of different animals -color blindness The color scheme you constructed in the end also inspired me. I'd like to make my own schemes based on a default one and modify them according to specific "filters" and limited color spaces. Many kudos and always looking forward to more from your channel 💞

[@crystalrose043]

16:05 you can actually kinda get hypergreen if you exhaust your long and short cones (staring at magenta on a screen for a while)

[@blacklistnr1]

Wow, the full color science in 40 mins. I hope you also do the psychological side of this topic talking about CIELAB, whitepoints, CIECAM, roses under moonlight and other color phenomena

[@dorianjack]

This is actually my favorite video ever. This is the sixth time I’ve watched it and it’s still interesting every time.

[@elkinmontoya9640]

Holy Fuck, so much information in a single video. This is without a doubt a classic in KZbin educational videos

[@adityapola]

I've accumulated knowledge about the topic over the years because I couldn't find all the information in one place. This work puts all of that together and then some. I appreciate your efforts, thank you!

[@mari-with-a-gun]

For the thing about multiple wavelengths, there’s also complex waves which are made by adding different waves together! This could apply due to light having properties of waves (sound can also be made of complex waves. Noise canceling headphones use this by playing a sound opposite of incoming sound) A formula for a complex wave would be (iirc), f(x) = A1 sin(B1 x + C1) + A2 sin(B2 x + C2) + … A is amplitude B is frequency C is shift However, the chromaticity diagram shown in the video would probably be a more efficient diagram for light

[@CubOfJudahsLion]

"Green?" "Hypergreen." No single video I'd seen before explains SO much about the nature of color. What a treasury of knowledge, this is. Thank you.

[@BariScienceLab]

Congrats on Honorable mention! This is a really cool video -- I always wondered if colors are actually a real physical phenomena or simply a figment of the human subjective experience.

[@matveyshishov]

Can't thank you enought!!! You have a tremendous talent for exploring a set of related concepts and then explaining them in a well-designed and cleanly structured manner!

[@DavidSartor0]

Thank you for the video. I learned things. I was hoping you would mention chimerical colors, aphakia, or tetrachromacy. Relearning things in more depth was nice, too.

[@weak7897]

This is probably the best video I've seen about color in my life thank you

[@amay_singh]

I have been eagerly trying to understand precisely these concepts for months!!! Here lies all of it, packed in just a 40 min video. Thank You. ✨✨👏👏

[@besknighter]

I've been into color theory and color science for a long while now but could never wrap my head around the chromaticity diagram and the cie xyz color space. BUT THIS VIDEO DID IT! I wish you could see my face when it finally clicked. I audibly gasped and said "OH! I GOT IT!". Thank you sooo much for this video!

[@cmbates4053]

This video is by far the best I’ve seen on Color science. Great job. Thanks for the hard work. Cheers

[@Schaex1]

A week back I wrote a program in Java that takes any color in RGB, HEX, DEC, HSB/HSV, HSL and CMYK and converts them into all the other representations in the respective color spaces. It can also display the standard color chooser to get an input as well. While searching for ways to do those transformations I also found the conical 3d-representation of HSV. I didn't quite understand it back then and just took the formulae for granted, which worked fine and the program did what I wanted, but it was not until I found this video until I felt like I actually understand what's going on. Thank you a lot for the video! I really liked how you were able to combine so much biology, quantum mechanics, mathematics and color theory in one concise lecture. I'm pretty sure there is a lot more but this already felt like a lot to take in at once and I'm certain that I now understand this topic a lot better. You definitely got a well deserved follow and recommendation to my friends for this one!

[@ThongNguyen-fl9jp]

thanks, this is probably the best and most thorough explanation of color in one video i've seen! i will rewatch this again and again. thank you!

