I Can't Show You How Pink This Pink Is

I can show a brighter pink. I can show a more saturated pink. But I can't show you this pink. Not quite.
Buttlesays...

He could have shown us a graphical representation of a typical monitor gamut, and where the pink lies (outside). He could have told us something about the human (or other) eye's gamut, and explained how the pink fits into it. But no

vilsays...

It does not have to be about fitting into gamut, pink is a combination of blue and red light, which monitors are good at.

The problem with real world materials is that perception is not as simple as that. The combination of reflected, refracted, and even radiated (transformed wavelength) and polarized light, the micro-structure of the surface and possibly other properties can influence perception.

Like your favourite washing powder makes your whites whiter, this stuff makes pinks look pinker somehow. Its about fooling your eyes in specific conditions. You can simulate the difference between a known pink - a standard colour sample - and this awesome new pink by putting them side by side and calibrating the camera and monitor to show the new pink as pink and the reference pink as less pink, like at the end of the video, but that cant beat walking into an art gallery and seeing it with your own eyes. I mean probably, I havent seen this particular pink, but I have seen modern paintings which look nothing like their RGB or CMYK reproductions.

eric3579says...

That is quite the generalization. My experience says different.

Although, i have seen that stereotype being perpetuated since forever.

SeesThruYousaid:

Few people are more pretentious than artists... or those who THINK they are artists.

Buttlesays...

Pink is a combination of red and white light.
There are almost surely numerous combinations of various spectral colors that will look exactly like ultra-pink to our limited eyes. Fitting into the various color gamuts involved in color reproduction and perception is not very simple at all.

Whiter than white washing powders work by using fluourescence -- they transmute some of the ultraviolet light striking them into visible light. The reason this works is explainable by a color gamut, the gamut of the human eye. If we could see in the ultraviolet range that is being absorbed then the trick wouldn't be nearly as effective. There are animals, for example bees, that do see colors bluer than we can, and in fact some flowers have patterns that are visible only to them.

It is possible that fluorescence is partly responsible for ultra-pinkness. If it is, that would have been more interesting than what was presented.

I suspect, but do not know, that the CMYK or RGB color representation schemes are up to the task of encoding the colors you describe. The problem is that there is no practical process that can sense them in an image, nor any practical process that can mechanically reproduce them.

vilsaid:

It does not have to be about fitting into gamut, pink is a combination of blue and red light, which monitors are good at.

The problem with real world materials is that perception is not as simple as that. The combination of reflected, refracted, and even radiated (transformed wavelength) and polarized light, the micro-structure of the surface and possibly other properties can influence perception.

Like your favourite washing powder makes your whites whiter, this stuff makes pinks look pinker somehow. Its about fooling your eyes in specific conditions. You can simulate the difference between a known pink - a standard colour sample - and this awesome new pink by putting them side by side and calibrating the camera and monitor to show the new pink as pink and the reference pink as less pink, like at the end of the video, but that cant beat walking into an art gallery and seeing it with your own eyes. I mean probably, I havent seen this particular pink, but I have seen modern paintings which look nothing like their RGB or CMYK reproductions.

vilsays...

Essentially there is no such thing as white light or indeed pink light. White light is when all your color receptors are saturated, what you think of as pink is when blue and red light is combined, and the possible wavelength combinations in both cases are sadly endless and impossible to represent fully in a simple table or graph.

Pink is a relatively easy color for monitors because, unlike for example yellow, pink is always a combination of blue and red light, while real life yellow is represented by a combination of blue and green light on your monitor and blue and green receptors in your eye. So yellow exists but we only ever see its representation as a mix of green and blue, while pink is a virtual colour all round :-)

Yes I suspect fluorescense is at play in this case somehow.

With RGB and CMYk the key word is representatiom. There are real life impressions of colours, and then there is the wish for standardisation and representation, but the eye is a very imperfect tool and representation is approximate. Real life paintings are awesome and you dont even come close watching photographs or computer monitors or prints in books.

Buttlesaid:

Pink is a combination of red and white light.
There are almost surely numerous combinations of various spectral colors that will look exactly like ultra-pink to our limited eyes. Fitting into the various color gamuts involved in color reproduction and perception is not very simple at all.

Whiter than white washing powders work by using fluourescence -- they transmute some of the ultraviolet light striking them into visible light. The reason this works is explainable by a color gamut, the gamut of the human eye. If we could see in the ultraviolet range that is being absorbed then the trick wouldn't be nearly as effective. There are animals, for example bees, that do see colors bluer than we can, and in fact some flowers have patterns that are visible only to them.

It is possible that fluorescence is partly responsible for ultra-pinkness. If it is, that would have been more interesting than what was presented.

I suspect, but do not know, that the CMYK or RGB color representation schemes are up to the task of encoding the colors you describe. The problem is that there is no practical process that can sense them in an image, nor any practical process that can mechanically reproduce them.

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