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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++;
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.
One of the more fascinating ones to read is this one: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2596756/ ("Protanomaly without darkened red is deuteranopia with rods").
One thing that makes it so hard to talk about deuteranomalous gamut is the fact that the best and richest part of it mostly lies OUTSIDE the gamut of traditional RGB. Imagine if I gave you a yellow laser, then asked you to mix it with light from a monochromatic orange laser until it matched a red laser. It's impossible -- no matter how dim you make the yellow and how bright you make the orange, it will never look "red". That's the problem deuteranomalous individuals have with everything from photos to video... they always look "wrong" compared to real life (the same way as the Mars Rover's pics), and there's no adjustment we can make to compensate for it... even if we manage to flawlessly match one specific shade of orange by adjusting the relative brightness of red and green, the color of everything ELSE is going to be screwed up even worse. Our color definitions don't match everyone else's, and most of OUR colors get rolled off, attenuated, and mangled away when reproduced in CMYK or RGB.
The best way to illustrate the true spectrum in a way that would preserve everybody's detail and help people with "normal" vision understand deuteranomalous gamut would be to build a row of monochromatic lasers whose frequencies ranged from "pure green" (~500nm, I believe) at the left to extremely intense near-infrared (around 850nm) at the right... with extra lasers at smaller intervals around "orange", since that's where OUR bands of different colors are all clumped and smashed together.