Where to Find the Colors Your Screen Can't Show You

Overall reaction to the article

• Widely praised as exceptionally clear, engaging, and inspiring.
• Several readers say it changed how they look at traffic lights, forests, skies, and paint.
• Some note it re‑ignited old interests in painting, lighting design, or stereo photography.

Real-world colors vs screens

• Many describe vivid experiences that screens fail to capture: blue and green lasers, forest greens, glacier/crevasse ice, high-altitude skies, dioptase and ultramarine pigments, peacock feathers, museum paintings.
• Repeated observation: photos of paintings, forests, or beaches look “flat” compared to real life, partly due to gamut limits and partly due to depth, texture, and reflections.
• Cataract surgery anecdotes underline how strongly optics and lenses affect perceived color.

Paint, printing, and photography

• Pigments and inks often exceed sRGB; examples include ultramarine, prussian blue, specialized cyan/pink dyes, and Hexachrome/extended-ink offset printing.
• High-gamut photo printers and multi-ink systems can reproduce colors beyond screens, though adoption is limited by cost, complexity, and communication to customers.
• Structural color photography and holographic processes are mentioned as ways to better preserve real-world color.
• Camera pipelines and JPEG defaults are blamed for “flattening” scenes even before display limits.

Color spaces, gamuts, and diagrams

• Discussion around sRGB vs Display P3 vs Rec.2020, Adobe RGB, ACES AP0.
• Debate over which missing region matters more:
  • One side: saturated blue‑greens are overemphasized in CIE 1931; real pain point is saturated oranges/reds/purples common in everyday objects.
  • Another side: foliage and certain animals make missing greens perceptually important too.
• Several note CIE 1931 chromaticity diagrams are only 2D slices, non‑uniform perceptually, and somewhat obsolete; newer models (e.g., CIECAM family) better match human perception.
• Some criticize gamut diagrams rendered in sRGB as inherently misleading when they “show” out‑of‑gamut colors.

Lighting and color rendering

• Color Rendering Index (CRI) is criticized for ignoring deep red (R9), leading to LED lighting that looks “off,” especially for skin tones.
• Alternative metrics (TM‑30, SSI, TLCI) are suggested but rarely available to consumers; practical evaluation often requires a spectrometer.
• Fluorescence (e.g., scorpions, some dyes) is noted as another dimension poorly handled in standard lighting and reproduction.

Vision science and perception

• Metamerism explained: different spectra looking identical under given conditions (e.g., yellow light vs red+green mixture; flower vs its print vs its screen image).
• Discussion of cone overlaps, silent substitution, and “impossible/chimerical colors”; mention of experimental work selectively stimulating cone types and of possible human tetrachromacy.
• Some clarify why color spaces are often shown as 2D slices (fixed brightness) despite underlying 3D structure.
• One commenter asserts humans have poor color memory and considers chasing rare colors misguided; others implicitly counter by valuing experiential richness.

Displays, projectors, and multi-primaries

• High-end HDR/wide-gamut monitors and reference displays are cited as significantly better, though still limited.
• Triple-laser projectors can approach or exceed Rec.2020, but trade-offs include artifacts, cost, and imperfect coverage.
• Multi-primary (more than three channels) displays have been tried; barriers include content, tooling, formats, and small markets.
• Interest expressed in hypothetical retina-projection/laser-based VR for more complete color reproduction, alongside safety concerns.

Cultural and linguistic aspects

• Color naming differences (e.g., “blue” vs “green” traffic lights; multiple terms for shades of blue) are noted as separate from physical color perception but relevant to how colors are talked about and remembered.