Trying to understand color is a mess...

  / theofficialprocyon   Color is not as simple as it seems. We think of it as something that belongs to the world around us. The sky is blue, leaves are green, blood is red, screens show colors, cameras capture colors, and movies are graded to look cinematic. But the deeper you go, the more unstable the whole idea becomes. Color is not really a physical property of objects. It is an interpretation created by the brain from light, wavelengths, contrast, brightness, culture, language, biology, display technology, camera sensors, color spaces, calibration, HDR standards, compression, and a long list of compromises that most people never think about. Modern screens try to trick our eyes into believing that glowing pixels are reality. Cameras record a version of the world that has to be processed, corrected, graded, compressed, uploaded, decoded and displayed again on devices that may all interpret the same image differently. HDR, OLED, MiniLED, DCI-P3, sRGB, Rec.2020, Dolby Vision, DisplayHDR, Pantone, LUTs and color science all exist because reproducing color is much harder than it looks. This is a video about color, human vision, display technology, HDR, cinematography, screen calibration, color spaces, and the strange illusion behind every image we see. Enjoy.