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by vlovich123 1852 days ago
That’s when you’re talking about color production (how the artist/content creator intends a specific visual image to be perceived).

Color reproduction is 100% an engineering thing about wavelengths. To my knowledge monitors do indeed change the wavelength. Sure it’s several separate colored emitters, but using constructive and destructive interference to generate a wavelength doesn’t take anything away from it.

There are places where things get messy where reproduction blends in a bit of production (eg applying an HDR filter, applying monitor-specific tweaks, etc). It’s a complex topic for sure. But the position of “color is purely a perception in our head and not wavelengths” position is too extreme in the opposite direction and isn’t helpful in building things.
2 comments
willis936 1852 days ago
No. Displays make (relatively) sharp peak emissions at one wavelength. We blend their relative intensities to trick our mind into thinking it's seeing the wavelength in between those three spectral peaks. All the colors we can see are from the spectral response of our three cones (hence why we use three spectral emission lines). We simply cannot tell the difference between magenta and red+blue. The actual photons are not interacting with each other. Take a prism to your display and you'll see the discrete emissions. This wouldn't happen with an actual magenta emission (which also doesn't exist, further highlighting the limits of color in the human vision system).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cone_cell

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mncharity 1852 days ago
> Displays make (relatively) sharp peak emissions at one wavelength.

Even microLED spikes are tens of nm wide.[1] Calling that "one wavelength" seems problematic, given all the confusion here today, and in TFA, between wavelength and spectrum and perceptual color.

[1] https://www.researchgate.net/figure/a-Measured-RGB-red-green...

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bildung 1852 days ago
> It’s a complex topic for sure. But the position of “color is purely a perception in our head and not wavelengths” position is too extreme in the opposite direction and isn’t helpful in building things.

As an illustration for the in your head position: Human eyes can't directly perceive yellow tones. What we think of as yellow is a computation on the signals of both the M and L cones. If both say they perceived radiation at approx. the same intensity, that gets calculated as yellow afterwards.

That's why RGB displays are not reproducing the correct wavelengths, but only those our eyes can read directly: red, green and blue.

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