(I’m brown-skinned.) I went into significant depth trying to understand why, and found out that there is a lot of complexity in digital color that is not well explained in a unified format.
#Digital photo viewer v3.0 skin
I decided to write this post after an incident where a self-portrait turned my skin distinctly pink when I uploaded it to Facebook. I’m multi-targeting this post for software engineers (game developers mainly), artists and photographers. This will be fast, loose, and cursory at best, but hopefully it’s enough of a glimpse to be enlightening. Understand in advance that I’m trying to distill a book’s worth of theory into a blog post. Most of this applies equally well to digital image capture (cameras, scanners), digital image rendering (offline or real time), and digital image reproduction (monitors, printers). I’ve been doing a lot of photography work recently, and it’s brought a number of things to the forefront which I did not previously understand and of which I haven’t seen concise, centralized discussion. Yes, today we’re going to be talking about color spaces, gamuts, color management, bit depth, and all the fun stuff that defines digital color. Extra credit if you thought about gamma curves or color temperatures, and a highly approving nod if the word “gamut” crossed your mind. More points if you mentioned HSV, YUV, YcbCr, etc.
![digital photo viewer v3.0 digital photo viewer v3.0](https://img.freepik.com/free-photo/digital-marketing-text-paper-with-calculator-notepad-coffee-pen-with-graph_376538-746.jpg)
If you said spanning, that’s very slightly better.
![digital photo viewer v3.0 digital photo viewer v3.0](https://img.freepik.com/free-photo/colorful-abstract-digital-design-background-your-design-work-with-free-space-insert-text_7954-7473.jpg)
![digital photo viewer v3.0 digital photo viewer v3.0](https://www.redalyc.org/journal/3939/393954895008/1982-2170-bcg-23-04-00654-f1.png)
What do you know about how computers read, store, process, and display colors? If your answer is R, G, and B color channels in the range of, go hang your head in shame - and no credit for alpha/transparency channels.