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Modeling Color Spaces With Blender
Mrs. Grundy writes "When creative professionals want to visualize colors in three dimensions, they often use dedicated and sometimes expensive software. Photographer Mark Meyer shows how, with the help of its Python scripting interface, you can create graphics of color models in Blender. He demonstrates plotting in XYZ, LAB, and xyY space, and also includes the Blender file to show how it's done."
Why massage and hack a program like blender when you can use the venerable POV-Ray, open source raytracer since 25 years back, first raytracer in space, etc.
You can already do all of this directly in its scene description language, and you will get exact results instead of interpolated meshes.
c++;
Not that good with Python
Anyone ever tried the same trick with Perl ?
I use POV-Ray too, but have to admit that the POV-Ray community is dwindling, with more and more newcomers opting for Blender instead
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
I dunno about the rest of you, but I read the title as 'Modeling Color Spaces with a Blender.'. That was gonna be awesome.
I was hoping I'd get to see a real life version of the mac working cursor...now that I think on it, I believe when I get off work I'll be going to the thrift store to buy a cheap blender.
I'll post the video.
I needed a sig so people would know who I am, but I was too drunk to make something witty, so you get this instead.
Cool... now I can finally make a proper color diagram for my fellow deuterananomalous trichromats, scaled to maximize (and give proper names) to OUR gamut... including "dellow" ('deuteranomalous yellow' == our equivalent to "Unique Yellow" -- the color we see as having no hint of green or yellow. Some true deuteranopes have proposed calling it 'deen' -- deuteranopic green).
Since 94% of you are probably thinking, "wtf, 'dellow'?!?" right now, deuteranomaly is generally thought to occur when somebody ends up with 'green' cones whose sensitivity peak is closer to red than the stastical norm (with some semi-recent refinements theorizing that SOME 'protanomalous trichromats' might REALLY be atypical outright dichromatic deuteranopes with a mutation that gives us foveal rod cells to compensate and act like a third cone type under the right lighting conditions).
Anyway, for us, the part of the spectrum you call 'yellow' falls into a vast, bland ocean that's just plain 'featureless green' to us, and the color you call 'Home Depot Orange' is blatantly red, but we have a tiny zone sandwiched between them where moving a tiny bit left or right makes a HUGE difference to the color. Colors WE might call 'dellogreen' (greenish dellow) and 'dred' (reddish dellow), togerther with dellow itself between them would all look like kind of the same orange to you, but we could pick them out and name them as easily as you can differentiate between yellow, orange, and red.
Our colorspace and gamut are absolutely compressed and missing a few bits of depth, but it's made worse by the fact that digital cameras, monitors, and everything else samples or reproduces 'green' at the wrong frequency for us. The problem isn't that I need 'more green' to accurately capture and reproduce 'yellow', the problem is that mainstream hardware samples the wrong green, then squanders most of its bits into areas of the spectrum that are useless to us, and totally starves the tiny sliver where they'd do us the must good. We can talk about dellogreen, dellow, and dred, but trying to photograph/video them, then look at them on a typical RGB monitor (vs what you'd probably call a red-yellow-blue monitor, but we'd see as unambiguously red, green, and blue) would make them all look like 'dellow' to us, the way they'd all look orange to you.
I look forward to future pentachromatic imaging sensors with red, dellow, green, lumirod (the sensitivity curve of rod cells), and blue sensors, and tvs that natively do red-dellow-green-blue. Only tetrachromatic women would get the full benefit, but apparently the color I'm calling 'dellow' (deuteranopic yellow) is pretty close to the peak of a tetrachromatic woman's fourth cone, so we'd get a free ride out of the deal and finally get to have tvs that reproduce OUR gamut in its full possible glory.
Just for the record, no creative professionals use dedicated and expensive tools to visualize color spaces. If they use an expensive tool like Maya for it, it's because they happen to have it handy for more sensible purposes. Visualizing color spaces is really just a novelty for most people. Anybody who needs to do it regularly isn't so much a "creative" professional, as a color scientist.
Still, sort of a neat demo of the Blender Python API.
blend?