sRGB, Display P3 and Rec. 2020 compared on the chromaticity diagram
Drawn at its defaults, in gamut and chromaticity.
It reads 3 options and
no others: observer, Y, step.
Called by 5 essays
the blast radius of changing it
What a gamut costs
Three primaries reach a triangle and the visible region is not a triangle, so something has to give. Widening the primaries helps, has a price in precision and compatibility, and runs into a limit that is geometric rather than technological.
What the eye doesWhy colour is exactly three-dimensional
Matching every wavelength with three primaries requires, for some wavelengths, a negative amount of one of them. That physical awkwardness is why the colour-matching functions were transformed into XYZ, and why the horseshoe is curved.
Matching and measuringSix numbers make a space
An RGB colour space is eight numbers — three primary chromaticities, a white point, and a transfer function — and everything else about it is derived. Deriving it rather than copying the matrix is the difference between having a colour space and having a table somebody else computed.
What a scene doesNo surface can be that colourful
There is a hard bound on object colour that no pigment will ever move, and it follows from a reflectance being at most 1. Its boundary is generated by two numbers, it shrinks by a factor of eleven from dark to light — and measured against it properly, sRGB reaches 40% of what a surface could be at mid lightness while Rec. 2020 reaches 106%.
Where the model breaksThe gamut shrinks in the dark
Every gamut number here is a property of a device and of nothing else, which is why the same display has the same gamut in a studio and in a cinema. It does not. Turn the room down four decades and the solid loses a fifth of its reach and two thirds of its volume, with the signal unchanged.