The Hitchhiker's Guide to Digital Colour

Rashomon was a film that offered a unique multiple recounting of a horrible incident. Why am I bringing it up here? It seems fitting. In order for us to fully appreciate the depths to which we have plunged, it is critically important for us to pay close attention to the two most recent posts. In […]

Remember how I promised years ago that this series would supply the typical digital image maker with fundamental concepts to get a grasp on the complex world of digital colour? This post is the second half of bolting down two important distinctions that cascade into many other insights. Question #26 probably feels like a massive […]

Phew… it’s been a while dear friend. And with that repose away from the insanity of digital colour, it seems fitting to do a bit of revisionist history tour and look back to what we’ve covered. Why? Because I’ve totally f*cking lied to you. Remember way, way, way back where we first started trying to […]

Question #25: What is alpha? Answer #25: Yet another dumb f*cking Greek glyph label that a math nerd arbitrarily decided to use. Done. As with all things related to digital image making it seems, there are way too many horrible labels based on completely unrelated names for glyphs from the Greek alphabet. Math nerds, we […]

Question #24: How can we move the red pixel from Question #23 down and block the green pixel? To answer the question, we need to build atop of the more recent subjects we have covered, and in particular, think about how light and geometry interact. Remember, as Mr. Blinn, Mr. Smith, Mr. Catmull, Mr. Porter, […]

We’ve been talking about “pixels” in terms of little squares that can emit light. I’d like to point out that Alvy Ray Smith, one of the key explorers of the alpha channel, has had a rather solid push back about leaning on the concept of “little squares” geometry exclusively. Mr. Blinn, who we introduced previously, […]

In the last post, we took a very high level peek at what might happen in a code value to display output chain. Let’s take a quick look at a recap… Without further ado… Question #22: What happens when we “move” a pixel? Let’s begin where we started in the previous Question #21, with our […]

If you’ve been following this series of questions, you are probably genuinely wondering why the hell we have taken an apparently massive departure from CIE chromaticity diagrams that map visible light to a stupid model, over to fundamental and equally dumb light intensity and geometry with Question #20. We have one more question before we […]

We’ve been talking about radiometric light ratios here for the most part, specifically regarding the final output from a display. In an effort to understand the subsequent questions that follow this one, we are going to need to fill in some further details about what “a quantity of light” means in a way that will […]

Phew. It’s been a long time coming, but the time we have invested is starting to pay off! We can actually discuss colour in a meaningful way, and with the introduction of perceptually uniform maps with Question #15, we can even compare colours or get a sense as to “how different” chromaticities are! And we’ve […]