Color Space and Its Divisions

What Hacker News says

1. DaubSep 2023
   What books I would recommend would depend upon what application you would put them to. User Danwills mentions color spaces, which are the means by which colour is expressed and also the means by which color is 'transcribed' from one device to another. For this I would highly recommend Kuehni, R.: Color Space and its Divisions: Color Order from Antiquity to the Present. Wiley-Interscience, 2003. A great read.

   It sounds as if you have an interest in the aesthetic application of colour. The standard tomes are Itten's The Art of Colour and Goethe's Colour Theory. In my opinion, both of them are semi-incoherent messes that have done more harm than good to painters. Bruce McEvoy's website 'Handprint' evidences a man who knows more about colour that Itten ever did. https://www.handprint.com/HP/WCL/water.html Its good to see that he is finally getting round to writing a book.

   The way I teach color application to my students is broadly as follows.

   Firstly, the 'thinking' color space for an artist (digital or traditional) should be Hue, Saturation and Lightness (HSL). Using these values the colors of an aesthetic image can be 'conceptually disassembled'. To demonstrate this, I ask my students to describe the colors they are each wearing in terms of pairwise comparisons of HSL (e.g. 'A' is the same saturation as 'B' but of a different hue and slightly lighter).

   For lightness, the simple rule of thumb is to ensure that the tones are approximately separate into three bands: light, middle dark (LMD). To this one might add black and white as the top and tail. Of courses, there is not an absolute rule, and without even blinking I could show you painters who have successfully employed only two-tone bands. Novices tend to overload the lower end of the tonal range. To demonstrate tone organization, I draw a posterise curve on Photoshop's Curves. It is important to know that the M of LMD is not absolute (with M as 50% with 0 as black), but instead tends to lay around 40%. It can also be observed that most paintings extend from black to white. However, again without even trying I could name a dozen exceptions (for example, check out the low tonal range of some of Gwen John's painting).

   Saturation is the intensity half of the chromatic component of colour. In common with lightness, it exists as a 'ramp' value bound by a min and max. For this reason, it can mostly be treated in much the same way as lightness. For most of art history, the saturation map of a painting followed its lightness map. It was the development of the chemical and dying industry in France that introduced artists to a wider range of intense pigments. The saturation map of Gericault's Still Life with Lobsters is remarkably different to its lightness map. If you don't have access of MATLAB or Nuke or suchlike, you can make a saturation map in Photoshop using the Selective Colour adjustment. Just cycle through the colours in the drop-down menu and set the black value of each one to -100%. For the white, neutral and black, set the black value to +100%. Seeing the saturation of a painting expressed in this way is something that the impressionists would have murdered for.

   Hue is the difficult beast in the HSL triumvirate. To get a grip on it you have to side-step into the RYB colour space. It is in the RYB colour wheel that the hues are arranged in their perceptually antagonistic pairings: red/green, yellow/purple, blue/orange. These pairings have been know for 100s of years, even before Newton's colour wheel was a thing. It is uniquely difficult to get a handle on hue... it defies easy conceptualisation. There is also a huge amount of bullshit in the wild on the subject of hue. Check out adobe's colour wheel: color.adobe.com/create/color-wheel See all that stuff about triadic complementary etc? Most of it is mostly hot air. How do I know? I have personally reviewed the hue histogram of hundreds of paintings. From this I can say that the organisational strategies that artists employ are, at best, approximate. Certainly, they are not as clear as the art books tell us. However, the following is generally true... painters avoid: hues that span no more than one half of the RYB hue wheel, hue that are evenly distributed on two halves of the RYB hue wheel, hue that occupies 360 degrees of the RYB hue wheel.

   The final key wisdom that I expect of my students is to understand contrast as a structural phenomenon. This can be understood as manifesting in two (main) ways. The first is ratio contrast, which is simply the contrast between two values. In painting, these values are usually averages. Separately considered can be the contrast between neighbouring regions and those which are not. The former are perceptually prime and can overwhelm our ability to perceive those regions which are distant to each other. The second contrast is global contrast. An image which extends from black to white has higher global contrast that one which extends from dark grey to light grey. These two ways of understanding colour contrast can be extended in many dimentions. For example, the way that they manifest between (ratio) and within (global) the depth planes of a landscape.

