Computer Color is Broken
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If you put a colorful image into photoshop or instagram and blur it, you’ll see a weird,dark boundary between adjacent bright colors. Yuk! In the real world, out of focus colorsblend smoothly, going from red to yellow to green – not red to brown to green!This color blending problem isn’t limited to digital photo blurring, either – prettymuch any time a computer blurs an image or tries to use transparent edges, you’ll seethe same hideous sludge.There’s a very simple explanation for this ugliness – and a simple way to fix it.It all starts with how we perceive brightness.Human vision, like our hearing, works on a relative, roughly logarithmic scale: thismeans that flipping from one light to two changes the percieved brightness a TON morethan going from a hund...
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If you put a colorful image into photoshop or instagram and blur it, you’ll see a weird,dark boundary between adjacent bright colors. Yuk! In the real world, out of focus colorsblend smoothly, going from red to yellow to green – not red to brown to green!This color blending problem isn’t limited to digital photo blurring, either – prettymuch any time a computer blurs an image or tries to use transparent edges, you’ll seethe same hideous sludge.There’s a very simple explanation for this ugliness – and a simple way to fix it.It all starts with how we perceive brightness.Human vision, like our hearing, works on a relative, roughly logarithmic scale: thismeans that flipping from one light to two changes the percieved brightness a TON morethan going from a hund...