[@carpenterhillstudios8327]

Exhautive description that seems to cover dimensions that traditiinally are kept separate like the role of our brains (and attendant unique sensory expereince) in the apercception of color. And yet- the math driven by a desire for systemization is compelling. Your final arrangements are a breath of fresh air because they are oriented in a circular base other than 6 and provide a home for white and black. thank you for your curiosity and drive to make sense (literally) of this subject.

[@school6268]

This was such a good video 🥲 love how you actually went (somewhat) into each topic you covered instead of straying away from the nonessential stuff. Some people might like the more “focused” kind of video, but I thought you did a great job of visiting a bunch of different topics but still keeping it unified

[@brittmurray9818]

Great video. Really. My wife was laughing about how many times I said "Ohhh!" in moments of realization. This video made the lightbulb over my head light up a number of times, as it were. Thanks!

[@renzoshamey5433]

I have been teaching color science for years and I wanted to salute you for a work very well done!

[@Shack263]

I would love a followup vid on perceptual uniformity. This is the part of colour science that I'm most interested in. It annoys me that a lot of the ways that computers deal with colour isn't standardised or correct. For example, it's common for blurs, downscaling and antialiasing in images/graphics to be incorrect (usually due to the the way gamma works in sRGB). There's actually an old well known blog post on gamma specifically, and how most of the time, images are never displayed properly when scaled. I'll try find it.

[@atrus3823]

This is an amazing video! I’m not sure if it was mentioned, but a really important concept that there is a lot of hullabaloo about is that there are no true primary colours! Red, green, and blue are used because they work well, not because they are somehow more primary. Additionally, there is no single universally agreed upon single wavelength blue or red or green.

[@Cubinator73]

This video is a picture-perfect example of an educational video that is absolutely packed with good explanations and visuals backing them up, and without going overboard into the realm of "abstract nonsense", hats off :) Also, as a passionate coder and photo and video editor I've always been interested in how editing software processes colors (beyond the typical "every pixel is an RGB/YUV vector") and how color spaces "work" (beyond the knowledge that they are just ways to assign numbers to colors). And even though I can handle all kinds of color transformations in the software I use, I never really "understood" them, and I never really found articles with sufficiently detailed AND intuitive explanations behind the ideas in color theory. Most of them just simplify stuff beyond ELIM5 and others just go headfirst into linear transformations without first giving an intuition of why the theory we are looking at is linear in the first place. And when it comes to the CIE chromaticity diagram, all articles I found are math-only articles without the slightest intuitive explanation. I had a real aha-moment when I saw the emission spectrum of a 3000K star together with the boundary lines for the visible spectrum and instantly thought "that's why hot stars look blue rather than orange/white!" before you even went on to explain why hot stars look blue. And for some reason I just had to laugh when I heard "[...] results in the light emitting diode emitting light" :D This video answered all the questions I ever had about color spaces, and this video is exactly what I wish all educational content aimed at a general audience would look like :)

[@GeirBordalen]

Brilliant and very learning walkthrough of something I thought I knew. I stand corrected - even after close to 40 years in tech (broadcaster). Thanks a lot!

[@sandman0829]

Best comprehensive explanation of the subject and it's not even close. Thanks so much for the video!

[@FindLiberty]

Love it - Beautiful review of color language with updates through computer age. *Thank you!* This made me reflect on and better understand my 50 year journey from photography, NTSC waveform/vectorscope, optics, computers to _now_ discover the human eye/brain color "timing" concept here, and Fourier Transforms/Physics to create Attosecond Laser pulses _Oct 2023._ What a trip!

[@alphalunamare]

A brave and successful attempt at explaining what is very difficult for most people to understand. In a way it is preparation for the introduction of the L*a*b* Colour Space that underpins Colour Management in the digital world these days. There is so little understandable documentation of this subject, which makes this video all the better and a 'must see' for anyone learning about colour.

