Retrospective on 10 Years of colour-science

colour-science.org

95 points·kelsolaar··4 comments

Thomas, thank you and everyone contributing to Colour Science for the work you have done. You have truly pushed color management and understanding of the pipeline to the next level. It's great to see your efforts merged into the upstream project (the CS ACES configs were a lifesaver at the time), and I'm definitely going to have to take a look at Colour in the near future!

If you rely on or have benefitted from this work, considering sharing some coin with them over on OpenCollective!

https://opencollective.com/colour-science

Thanks a lot for the kind words! It is always great and motivating to hear positive feedback from people. We are really glad our work is helping.

I got into a bit of color science when I worked on a physically-based, spectral renderer some 15-ish years ago. Truly a fascinating and complex topic.

It's relatively easy to make a spectral renderer, that part of the math is pretty straight forward.

But generating fairly accurate and good-looking images that can be displayed on a low dynamic range RGB monitor from the result is something else.

This is really a complex topic and we certainly do not have the answers to many questions! No longer than two days ago we were discussing about the fact that we need a Display Rendering Transform (DRT) (typically using a Sigmoid-Like function) to exhibit images on a display and there is not a full understanding as to why. If we think about the dynamic range of the scene being vastly different in many cases than that of the display, it makes sense, but even with very good display, which can cover the scene dynamic range, we still need a DRT. Part of the answer could be in the viewing conditions and surround being different but many of the answers lead to preference.

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