CD / Color

hang on let's optimize the thumbnail brighten it up punch up the contrast white balance on the silver teeth now saturate saturate saturate [Music] the most important thing to recognize about color is that it doesn't actually exist it's true electromagnetic energy exists all around you and if we sort it by wavelength your vision is sensitive to a small sliver of that spectrum but the sliver isn't literally filled with the vibrant hues shown in diagrams it's just the waves and you don't sense all of them with one organ the back of a typical human eye is peppered with four kinds of photoreceptors one kind the rods is for seeing in low light and doesn't matter right now but the other three the cones specialize in being sensitive to long medium and short wavelengths of light the sorts of wavelengths that tend to bounce off stuff that is all over earth how convenient there is a lot of overlap between these three sensitivities in fact it's impossible to perceive the pure signal from just one type of cones all visual information that gets to the brain is a combination of at least two these combinations feel like different hues spanning every frequency of the visible spectrum that's a pretty dicey method for telling things apart if you think about it i mean when you see orange light you might be looking at a single source emitting waves of that frequency or you might be looking at multiple sources emitting multiple frequencies that combine to stimulate your cones in the exact same way the eye can't tell the difference you can even perceive a combination of opposite ends of the spectrum as a hue purple and magenta don't exist at any individual frequency but are a mix of the longest and shortest visible waves it's all a three-dimensional blob of perception possibilities or if you want to be fancy about it and use math a spectrum locus plotted inside the cone excitation space or if you average out the dimension of brightness a melty triangle of all observable hues every color is an imbalance between the three cone outputs the more balanced there is the less saturated a color seems until proportionally equal outputs just look like no color at all remember this whole chromaticity diagram is just what happens in your head for people with atypical color perception or other animals the diagram might be shaped differently and filled with different values but it's just as valid an interpretation of the achromatic energy hell that is the real world and let's not discriminate against machines either display devices and print mediums all have their own usually more limited color gamuts you're watching this as a rec 709 image displayed in the modest srgb color space but that's okay a limited palette works fine as long as the color relationships remain the same that's why things don't seem too weird in different lighting environments and also why it's okay to simplify the chromaticity diagram into a circle the hue circle with all its pleasing color geometry works because it's an abstraction of human vision itself and you know who figured that out this guy this this mother while establishing the foundational laws of classical mechanics as a side project pretty much figured all this out he understood that color is a byproduct of physical and psychological phenomena before there was indoor plumbing or electricity before people knew atoms existed he drew the hue circle before the invention of photography what the what are we doing with our lives oh you didn't like that someone you like liked to tweet by someone you did dude used to grind his own lenses a century and a half later james clerk maxwell figured out the electromagnetic spectrum and described the three color separation principle which became the basis of pretty much all color imaging technology and a century and a half after that we still use newton's hue circle as a standard visual aid for additive color relationships it's handy for figuring out effective color palettes in digital art and for performing intricate color grading on moving images here the goal is to push the relatively limited color space to somehow convey the depths of human visual experience and imagination to do this right we need to inform our perceptions with reliable measuring instruments mainly a vectorscope and waveform monitor these used to be expensive dedicated pieces of hardware but now they're just a click away in all your favorite video editing applications the vector scope plots where the colors of your image fall in terms of hue and saturation on the hue circle neutral tones not sitting in the middle pull them over neon lights over saturated rein them into the nearest primary color box skin tone looking a little weird get it somewhere on the standard skin tone vector vector vector scope oh i get it but the waveform is arguably more important it plots the luminance of your image over the total dynamic range of the color space you're working in it's a way to ensure your shadows are dark enough your highlights bright enough and your mid-tones are just right imagine the picture printed in black and white on a plastic transparency then distorted in such a way that the brighter an area is the higher its relief looking at that edge on from the bottom is what the trace of a waveform shows and for even more detail you can look at a parade of each of the three color channels luminance why so much scrutiny on the waveform well remember the unimportant rods in your retina there are about 94 million more of them than the color sensing cones you're designed to prioritize contrast way over color it's what makes chroma chromosome sampling possible and why color blindness is not really a big deal many people with color deficiency in their vision don't even realize they have it until later in life and in this fascinating art experiment painter marco bucci demonstrates how almost completely random colors can look sensible in paintings with well-defined black and white tones so to summarize what we've learned so if you're trying to make your videos look good with some basic primary color correction don't overdo it just establish a good tone profile consistent from shot to shot and only tweak the actual color hues subtly to taste [Music] it's all about the wave form man gotta nail those mid-tones make sure the blacks are nice and rich and the whites are kept in check not blowing out over the legal limit and everything will be fine everything will be just

Channel: Captain Disillusion

Views: 1,546,733

Rating: 4.9738836 out of 5

Keywords: explanation, tech, graphics, animation, photography, physics, comedy, visuals, filmmaker

Id: FTKP0Y9MVus

Length: 7min 0sec (420 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 18 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/ThePi7on]

Holy shit, I never understood how the vector scope actually worked, but now I really get it. Those animations are amazing

[u/[deleted]]

Invents calculus on break during the plague. Fucking Newton.

[u/NotForPublicView]

Production quality is always amazing with CaptainD. I also really love this types of videos which explains topics with great visuals.

[u/Electronic_Syndicate]

Here’s a link to that Marco Bucci video if anyone is interested. It’s pretty cool!

[u/Kfey93]

• "This Motherfucker"

[u/Pool_of_Death]

This might be the highest production quality youtube video made by a single person or small team. Every single shot was impressive in its own way. I can't imagine how long it took to plan this out and execute it. Well done Captain D, as always.

[u/ben123111]

I was expecting him to explain how color is displayed on TV and Monitors, not a comprehensive explanation of what color literally is lmao

[u/thegreatequalizer]

I'm picking up a message in his outro: "Make sure the blacks are nice and rich, and the whites are kept in check... And everything will be fine... everything will be just..."

[u/ultra_22]

Colour only exists in our brains..... this is like that "if a tree falls, but no one is there to hear it" situation. Is everything in this universe actually colour-less?