Colour Science & Perception
what the eye settles, and what it cannot
Generator

A gradient of one hue, mapped into a press's gamut 2 ways

Chroma asked for along the bottom, chroma delivered up the side, for a ramp at lightness 55 and hue angle 25°. A colorimetric intent follows the diagonal until the press runs out and is flat afterwards — the flat part is a gradient arriving as a single colour. The perceptual intent is under the diagonal from the start, which is the price of never going flat.
A gradient of one hue, mapped into a press's gamut 2 waysChroma asked for along the bottom, chroma delivered up the side, for a ramp at lightness 55 and hue angle 25°. A colorimetric intent follows the diagonal until the press runs out and is flat afterwards — the flat part is a gradient arriving as a single colour. The perceptual intent is under the diagonal from the start, which is the price of never going flat.20406080asked for = deliveredrelative-colorimetricperceptual024487297chroma asked for2 intentsCIE 1931 2° observer · D50

Drawn at its defaults, in ink, profiles and delivery. It takes no options at all, so every essay calling it gets this exact drawing.

Called by 2 essays

the blast radius of changing it

What it takes to deliver it

No mapping preserves everything

More than half the sRGB solid is outside a press's gamut, so something has to be done with it, and there are two things that can be done. One leaves every reproducible colour exactly where it was and delivers a gradient as a flat area. The other keeps the gradient and moves every colour that needed no help by about three.

 What it takes to deliver it

A budget drawn through one hue

The three-stage error budget this collection publishes for a colour-management chain is computed over twenty-four colours of a single hue at a single lightness. The quantity that actually varies with hue — how many distinguishable colours a rendering intent destroys — runs from nothing at all to more than a third, and the hue the budget uses is near the bottom of that range.

All 155 generators · what each essay asks for instead