Computer Color is Broken

And twitter - @minutephysics

Minute Physics provides an energetic and entertaining view of old and new problems in physics -- all in a minute!

This video made possible by the following Patreon Supporters:

Mark
Wes Brown
John Green
Florian Philipp
Rens van der Heijden
Bob Bolch
Daniel Ametsreiter
Joël Quenneville
Richard Pearson
David Dailey
Steven Mulder
Karim
Ethi Raj
Ryan Kyle
William Ricketts
Collin Mandris
Matt
Jonathan Foster
Siddharth Sadanand
Maarten Daalder
Robby Olivam
Alan Browning
Jonathan Piersa
Julia Person
James Craver
Sarah Chavis
Yonatan Bisk
Richard Campbell
Chris Barrett
Jan A
Christopher Coleman
Daniel “YoureDown” Breger
Hendrik Payer
Daniel Yip
Matt K
William Pearson
Kevin Lynch
Nick Ward
Kevin
john eriksson
Allan Farrell
Tobias Olesen
Chris Chapin
Michael Keefe
Jon Mann
Bert Goethals
Joji Wata
Adam Naber
Rob Ibsen
Jacob Gumpert
Peter Collier
Andi Davis
Aarthy
Raymond Cason
Evan Gale
Paul
Tori McClanahan
Andrew Stobie
Dominik Steenken
Danilo Metzger
Christian Altenhofen
Ezra Lee
Roy Morgan
Olivia Darroch
Amber Ciarvella
ryan horlacher
Keith Chang
Milokot
Janel Christensen
Will Scherer
Mike Fulcher
Larom Lancaster
Liam Callaway
John Harman
Christos Papandreou
Fernando Pazin
Johnathon Kinville
Jason Medrano
Andrew Barnett
Katharina Schuchmann
John Gietzen
Michael Tardibuono
Matthew Hebert
Christy Filipich
Pierre-Louis Bourgeois
Genevieve Lawrence
Brian D'Agostini
Chris
Dominik Menzi
Ryan A. Schauer
Daniel Johnson
Nico Houbraken
Michael Carr
Ragnhild
Elizabeth Meisterling
Lysann Schlegel
Magnus Krokstad
Chase Turner
Owain Blackwood
Russ Arrell
Brenden Bullock
Asaf Gartner
Mark Samberg
Tina Johnston
Mike Cochrane
Tom Murphy
Peter L
Jeff
Erica Pratt
David
Artur Szczypta
David Drueding
Nicklas Ulvnäs
Nigel W
James Nelson
Mary Foster-Smith
Clayton Neff
Michael Merino
Jason and Gayle Corfman
Mihaly Barasz
Steven Klurfeld
Richard Bairwell
Tamas Bartal
Erven
Justin Prahl
Michael Maitlen
John Harman
Hans van Staveren
Kasey
Karlin Nazario
M K
Jacques LABBÉ
Geralyn Byers
jason black
Candice Blodgett
Daniel Gibbs
Henry Berthelsen
Andy Kittner
Steve Hall
Erdumas
Rob Snyder
John Kelly
Jessica Rosenstein
Bill Tomiyasu
Vasco Simões
Eoin
Simon Hammersley
iain
Holger
Alexis Carpenter
Jay Goodman
Joseph Perry
Mark Govea
Eduardo Rampelotto Gatto Created by Henry Reich

[katiefrances]

ahh!!! this means a lot to me as a digital artist!! thank you for explaining why my drawings turn out like garbage when i try to blur them

[victoriam]

I'm a professional illustrator, and you just taught me something. I'd always assumed it was because image editors were intentionally treating colours like pigments and mixing them subtractively instead of additively, since the result generally fits.

[Juniorfunny]

>An Adobe product not having the default option be the best choice.
As typical as the sun rising in the morning.

[angelorf]

Gamma correction is like daylight savings time. The actual mathematical operation is super easy, but I can't for the life of me figure out whether to do the one step or its inverse. I keep rewatching this video time and again.

[chase_like_the_bank]

This actually helped me so much with the raytracer I was writing

[CLipka]

Interestingly, the non-linear storage of brightness in computer graphics did not evolve as a clever deliberate choice; instead, it was merely a legacy from the display systems used back then: Cathode ray tubes. Their brightness happens to be roughly proportional to the square of the control voltage. Designers of TV broadcasting norms were aware of this, and decided to compensate for this effect in the broadcasting side of the system, to keep the receivers as simple as possible. When those same receivers were later adapted as computer displays, the computer engineers never seemed to have paid any attention to this detail. It was only when computers started to be used in the printing industry that this quirk started to get any attention in computer technology.

[ThePizza]

I noticed how as an artist I never use even a tenth of all the very bright white values available to me, and it irritates me a lot when my dark grey gets 1 unit closer to black but it looks much darker...

[deusexaethera]

As a computer programmer, I think this is less an issue of laziness and more an issue of not realizing the color values were square-rooted in the first place. Thanks for sharing this information.

[xINVISIGOTHx]

the bass in this video is shaking my house

[Ayverie]

My mind is blown once again. Thank you, MinutePhysics.

[vizzysfizzys]

that moment when your drawing program has blurring on an image but it knows what it’s doing and doesn’t make it ugly

[descent]

thank you. Now all I see is incorrect bluring.
:P

[urinstein]

Minute Physics
Minute Maths
Minute Biology
Minute Technology

4 Minutes of Awesome

[saquist]

WOW, that was WAY more relevant to me as a photographer than I thought it would be when I clicked on the video

[rerere]

As a (hobby) programmer, I come back to this video occasionally to remind myself about this. Thank you. On this watch I realized I've programmed contrast wrong in a few programs.

[lucasok]

Damb I remember when this video was new, one of the first videos I saw on the channel. I am really enjoying YouTube recommending me old minute physics videos all of a sudden

[AbrahamAnimations]

Wow! Just checked and Photoshop does mess it up :( But! Blender's node editor, free 3d software, makes it yellow how its supposed it be! :D

[highdough]

More than one million views and no comments??

As a person who does does a lot of graphic art on the computer, I'm amazed I didn't know this before. And why this has not been fixed.

[rhamph]

Years of programming, including reading about gamma, and I never saw mention that both cameras and monitors used logarithmic scales, therefor all our beloved 8-bit image brightness is also on a logarithmic scale. "Gamma correction" is always portrayed as a funky post-processing effect to manipulate brightness, not an intrinsic step the monitor does to reverse what the camera did.

[tibschris]

Beauty is the default! Look how elegantly an entire image was stored using as few bright gradations as the human eye can even notice!