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JRCnrd — Color Models for Simpletons
Published: 2012-03-10 07:19:59 +0000 UTC; Views: 15001; Favourites: 468; Downloads: 340
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Holy god this has to be my largest tutorial so far.
I am quite pleased with how it turned out. Basically the inspiration for this came after looking at the first version of this ( [link] ) which was submitted a year ago and thinking. DUDE. I CAN TOTALLY DO BETTER. And I so did. 
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Comments: 34
That's so easy to understand, I like the simple way it's shown. Though I already know that, it's always good to learn how to explain it better.
Very good!!!
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Thank you, very interesting and helpful tutorial.
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This is a nice reference, thanks 
~VelkynKarma
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Lab colors... does that mean I could color with, let's say, radio waves? O.o
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i have such a hrad time choosin' colors thanks 4 this
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Dude, I have no idea why this became so popular, but power to you. Excellence as always.
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Interesting! I never knew about all of these different color wheels. I mean, I knew about them, but I didn't know that's what they all meant.
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thanks a lot it is really well explained and useful
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This works for me; just the physics involved make this tutorial worthwhile.
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It should be noted that there are some LCD's that do break slightly with a pure RGB model.
Nearly all of them can be found in mobile devices, for example some of them include a white (or unfiltered) pixel, to improve battery life (as it makes for a brighter display), if you have an AMOLED display, while they typically only have RGB pixels, they're arranged more like the bayer pattern found in most digital camera sensors, making the display more like RB+RG for each alternating pixel.
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So it's still RGB, but a slight variation, if I understand correctly.
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I was going to go with a big wodge of text to explain it, but it's easier to say, basically, yes, it's still essentially RGB.
I only made the distinction since the way these screens display colours can have an effect on how they appear.
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Ah. Ok. I'll probably make some edits later then. :>
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but for a designer its important to know that he shouldn't upload an cmyk picture to a website and that he shouldn't print with RGB.
If you're unsure about how the picture's used you should tend to LAB.
to know about the white LED or the background lighting for contrast is more important for engineers.
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Awesome! I thought I knew this stuff pretty well, but I just learned a lot - especially about Lab color, which I tend to skip over when I'm teaching color models in Photoshop.
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Well to be fair, Lab is only really important to photographers. It's nice and accurate, but displays don't display all the colors, so there's little point to it.
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Well, it's one of the color models used in Photoshop, so it's nice to be able to say something about it when I'm teaching Photoshop! Also, it kind of reminded me of YUV/YIQ, which I know a little about. I still agree that there's little point to it, especially for my students. (But I also talk about the CIE diagram, which also "contains" a lot of colors that don't show.)
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Never heard of YUV/YIQ and CIE.
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Aha! Something for the next edition of your excellent tutorial. (I know you didn't ask, but...)
YUV and YIQ (Wikipedia: [link] and [link] ) are closely related color models consisting each of a "luminance" component and two "chrominance" components, one bluish-orange and the other green-magenta. YUV is used in JPEG compression, YIQ in color TV. ("Can you put a little more orange in his face?") You can see the resemblance to Lab color.
The CIE color diagram (Wikipedia: [link] - see also [link] ) is a diagram that allows us to assign numbers to any color that the human eye can see. One neat feature of the diagram is that you can specify any three "primary" colors (not just RGB, CMY, or red-yellow-blue) by pinpointing them on the diagram - they will form a triangle, and the colors inside the triangle or on its edges are all the colors that those three primaries can be combined (additively) to produce. Since the diagram itself is a half-oval rather than a triangle, this shows that no three primaries can represent all the colors we can see.
Some primaries are better than others, though: red, yellow and green, for instance, could be picked as "primaries" but their triangle would be pretty small and would fail to include a great many colors that a good R, G and B can encompass.
Wow, thanks for the implied question! So I get to teach you something. Assuming, of course, that you are interested.
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The day I stop learning is the day I die.
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