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Comment by graypegg | Hacker News Reader

I get the concept, but I have a feeling this might not be any more comprehensible when picking a colour than other additive colour codes with a fixed range and components.

It would be neat if you could express colours as a mix of arbitrary base colours, kind of like you’re mixing it on a paint palette. (ROYGBIVWK maybe? K being Key/blacK)

r2b1 gets you a deep reddish purple, but if you want it to be lighter you just keep adding white, r2b1w1, r2b1w2 etc. You can just focus on chroma, and mix in white/black to futz with the saturation/lightness. I feel like that’s a bit more like the way people talk about colours. (Pale yellowish-green = y1g2w2, dark blueish-grey = b1w2k4)

The way paint colours blend gets a bit complex compared to mathematically perfect RGB light sources, and there’s obviously MANY ways to represent the exact same colour, so not a silver bullet by any means.

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I think that's a really fun idea and I'd love to see it if you do it :)

One thought is maybe you don't need the numbers? Like for n<=2 they're redundant anyway, and maybe it's good to discourage ratios that are more complex by making them longer lexically.

eg reddish purple is just rrb, and dark blueish-grey is bwwkkkk – I kinda like how that reads

Fun enough to throw at v0, definitely.

https://pigment.ribbits.org/?c=bwwkkkk

Ohhh I really like that for the visual side of it. If the letter takes up more space in the code, it's more like that colour. That makes a lot of sense.

I might ask around some digital-artist friends to see what they think about this generally! I know a lot of digital-painters think of hex codes as more of an ID to a colour than a colour description, so it needs to be brought into some UI before it's understandable.

author here. there are other ways to pick colours, yes

Sorry if that came off as a knock on what you're doing! Just thinking outloud

Almost all of the other ways are dramatically superior, for humans

Oklab and the Munsell colour system are very obviously far more intuitive at low numbers of quantised steps: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:MunsellColorWheel.sv...

To be blunt: your system blithely ignores the color space, gamma curves, and human perception.

There’s like… entire textbooks written on the topic of optimal encoding of hues given a fixed number of bits! That’s most of the secret sauce of Dolby Vision, for example.

Sorry to burst your bubble like this, but the assumption that “RGB” means anything at all is hilariously naive.

It’s like specifying a text format and neglecting to mention the encoding or the escaping rules! It will get mangled by the receiver.

okay

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

Getting mangled by the receiver appears to be part of the spec. They've implemented their a custom LUT and suggest others should do the same.

It feels like there's a fundamental disconnect between your comment the intent of the tool.

"Custom LUT" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. He's literally just diving by ten.

If you want to discuss the content of the page, it would be nice if you read the content of the page first.

That is literally not true.

The feeling of disconnect between your comment(s) and the intent of the tool remains.

This is quite the unhinged and accusatory attempt at uncalled-for dismissal. What's with the attack?

How exactly is it unhinged and uncalled for?

It’s factual and references the state of the art — which the OP couldn’t even be bothered to Google.

How is it uncalled for? It’s here! In the public sphere! The OP published it and is showing it off!

Their grand contribution to color theory: divide a nonlinear, unspecified encoding by ten.

    channel / 10

I’m sorry, but unless the OP is still in (junior!) school this doesn’t warrant a website like he’s cracked the secret code that has been holding back color theory for decades.

Something worthy of HN front page would be a tiny NN that optimally allocates perceptually uniform color divisions such that +1 or -1 was always consistently what an artist would expect. That would be cool and worthy of a website and a discussion on a tech forum.

Sometimes we need to encourage something hopelessly naive, but I put my limit somewhere around… this.

Anyway, why do you care if I dismiss the OP's "contribution" out of hand? The OP doesn't care about his "work" in the slightest! To quote: "Or something like that roughly... It doesn't matter if it's not perfect."

author here. are you okay?

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