   As for what constitutes effective colour contrast: one observation holds true of all painters, writers, filmmakers etc.: that their task is to exaggerate life. This they do in two dimensions: exaggeration of difference and exaggeration of similarity (though Ruskin expressed this as a difference between affinity and contrast).

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2. DaubOct 2022
   > Where can I learn about the mad-ass angry part?

   Bruce MacEvay know more about colour theory and history than any man alive: https://www.handprint.com/HP/WCL/wcolor.html

   Also Color space and its divisions (Kuehni, R. G. 2001) will help you tell the difference between up and down in the color domain (not an easy task in the world of colour).

   My own thoughts...

   Goethe's full text of his `Colour Theory' is effectively a hate letter to Newton. However, that part of the book is rarely translated into English.

   Generally, that whole bunch of romantics/spiritualists brought nothing but fuzziness to the subject of color theory in art. For example, in ‘Concerning the Spiritual in Art’ Kandinsky remarked that `orange is red brought nearer to humanity by yellow'. Goethe described the colour ‘yellow-red’ as being a favorite of `savage nations' and `impetuous, robust and uneducated men' and Itten himself describes the colours of a stained glass window as offering a `...direct invitation to higher spirituality'. Lovely words, but of little application to confused art students.

   The problem with that hot-head Goethe is that he misunderstood a lot of what Newton was saying. Newton was addressing the physics of colour, whilst Goethe was addressing its application. These (generally) involve two different colour spaces defined by two different sets of antagonistic pairs (RGB/subtractive/light for Newton and RYB/additive/paint for Goethe). These two different ways of understanding the same thing are difficult to reconcile. For example, in RGB black is an absence of light, whilst for the painter's RYB space it is an active element.

   Goethe is often credited with discovering the physiological dimensions of colour (that one colour can influence our perception of another). In fact it was Newton, though he did not pursue it very deeply.

   Goethe had a massive influence on the way art and colour is addressed and I don't believe that art schools will ever recover from that. However, I still respect Goethe for his obsessive approach to the subject. Itten, on the other hand, is a whole bucket of shit. His set of contrasts developed out of his teaching, and he was the living embodiment of a bad art teacher. You have been to art school I guess... you know the type. Charismatic, cultish and mistaken. He required all his students to be vegetarians, and to practice calisthtics at the beginning of class. Unsurprisingly, was a proponent of Mazdaznanism, which was a fire cult.

   There are many errors and inconsistencies in his work. For example, in his book `The Art of Colour' he describes yellow as being ‘lighter’ than blue. This is clearly erroneous, as lightness is independent from hue, and any hue has the potential to be lighter than any other hue. What he is responding to is that the maximum saturation of yellow is reached at a lower lightness value than (for example) blue or green. The annoying thing is that in the same book he recognizes HSL as being the three perceptual dimensions of color! I could fill a book with other mistakes he made.

   You mention Albers. He is someone I have a lot of respect for. Goethe and Itten tried to construct general theories on the subject. Albers was more humble. His book `Interaction of Color' was a set of thoughtful observations, as indeed was his whole body of work 'Homage to the Square'.

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3. DaubOct 2022
   I agree that as a practical space HSL is limited. Indeed, HSL was supported in the first two versions of Photoshop, but was abandoned as being too inconsistent. A conversion to and from HSL resulted in a mess. However Photoshop, like all design apps, features an HSL colour picker.

   Thanks for introducing me to OKLAB.

   > From my perspective that hue is the independent variable to set first

   Agreed.

   > Color spaces definitely defy straightforward intuition about them.

   You are aware of Kuehnis book "Color space and its divisions."? It is a great read on this fascinating subject.

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4. DaubMay 2020
   Will Certainly check that paper out. 13 years old? Pretty precocious.

