Color, from physics to pixels

A Vox explainer on research into how languages name colors, showing that languages tend to add color terms in a similar order across cultures. It draws on the World Color Survey and work by linguistic anthropologists.

Tom Scott explains how different languages divide the color spectrum differently, including cases where one word covers both blue and green. He gives a short tour of color terms across languages.

A Technology Connections video on the colour brown. It explains that brown is not a distinct colour of light but orange or yellow seen in context next to brighter surroundings, and what that means for how screens and RGB represent colour.

A minutephysics explainer on why blending colors in ordinary RGB gives wrong results, such as the dark band in the middle of a gradient. It explains that stored pixel values are a nonlinear function of light intensity, so averaging them has to be done in linear light.

Technology Connections explains how RGB color works, from how screens mix red, green and blue to why that model breaks down for reflected light. It also covers why LED lighting can make objects look unnatural.

Kuvina Saydaki's roughly 40-minute explainer on the math behind color, covering how color mixing works and why a better color space than RGB is needed. It is dense but aimed at a general audience.

Gneiss Name explains the Oklab perceptual color space using Minecraft as the medium. The video shows why perceptual uniformity matters for color work and how Oklab achieves it.

Acerola explains how color works in computer graphics, covering color spaces, perceptual brightness and why common representations like RGB mislead us. The tone is humorous and aimed at people who work with color on screens.

John Austin's Strange Loop talk traces the science and history of color, from how screens produce RGB to the CIE XYZ color space. It explains how human color perception led to the models used in software today.

A 17-minute SIGGRAPH Asia 2021 presentation on mixing digital paint the way physical pigments mix, rather than with RGB blending. It demonstrates how simulated pigments produce more natural, vivid mixes, such as blue and yellow giving green.

Blender Guru's Andrew Price explains how color management, exposure and tone mapping affect the realism of 3D renders in Blender. He argues that getting this setup right matters more than most other tricks.

Nathaniel Smith and Stéfan van der Walt present the thinking behind Matplotlib's new default colormap, viridis, at SciPy 2015. They show why the old jet rainbow map distorts data, explain perceptual uniformity and color spaces, and cover how the new map holds up under color blindness and in greyscale.

Mark Ferrari, the pixel artist behind LucasArts adventure games, gives a GDC 2016 talk on making 8-bit and 8-bit-looking graphics. He shows how tight palette limits, dithering and palette tricks such as color cycling produced images that look richer than the hardware should allow.

The 8-Bit Guy on how the IBM CGA graphics card really looked in its day. He shows that its four-colour modes and the composite-monitor artifacting tricks gave games far better colour than the garish palettes people remember from digital RGB monitors.

Ai Angel's video on how video games bend color theory and rendering to get the look they want. It covers the color and tone choices behind game visuals and how they differ from film and photography.

Alex Sexton's CSSConf US 2014 talk traces the odd history of named colors in CSS, from X11 names to oddities like peachpuff and lemonchiffon. It is a funny tour of how these names ended up in the web's color vocabulary.

Tom Scott visits a collection of rare pigments and talks about colors that are hard to make, find or reproduce. It is a short explainer on where colors come from and why some are rare.

Posy's Dots is a hyperzoom video into color halftone printing. It zooms into printed dots to show how CMYK images are built.