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A Pixel's Color

Pekka Paalanen requested to merge mr/pixel into main

This story is meant as an introduction to understanding how pixel values relate to the perception of color. It is meant to be fairly casual in tone but still have the facts right, even if doesn't explain everything. A main point is that a color is never "just RGB" like https://docs.rs/palette/0.6.0/palette/index.html put it.

The intended audience is software developers that may be used to shoveling someone else's pixels around all day, but don't know what they really mean, or shy away from terms like "color management" or do not understand why such a thing even exists.

There are two important perspectives to reviewing this:

  • for those who know about color: are the facts straight and the terminology acceptable
  • for those who don't know about color: is it easy to read and understand the concepts

The article (it is meant to be an article and not a book) stops a bit abruptly, and I wanted to have a conclusion, but didn't come up with one yet. It's also really short on references. Much of the latter half content I got from the book Digital Color Management - Encoding Solutions, 2nd ed., E.J. Giorgianni and T.E. Madden, 2008, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

I tried to keep the article scope focused on "how does a pixel look like" rather than wonder off into the things one needs to do to make it actually look like intended. Like a list of problems rather than solutions.

My hope is that this introduction will aid understanding everything else that is discussed with wide color gamut, HDR, or just color in general with respect to window systems, KMS, and displays. What it probably achieved the most is my personal education, assuming I didn't get anything grossly wrong.

Cc @Deetwenty

Edited by Pekka Paalanen

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