The Magical Tech Behind Paper For iPad's Color-Mixing
fastcompany.com
fastcompany.com
The article says that the Kubelka-Munk model achieved color mixing that was "too realistic" and therefore difficult to use for the purpose of creating a distinctive brand palette. What this tells me is that they weren't looking for a model of how colors mix together, but a model of what colors look good together.
> "We know red and yellow should yield orange, or that red and blue should make purple--but there isn't any way to arrive at these colors no matter what color-space you use."
Well, that's clearly not true. In the HSL color wheel [1], orange is halfway between red and yellow, and purple is halfway between red and blue. Should have picked a better example.
Our problem is more abstract. We want to appeal to the user's notions of how pigments blend together, but in such a way that the operation is predictable and can be hand tuned to avoid unpleasant cases. Ultimately, the mixing behavior that we released is inspired by the physical world, but is tuned by our designers to produce what they consider pleasing results.
There's nothing wrong with any given color space. It was designed with particular goals in mind, and those goals generally did not include attractive blending through linear interpolation. So, yes, we developed a means of hand-tuning the interpolation such that it produces colors that look good together, which is what our users really cares about.
Mixing colors would be a neat addition if the rest of the app was geared toward actual creative work. Drawing is laggy, there's no zoom, the UI enforces landscape mode, you can't select your own drawing order or see more than one drawing at a time with their fancy pants book page flip animation.
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/6432940/paper/mixingWell/24/index.ht...
Notability, which has some similarities, sells for 0.99 without in app purchase nonsense and is rated higher.
By making features an in-app purchase, they effectively monetize users going from version 1 to version 2, and so on. If you used the up-front payment model, new versions of the app would have to be a different app to continually monetize it, which would have a number of it's own problems.
I'm tired of paying for apps up-front only to find that they weren't what I was looking for or what was advertised. Good reviews don't necessarily mean that it is the right tool for the task, and forcing the user to then have to request a refund instead of just having a trial period or a free version they can simply delete is not user-friendly and results in all of the "DO NOT PAY FOR THIS APP!!!!1" and "I WANT A REFUND!" reviews from people who know none-the-wiser (although Apple doesn't make it very clear/easy to do so to begin with) and cause more people to turn away before giving it a shot. It also allows for the developer to be able to persuade initially unsatisfied users with later [demo] releases.
I would rather see Apple implement a time limited refund like Google does than use in app purchases for try and buy functionality.
“Compare red nail polish to red ink: both are red, but the nail polish will be visible on black paper because it reflects light. The ink won’t be, because it absorbs light.”
doesn't seem right to me, but I'm not an expert. The ink doesn't reflect light? If you put a drop of red ink on a sheet of glass, it won't look red? Isn't the difference because the ink will soak in to the paper while the polish will sit on top of it?
Ink is transparent; It lets through or absorbs light that hits it. Red ink lets though red light and absorbs the rest. Shine white light through it, and it will look red.
Shining white light on a black piece of paper with red ink on it will look black. What light is not absorbed by the ink is absorbed instead by the paper.
Of course red ink reflects light, as you say, but that is just because of reality. It is not essential to its function. If it were possible to make a 100% non-reflective ink, it would work perfectly well.
I hope this clears it up :)
Ink is semi-transparent. So think of white paper as a light source, and the red ink absorbs all colors but red coming off the paper before it reaches your eye.
Nail polish isn't transparent, but it still looks red because it simply reflects red light. That light never reaches the paper -- it bounces off the nail polish and comes back to your eye.
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/6432940/paper/mixingWell/4/index.htm...
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/6432940/paper/mixingWell/22/index.ht...
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/6432940/paper/mixingWell/24/index.ht...
Interesting they use Processing.JS and CoffeeScript.
This is an interesting technical post, but why is it being hosted on fastcompany.com. This belongs on their blog.
If you'd like to discuss our approach to color blending, I can be reached at https://twitter.com/cmchen
Printer cartridges are highly calibrated for this kind of mixing, if you attempt to do it with acrylics or oils you will get a dirty dark grayish color. This is because different inks have different opacity and reflect light in different ways (as the German research points out).
It's the only way to make great things.