andrewducker: (Default)
andrewducker ([personal profile] andrewducker) wrote2003-05-09 10:15 am

Looks fine to me

Here you will find colourmatch, which takes a selected colour and gives you other colours that go well with it. I'm most impressed by how well it works - and I wonder what this tells us about the way the human eye/mind perceives colours.
diffrentcolours: (Default)

[personal profile] diffrentcolours 2003-05-09 06:48 am (UTC)(link)
Mathematical, algorithmic approaches to this are surprisingly different - I studied computer colour theory for my degree and the RGB co-ordinate system used by most computer stuff is bloody useless for things that interact with humans. There are some appropriate colour spaces, but the transforms between them are incredibly nasty, especially the four-dimensional and five-dimensional ones. Working with them is hard. A well-done implementation is... better than I managed :)

[identity profile] kpollock.livejournal.com 2003-05-09 06:56 am (UTC)(link)
I bow to your experience. I freely admit that i only know about it from a pigment angle and what works as paint often doesn't work on screen, for reasons obvious and obscure.

Of course one must alway take into account the colour-blind (of all varieties) - who are surprisingly common.

I assume a 4(5) dimensional colour space is one where you try to find 4(5) harmonising colours???
diffrentcolours: (Default)

[personal profile] diffrentcolours 2003-05-09 07:04 am (UTC)(link)
No, it refers to the number of variables you need to refer to a single colour. Any colour in the RGB colour space can be represented by how much red, how much green and how much blue there is in the colour - black is (0, 0, 0) and white is (1, 1, 1), while pure red is (1, 0, 0).

One dimensional colour systems can be represented as a line, say from black through grey to white. Two dimensional can be represented as a flat surface. Three dimensional as a solid object. Four dimensional and five dimensional things are much more mind-boggling to visualise.

[identity profile] kpollock.livejournal.com 2003-05-09 07:12 am (UTC)(link)
Ah. So 5 would be the max, would it not? Again, at least for pigment. (well unless you want to get all metallic...).

Are you saying that there are colours that you can't represent in RGB?? That seems right. The 3 colour CRT/LCD system is inherently not as flexible as the more analogue pigment colour system.
diffrentcolours: (Default)

[personal profile] diffrentcolours 2003-05-09 07:23 am (UTC)(link)
Well, five is the most I've dealt with. More may be possible, I'm not sure.

There are indeed colours that can't be represented adequately by RGB. Gold is a good one, although you can make a good approximation.

The colour space I ended up dealing with was designed to closely map human perception of colour. It was sodding horrible.