What Is a Color Space?
5 comments
·August 25, 2025JKCalhoun
pessimizer
> What was shocking to me was just how small the gamut of a printer typically is when seen alongside that of a decent display.
What was a nightmare for me when I worked in prepress was how hard it is to get a convincing purple out of a $20K printer. I used tricks which basically produced nothing like purple in a way that gave customers a good purple impression because the things with a closer actual resemblance to purple always looked awful.
ChrisMarshallNY
That's a terrific article!
I spent the majority of my career at an optical equipment manufacturer, and we wrote a color management system to handle 48-bit color, before any OS manufacturers had it.
Non-trivial stuff, but powerful.
I know of at least one technology that works by converting to an esoteric color space, messing with image data there, then converting back.
evaXhill
Really great introductory article on color space in general, I really appreciate that they touched on perceptual uniformity and how we all perceive colors differently. It’s great to find out that applications like Oklab came out recently to fix this by manipulating the distances between colors to try compensate for human perception while also being more straightforward to calculate so that it can be used in real-time applications. Also the UI of this blog post was so aesthetically pleasing, that it was worth burning my retinas with the light mode
rylan-talerico
Such a great read
What an excellent article. I can't think of anything (except the very esoteric) that it did not cover.
If I had to criticize, I wish it had talked a bit more about printer color profiles (although in this paperless, web-world we live in, perhaps printing is in fact esoteric).
Unlike displays, a printer can't be simply defined with three primaries and a white point. Printer profiles can be quite large as they rely on someone having printed out a copious number of swatches on a given paper type and then measured (with some kind of colorimeter) device independent color values for each swatch. Those are used to build a large table for mapping from device independent color spaces to the printer's gamut.
Those large tables make the profile so large. And then of course interpolation is still required when mapping from a device independent color space to the printer profile. (Now imagine too that you need a different profile for each type of paper you might want to print to since each can represent color differently — plain paper unable to get the levels of saturation that a coated paper can.)
What was shocking to me was just how small the gamut of a printer typically is when seen alongside that of a decent display.
Consider that, in print, you'll never see an image as vivid as you can display on a nice, modern display. (And then consider that there are colors in nature so vivid that even a modern display cannot represent them. Just look at how much color is outside the triangle on the CIE "shark fin" color representation.)
Also not touched on (did I miss it?), all the math presented to map from one color space to another, also allows for "soft proofing" — where in fact you might match to a printer ICC profile but then take the result and match again to the user's display to give you a "preview" of what will be lost when going to said printer.