Colour and Gamma

[pne]

I must confess that I am a Bear of Very Little Brain when it comes to colour processing and, in particular, gamma.

I was looking for a way to create a "proper" rainbow and grepped for "color FAQ" to see whether there's any way to convert a wavelength of visible light to an R,G,B triple, and I found a colour FAQ and a companion gamma FAQ, but for the most part, they both read to me like "Blah blah blah highly technical blah blah equation blah blah" :(

I'm sure that there are people who can easily understand this and who'll say, "It's really quite simple," but it all seems very confusing to me (especially the bit about gamma, how it's used, when and when not to apply correction, etc.). So I ended up cheating and just saying "give me an image that transitions from 'red' over 'orange', 'yellow', 'green', 'blue', and 'indigo' to 'violet'" and trusting the colour name file to come up with suitable shades for those colour names.

Comments

[darth-spacey.livejournal.com]

Poyton's docs are *the* docs for chroma and luma stuff. I have looked in vain for some years for something as complete but simpler to understand. I found that if I just treated it as a college text, and read it several times with iteratively improved note-taking, I could just manage to grasp it. It's not unfortunately a subject that I can hold in my head all in one go. If it were, I could be more helpful.