I gave up trying to reason about color models when I realized the CIE model wasn't determined rigorously and empirically. A full critique is beyond the scope of 3AM, but, it's kind of fascinating to go back to the roots of color models and read about how precisely they came up with them. Remember to turn on your skepticism when you do.
"X is a sphere" has to be reconciled with "What are the chances that our visual system would evolve into a perfect sphere with no flaws?"
For some reason, people are so determined to turn complicated phenomena into a pure and simple form. Even astronomy wanted to believe that orbits were circles, since circles are clearly more perfect. But nature isn't perfect; it simply exists.
Certain aspects of nature can be modeled extremely well with simple formulae.
Orbits are damn close to perfect ellipses.
Likewise, human perception of color luminance could be represented by a simple model where cross-human perceptual variation results in a damn close to perfect sphere.
Just like the actual orbital parameters for a given body are described by a few constants derived from observation, the actual human perceptual parameters (such as the constants in the CIE model) are likewise derived through observation.
Being close to something doesn't make it that thing. The orbits are close to perfect ellipses, but Mercury's orbits isn't a perfect ellipse – it required Einstein's modification to understand the discrepancy.
Human vision isn't even remotely in the same ballpark as "close to an ellipse". That idea is a very powerful, very persistent illusion, and as far as I'm concerned it will be productive to break it whenever possible.
Not to my knowledge. Their official tool is for interior designers I think, and their system is copyrighted. I'm using a custom "color wheel" that's inspired by NCS opponents and CIE. I might release it open source as a web app though. It's actually part of a bigger design system for design systems I'm working on, but I'll see if I can break it off into it's own thing somehow.
Comments
I gave up trying to reason about color models when I realized the CIE model wasn't determined rigorously and empirically. A full critique is beyond the scope of 3AM, but, it's kind of fascinating to go back to the roots of color models and read about how precisely they came up with them. Remember to turn on your skepticism when you do.
"X is a sphere" has to be reconciled with "What are the chances that our visual system would evolve into a perfect sphere with no flaws?"
For some reason, people are so determined to turn complicated phenomena into a pure and simple form. Even astronomy wanted to believe that orbits were circles, since circles are clearly more perfect. But nature isn't perfect; it simply exists.
Certain aspects of nature can be modeled extremely well with simple formulae.
Orbits are damn close to perfect ellipses.
Likewise, human perception of color luminance could be represented by a simple model where cross-human perceptual variation results in a damn close to perfect sphere.
Just like the actual orbital parameters for a given body are described by a few constants derived from observation, the actual human perceptual parameters (such as the constants in the CIE model) are likewise derived through observation.
Being close to something doesn't make it that thing. The orbits are close to perfect ellipses, but Mercury's orbits isn't a perfect ellipse – it required Einstein's modification to understand the discrepancy.
Human vision isn't even remotely in the same ballpark as "close to an ellipse". That idea is a very powerful, very persistent illusion, and as far as I'm concerned it will be productive to break it whenever possible.
For me, their (CIEs) color opponents are already wrong, I prefer NCS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_Color_System
Are there any NCS-based web tools for generating such a palette? The "official" tool is... bad.
Not to my knowledge. Their official tool is for interior designers I think, and their system is copyrighted. I'm using a custom "color wheel" that's inspired by NCS opponents and CIE. I might release it open source as a web app though. It's actually part of a bigger design system for design systems I'm working on, but I'll see if I can break it off into it's own thing somehow.
That would be awesome, thank you.