Welcome pixel hustler! If you are new to this site and seeking digital colour comprehension, you might as well start at Question #1…
- Question #37: What the F*ck is a Transfer Function, Again?
Back at Question #6 we discussed the idea of an “encoding transfer characteristic”. That mouthful of marbles is worth drilling into more closely. This do-over of posts is hopefully going… Read more: Question #37: What the F*ck is a Transfer Function, Again?
- Question #36: What the F*ck is that 0.5, Again?
The parallel funny walk stepping into what some folks might consider an “esoteric” accumulation of concepts around pictorial depictions is now interrupted by a brief return to our standard programming;… Read more: Question #36: What the F*ck is that 0.5, Again?
- Question #35: What the F*ck is Photography’s Founding Myth (And Why the F*ck Should We Care)? Episode Two
Onward to Colour With the previous Question #34, we began a discussion of “Seeing X in Y”. Given that we have at least a fundamental grasp of the idea that… Read more: Question #35: What the F*ck is Photography’s Founding Myth (And Why the F*ck Should We Care)? Episode Two
- Question #34: What the F*ck is Photography’s Founding Myth (And Why the F*ck Should We Care)? Episode One
Dear reader… your burdened author has several posts sitting in the drafts box. The author has wanted to tackle some of the more interesting things around photographic “exposure”, or more… Read more: Question #34: What the F*ck is Photography’s Founding Myth (And Why the F*ck Should We Care)? Episode One
- Question #33: What the F*ck are the Colours of the Three Lights?
With the past several posts, the astute mind will have already arrived at the answer to the headline question here, so in an effort to add some value to the… Read more: Question #33: What the F*ck are the Colours of the Three Lights?
- Question #32: Does the F*cking “Colour” of the Light Change When We Increase or Decrease the Quantity of Light?
As we look back to the past two questions, it is hopefully more evident that no simple path as forwarded by “stimulus-as-colour” can aid in charting us successfully through the… Read more: Question #32: Does the F*cking “Colour” of the Light Change When We Increase or Decrease the Quantity of Light?
- Question #31: What the F*ck is Colour?
There’s a lurking question sitting atop the pile of these posts, which hopefully has been emerging up and out of the swamp. The shambling shibboleth ultimately is one that we… Read more: Question #31: What the F*ck is Colour?
- Question #30: What is the F*cking “Colour” of Light?
Hello. I just wanted to let you know that the dimwitted author set their password to “password”. This left a glaring security hole in their website. I’ve just read over… Read more: Question #30: What is the F*cking “Colour” of Light?
- Questions to the Editor #1: What the F*ck is a Picture?
I often receive quite a few questions asking me about my particular spin on colourimetry, pictures, and vision, from folks who have completely erroneously decided that I have even the… Read more: Questions to the Editor #1: What the F*ck is a Picture?
- Question #29: What the F*ck is Intensity, Again?
Following on from Question #28’s Rashomon inspired retelling, we are going to look again at what Question #2 brought to the table, and pick it apart. Question #2 asked: Question… Read more: Question #29: What the F*ck is Intensity, Again?
- Question #28: What the F*ck is the Difference Between Affect and Effect? (And What the F*ck is Rashomon?)
Rashomon was a film that offered a unique multiple recounting of a horrible incident. Why am I bringing it up here? It seems fitting. In order for us to fully… Read more: Question #28: What the F*ck is the Difference Between Affect and Effect? (And What the F*ck is Rashomon?)
- Question #27: What the F*ck is Perceptual Colour?
Remember how I promised years ago that this series would supply the typical digital image maker with fundamental concepts to get a grasp on the complex world of digital colour?… Read more: Question #27: What the F*ck is Perceptual Colour?
- Question #26: What the F*ck is Stimulus Colour?
Phew… it’s been a while dear friend. And with that repose away from the insanity of digital colour, it seems fitting to do a bit of revisionist history tour and… Read more: Question #26: What the F*ck is Stimulus Colour?
- Question #25: What the F*ck is Alpha?
Question #25: What is alpha? Answer #25: Yet another dumb f*cking Greek glyph label that a math nerd arbitrarily decided to use. Done. As with all things related to digital… Read more: Question #25: What the F*ck is Alpha?
- Question #24: How the F*ck Do We Move a Red Pixel Down and Block Another Pixel’s Emission?
Question #24: How can we move the red pixel from Question #23 down and block the green pixel? To answer the question, we need to build atop of the more… Read more: Question #24: How the F*ck Do We Move a Red Pixel Down and Block Another Pixel’s Emission?
- Question #23: How the F*ck Do We Move a Red Pixel Down Over Another Colour?
We’ve been talking about “pixels” in terms of little squares that can emit light. I’d like to point out that Alvy Ray Smith, one of the key explorers of the… Read more: Question #23: How the F*ck Do We Move a Red Pixel Down Over Another Colour?
- Question #22: How the F*ck do we Move a Red Pixel?
In the last post, we took a very high level peek at what might happen in a code value to display output chain. Let’s take a quick look at a… Read more: Question #22: How the F*ck do we Move a Red Pixel?
- Question #21: How the F*ck do we Put a Red Pixel on the Screen?
