Modeling Color Spaces With Blender 35
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."
Pretty but why? (Score:4, Interesting)
Why massage and hack a program like blender when you can use the venerable POV-Ray [povray.org], 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.
POV-Ray (Score:2)
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
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There doesn't seem to be much massaging or hacking at all. Because of the substantial Python API, it only takes a few lines of code to get blender to do this. The hardest part, I would guess, is that some of the code he's using is not particularly well-documented.
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Considering that it's a command line tool with no system dependencies building your own binary from source isn't a significant burden.
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Wow, I had lots of fun with pov back in the day, and Vivid before that.
Writing stuff directly in their respective scene language was a breeze too, and so easy to output from another language - so we used C to produce scenes and then leave POV to chug through them for days to produce animations.
Perhaps if Blender could import SDL, and given it can use POV as a renderer, it would make sense to stick with Blender so you only need one main tool.
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Why use POV-Ray? You could just code it all in C, and it would be faster than POV-Ray, and easier to code and understand too, since 43 years back. Oh, and there is a continuous and thriving C coding community. And there are updates to C on at least a quarter year basis (every 3 months a new and updated version!). Coding in C is 100,000,000 times easier than trying to decode the cryptic byzantine mess that is POV-ray.
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You could do it in Perl, but since Blender doesn't have a Perl API, you'd have to write your own modeling, lighting, rendering, and materials routines. Might be easier to join the rest of the world and just learn a little Python.
I wanted this to be cooler. (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Deuteranomaly power :-) (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Awesome. The amount of misinformation and misunderstanding about anomalous color vision -- even among people who should KNOW better by now -- is staggering. The truth is, the world isn't as neatly RGB as most people believe, not even for chromatypicals (people whose color vision more or less lines up with statistical norms). Read about the history of things like CIE color, and it quickly becomes obvious that they didn't so much come up with a precise definition of colorspace as define the dogma of an RGB re
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I don't think anyone would argue that RGB is "how the world works". I think RGB was just an easy model to visualize and to code for, that was good enough for most purposes. (As a colorblind person, I don't like it so much, but as a programmer, I like it tons. :p)
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Sounds like too much work. Instead we'll poke out your eyeballs.
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One of the more fascinating ones to read is this one: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2596756/ [nih.gov] ("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
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Another interesting journal article about rod behavior in dichromatic individuals: http://macboy.uchicago.edu/~eye1/pdf%20files/large%20field%20tri%20josa%201977.pdf [uchicago.edu]
It appears that under specific lighting conditions, most deuteranopes CAN reliably distinguish between deep saturated red and pure green, even after controlling for relative brightness. The catch is, the color has to fill their field of vision, and they have to study & contemplate it in relatively dim light. In other words, they can't look a
Sort of a flawed premise in the summary... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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But will the color models... (Score:1)
blend?