"Real World" colors - what are they?

[xpatUSA]

Happy New Year, all!

Another Geekly Gift from your Resident Pedant:


(Found in a Kodak document here)

It's the familiar (to some) 1931 CIE diagram of all visible colors with some color spaces shown on it. I am pleased to see that Adobe RGB is not shown, probably because it's of no use to man nor beast ;-)

Now, for the first time, when someone plays the "real world" card in reference to color, here it is defined, by no less a Company than Kodak (RIP).

Enjoy - the link too is very informative but it could make your eyes water . . . .

[davidedric]

Understood every word - it was the sentences that gave me problems Interesting though, thanks for posting.

[Graystar]

The only reference I know of for "real world surface colors" is to a Kodak document on color encoding called Metrics for Comparison of Color Encodings. In that document the term "real world surface colors" consist of 1739 measured surface color patches including...
-Munsell Color-Cascade (non-fluorescent)
-Surface color objects measured by Trussel
-Dupont paint samples
-Graphic arts spot colors
(I believe "Trussel" is a reference to H. Joel Trussell, a professor and color scientist.)

The document I'm referring to was found here...
http://www.colour.org/tc8-05/MetricsUpdateNov01.pdf
...but it doesn't seem to exist anymore, as it's been unavailable for some time.

However, A chart of the colors can be found on the following page...
http://www.normankoren.com/color_management_2.html

...about 2/3 or 3/4 down the page.

By far the most interesting thing about the gamut of real-world surface colors is how small it is. Yes, sRGB only covers about 61% of these colors, but Adobe RGB would cover a much larger portion. Dunno why Kodak didn't compare the R-W gamut to Adobe RGB. But yeah...when you compare to spaces like ProPhoto (ROMM RGB by another name,) it's ridiculous. ProPhoto covers 100% of the gamut, but R-W colors only make up 40% of ProPhoto. It doesn't seem like it would be too difficult to define a space that covers the R-W colors without much waste.

[xpatUSA]

Thanks Graystar, I had forgotten about that image and the paper it was derived from:


original from www.gamutvision.com

[Macmahon]

... ProPhoto covers 100% of the gamut, but R-W colors only make up 40% of ProPhoto. It doesn't seem like it would be too difficult to define a space that covers the R-W colors without much waste.

ProPhoto is, I think, essentially ROMM RGB in Ted's Fig 1. You can see that if the spaces are defined by their three corners (R,G,and B primaries?) the triangle couldn't be much smaller to include all of the "Real world Colours".
FWIW an interesting modern take on this stuff is in the movie here on Andrew Rodney's site.
Cheers
Tim