[@flamezcallahoon]

Only 40 seconds in and I can already tell this is going to be a banger

[@flamezcallahoon]

Update - it was a banger

[@oceannuclear]

Excellent video! Perfect level of complexity and no visual clutter. I can see that you've thought very hard about visualization schemes (and made very good and choices that allows for most intuitive understanding). I also love that you've defined a lot of terminology and concepts without this feeling like boring dictionary

[@johnallenrichter]

Great video thank you. Love your animations! Just 2 cents... I studied physiology in college and have wondered about this ever since. I don't know what the answer is. You said there are about 6 million cones in each retina and I think that's correct if memory serves. Ie, combined 12 million cone receptors. But I also remember that the retinal neuropathway leading to optical section of the brain has only 1/3 that many pathways. And I think that means nerve pathways are being shared by the receptors. Or it's possible that colors are being averaged between receptors before being fed to the neural pathway. I discount the second notion because the human nervous system operates at 60hz from full stimulation to full recuperation. And because we've learned from movies that retinal reception operates smoothly at 30 Hertz, another possibility exists that cone receptions are being sent through the neural pathways to the brains occipital optic center at least twice per second, one after another, possibly more. In this case I suspect the blending of colors is completed by optic center itself. The third thing I believe is that our brains compute information for us when receptive info is lacking. This explains optical illusions. A good one is the 5 legged elephant. If you look near the top of the elephant your vertical peripheral vision kicks in to fill in the bottom part to show the normal 4 legs our brain expects to see. But if you focus the center of your retina at the bottom you will see 5 feet. The peripheral receptors are called rods and they only detect luminosity, not color. So they must in fact be blending with other receptions inside the optic center to present 4 feet instead of 5. The human brain is astounding. Rods were developed most likely for survival at night. And because night can vary from pitch black with no moon and no stars to fairly good vision with a fully reflective moon and clear skies, I think the occipital lobe evolved to replace certain receptive data, at least what the brain thinks "should" be there - in the absence of full reception due to darkness. I walked alot as a teenager passing papers and visiting friends and in the darkness I would play games with the occipital lobe's tendency to add things. And survival is the key. So if you use horizontal peripheral vision in medium moonlight you may spot a phenomena commonly called "dark man", or thin man depending on your geographics, which is really just an hallucination boogeyman derived by the mind to entice you to find a spot to park it until daylight! Which I never did. At first it was scary and I didn't understand it. But as i kept going I realized the boogey-man was moving to the next houses Bushes as I did. Anyway these are just my thoughts based on the inadequate nerve pathway that I know exists. This os nothing textbook or concrete by far. Just things I find fun to think about. For those of you spying on me yes, this message is coded and everyone of your names is in it. Just kidding Jimmy and et al, you know I don't care enough to code your names. Ha ha... ah the boogey man!

[@Kuvina]

Maybe you've already seen it, but I found this page: biology.stackexchange.com/questions/68385/are-all-cone-cells-connected-directly-to-the-brain The answerer talks about the optic nerve pathways, as well as how the differences between adjacent cones contribute to edge detection.

[@johnallenrichter]

@@Kuvina Awesome! They use ganglial cells to share the pathways one after the other like I thought. Thanks for looking that up. I didnt mean to put you to work though.

[@Kuvina]

Don't worry, I wouldn't have looked it up if I didn't find it interesting.

[@CarlosBonin]

Kuvina, this is, and I can't stress this enough, BY FAR the most comprehensive explanation on colors. It answered basically all my questions. Thank you a lot. I will share this video to everybody, now!

[@RichConnerGMN]

your character is great. wavy arm good math too

[@nnhm]

This is the one that made it click for me for color spaces. I'm a developer and learning color grading for videography too, and this is of immense help 🙏

[@loftyTHEOWNER]

One of the best math videos I've seen in my life. I'm gonna suggest it to my professor of the neurosensory class

[@digant1973]

the best video explaining light concepts I ever saw. Thank you very much for your excellent explanations. I would like to understand also what happens when there is too much light hitting our eyes (what happens on cones etc...). Anyway you explained everything in a perfect way (basic concept + physics + mathematics)!