It's probably good to start with XYZ, but we have much better colorspaces now that do a better job at correlating with our vision.
Mainly CIE 1976 L',u',v' and even more recently ICtCp from Dolby research.
Mainly CIE 1976 L',u',v' and even more recently ICtCp from Dolby research.
These features are not really replicable in any other colour space, at best you can use a linear transformation of it (which XYZ already is, and it has almost all properties you could want of a choice of basis).
The only claim to superiority it makes is gradients, and that's a category error: they blend polar opposite hues in the Cartesian space (i.e. x / y / z), rather than polar (i.e. h/s/l). Opposite hues mean lerp'ing in cartesian brings it through the center of the circle, 0 saturation. Thus, blue and yellow do combine to a off-white. Engineering around it indicates something fundamentally off, much less that it is better. I don't ascribe ill intent but I do worry very much about how widely this is misunderstood.