Colour
2015-04-07 — 2021-03-24
Wherein the nature of colour is surveyed as a problem of dimensionality, and the reliance on four retinal photoreceptors in compressing an infinite spectrum is described alongside reproduction difficulties for print and RGB.
User’s guide to hues and the magic of sensing an infinite spectrum with only 4 types of light sensors in the human eyeball, and to the difficulties of reproducing that magic for print and RGB display. A case of dimensionality reduction, one of history’s more lengthily studied.
1 Philosophy
- Phillip Ball on the weirdly fascinating world of paint pigments and why greens fade.
- Robert Simmon’s fascinating introduction to colour for NASA
- Design for hackers does colour theory: Why Monet never used black and you shouldn’t either.
- The color purple is unlike all others, in a physical sense
2 Practicalities
Design for non-designers. This is indeed the original what color is the bikeshed problem. Naturally enough, there are too many options.
2.1 Maximally distinct colours
Via Tom Blau, Where can I find a large palette / set of contrasting colors for coloring many datasets on a plot?.
2.2 Informative colour maps
- ColorBrewer: Color Advice for Maps is a classic
- Kenneth Moreland on colourmaps for scientific visualization. See also his Why We Use Bad Color Maps and What You Can Do About It
- colorbox is a colour gradient/palette design tool.
2.3 Harmonious colour palettes
- colorspaces
- bootswatch
- happyhues
- smart-swatch
- mycolor.space
- colors.lol catalogues overly descriptive color palettes from @colorschemez
3 Color in Inkscape
- Imitation Pantone Palette for Inkscape etc (I don’t know if they suffer from copyright restrictions, but this vanishes regularly enough from the internet that I have suspicions.)
- Where to put your color profiles:
~/.local/share/color/icc/
4 Colour in imagemagick
Colorspace conversions are hidden in imagemagick.
5 Incoming
- Color Oracle simulates colour blindness for accessibility of visualisations and plots, etc.