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Just as a sidenote: In Computer Graphics (and according to Grassmann's law) colour is a three dimensional quantity.

I had to dive pretty deep into Wikipedia in order to figure out how that works. I originally wanted to separate out hue from saturation, but all that does is oversimplify color. Here's the page that finally gave me the epiphany:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YUV

Scroll down a bit and look at the Notes section. Colors seem to have different shapes. Red occupies a corner of the cube. Cyan a whole edge. Trying to flatten the space by removing the lights and darks just doesn't work.

Color is weird.

CIELAB ColorSpace is a better representation:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIELAB_color_space

You're definitely right about that, but projecting the color space onto a cube and then seeing how it distorts everything has a certain visceral feel, like looking at the Mercator projection and seeing huge Greenland and tiny South America. You know all map projections are wrong, but the Mercator is wrong in a way that lays map projection distortion completely bare.

Without seeing the cube viz in my link, I'm likely to look at CIELAB and say, "oh, sure, but you can just take out the brightness and then it's all flat again." The cube makes it clear what happens when you do that.

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