   A great book to read on the subject of color spaces is ‘color space and its divisions: Color Order from Antiquity to the Present’ by Rolf Kuehmi. I have read just about every major book on color there is, and this one is easily amongst the best. Written in plain English and with great insight. Go with him to a place beyond RGB.

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5. jacobolusFeb 2019
   Like many resources about color, this one has an output-medium-centric followed by early-20th-century-experiment-design-centric viewpoint, presumably because that was where the author started and what he read about. But however perfect the exposition might otherwise be, that is the wrong way to start a general discussion of the subject, and the result is inevitably misleading and confusing for non-experts.

   > it is a pragmatic approach

   Having tried to talk face-to-face to many people from different backgrounds about color, in practice this doesn’t work. People are starting with too many misconceptions and gaps in foundational knowledge.

   If you want to understand color you have to start with at least the basics about the physiology of human vision, along with some basic optics. It is all but impossible to properly understand what is going on with RGB displays, understand what “white point” means, etc. without that background.

   One of the resource recommended at the end, Bruce MacEvoy’s site http://handprint.com/LS/CVS/color.html is a much better starting place, albeit pretty long for someone just interested in the basics.

   Or there are many books about human color vision and color reproduction, some friendlier for laypeople and others highly detailed and technical. To understand recent color models Mark Fairchild’s book Color Appearance Models is pretty good, and the first half is a pretty accessible general overview. Or for more about color reproduction try Billmeyer and Saltzman’s Principles of Color Technology (recent editions rewritten by Roy Berns). For more about colorimetry try Hunt & Pointer’s book Measuring Color. Or for something historical, try Kuehni’s Color Space and Its Divisions.

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6. DaubJun 2025
   > especially since there’s no real science or theory behind it (that I know of).

   The literature on hue harmony is fuzzy, but there are a few gems.

   Check out Matsuda [1] who tracked the colors of what his female students were wearing, and tried to identify any principles informing their color choice. My criticism of him is that he plotted hue distribution on the RGB color wheel. The RYB wheel would have been a far better choice. His paper is in Japanese, but is summarized in multiple places. Below [2] is a link to 2 pages from a lecture I gave which summarizes his findings.

   I'm sure you also know of Kuehni's classic tome on color spaces [3]. A fun and informative read.

   There has been no research on hue antagonism (which is the idea that underpins complementary pairs). This is crazy, as it would be a very easy subject to investigate. To me it is obvious that there is a special relationship between antagonistic pairs above the fact that they mix to neutral. Supporting this is the fact that Leondro DaVinci documented this relationship even before hue circle was invented [4]!

   As for the mystical dimension of color harmony... this has been assumed since the dawn of color science. Newton himself believed that there was seven colors in his hue circle for no other reason than this was a spiritually significant value [5]. Itten [6], Goethe [7] and Kandinsky [8] all absolutely believed in the spiritual dimension of color. Personally, I believe that their work has had nothing but a destructive impact on how artists and designers use color. It is wildly inconsistent, vague and often plain wrong.

   [1] Matsuda: Color Design. Asakura Shoten (in Japanese). (1995)

   [2] https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/4ac93etjyg0z5y2ouq5ge/matsuda...

   [3] Kuehni, R.: Color Space and its Divisions: Color Order from Antiquity to the Present. Wiley-Interscience, Hoboken (2003)

   [4] Leonardo da Vinci, Trans. J. F. Rigaud, A Treatise on Painting (London: J.B. Nichols & Son, 1835).

   [5] Matt Chamings “Why are there seven colours in a rainbow?” New Scientist, Last Word, 2021.

   [6] Johannes Itten, The Art of Color: The Subjective Experience and Objective Rationale of Color (New York: Reinhold Publishing Corporation, 1961).

   [7] J. W. v. Goethe, Goethe's Colour Theory, Trans. C. L. Eastlake (London: John Murray, 1840).

   [8] Wassily Kandinsky, Trans. Michael Sadler, Concerning the spiritual in art (Penguin UK, 2024), p. 59.

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