If you’ve been following this series of questions, you are probably genuinely wondering why the hell we have taken an apparently massive departure from CIE chromaticity diagrams that map visible… Read more: Question #21: How the F*ck do we Put a Red Pixel on the Screen?
- Question #20: What the F*ck is a Quantity of Light?
We’ve been talking about radiometric light ratios here for the most part, specifically regarding the final output from a display. In an effort to understand the subsequent questions that follow… Read more: Question #20: What the F*ck is a Quantity of Light?
- Question #19: What the F*ck is a “Gamut”?
Phew. It’s been a long time coming, but the time we have invested is starting to pay off! We can actually discuss colour in a meaningful way, and with the… Read more: Question #19: What the F*ck is a “Gamut”?
- Question #18: What the F*ck is the Missing Axis in a Chromaticity Diagram?
We’ve touched on the importance of the CIE’s chromaticity model, and its relationship to visible light spectra as the single most important framework for pixel pushers to get a firm… Read more: Question #18: What the F*ck is the Missing Axis in a Chromaticity Diagram?
- Question #17: What the F*ck is a Colour Space?
Sixteen questions! It has taken us sixteen questions to even begin to describe the term “Colour Space” with any degree of useful communication. We can hop right in to our… Read more: Question #17: What the F*ck is a Colour Space?
- Question #16: What the F*ck is the Triangle Thingy in the Chromaticity Diagram?
Recall back to Question #13 where we explored how chromaticities are discussed. You may have wondered where that triangle went, and why I removed it in the subsequent diagrams in… Read more: Question #16: What the F*ck is the Triangle Thingy in the Chromaticity Diagram?
- Question #15: What the F*ck is “Perceptually Uniform”?
We have laid some tremendously important groundwork in the most recent questions. Within that, even if you have seen or heard about the concepts introduced prior, it is helluva important… Read more: Question #15: What the F*ck is “Perceptually Uniform”?
- Question #14: What the F*ck is “White”?
Phew. It’s been quite a few questions to be able to finally, just about, almost, kinda, sorta discuss what is “white”. The key here is to attach “white” to terms… Read more: Question #14: What the F*ck is “White”?
- Question #13: What the F*ck is a Chromaticity?
Another big word for someone who likely only wants to focus on painting on their iPad Pro. The bad news is that exploring new terms takes time and energy. The… Read more: Question #13: What the F*ck is a Chromaticity?
- Question #12: How the F*ck Can We Talk About Light “Intensity”?
Brighter? Lighter? More light? Less light? Where the hell does physics and energy fit into all of this? Arrgh. If we don’t have a clear grasp on what linear means… Read more: Question #12: How the F*ck Can We Talk About Light “Intensity”?
- Question #11: How the F*ck Can We Talk About “Colour”?
Given we’ve hit a milestone in that we are approaching the teens in our question count, the time has come to start diving into the murky side of digital colour… Read more: Question #11: How the F*ck Can We Talk About “Colour”?
- Question #10: Why the F*ck Do We Bother With Linear and Nonlinear Encodings At All?
Hard to believe we’ve hit Question #10. Hopefully you are all finding the series useful. Nothing is more valuable than you reading these posts and leaving comments and suggestions via… Read more: Question #10: Why the F*ck Do We Bother With Linear and Nonlinear Encodings At All?
- Question #9: Why the F*ck is Linear Light Important for a Digital Artist?
In our last question, we took a quick dive into discussing what a particular type of linear, display linear, is related to. What we haven’t discussed yet, is why there… Read more: Question #9: Why the F*ck is Linear Light Important for a Digital Artist?
- Question #8: What the F*ck Type of “Linear” Have We Been Assuming?
I’m going to spoil our trend of not answering questions with an actual answer, that is somewhat not-too-secretly buried it the question itself. That is, this isn’t even a question,… Read more: Question #8: What the F*ck Type of “Linear” Have We Been Assuming?
- Question #7: What the F*ck Does “Linear” Mean?
This is perhaps one of the most ugly questions we are going to tackle, and I’ll warn you up front, it’s very ugly. The good news is that we are… Read more: Question #7: What the F*ck Does “Linear” Mean?
- Question #6: What the F*ck is a Transfer Function?
Whoa. There’s a term that you probably haven’t bumped into before, eh? You’ve been pushing pixels for how long, and some bozo tosses a made-up term at you? You might… Read more: Question #6: What the F*ck is a Transfer Function?
- Question #5: What the F*ck does 0.5 mean?
Continuing along the analogy of mixing paints, the colours of the paints matter. If we ask two people to pick out three paints each, at random, and ask them to… Read more: Question #5: What the F*ck does 0.5 mean?
- Question #4: What the F*ck are the Colours of the Three Lights?
Have you ever taken a random set of paints and started mixing them? If you have, you probably have realized the not-quite-groundbreaking idea that the paint mixture colour depends on… Read more: Question #4: What the F*ck are the Colours of the Three Lights?
- Question #3: Does the F*cking “Colour” of the Light Change When We Increase or Decrease the Quantity of Light?
With the first couple of questions out of the way, we have a concrete, albeit simplified, understanding as to what happens in most DCC painting applications when we change an… Read more: Question #3: Does the F*cking “Colour” of the Light Change When We Increase or Decrease the Quantity of Light?
- Question #2: What the F*ck Does 0.6 Mean?
As we learned through our entry question #1, changing the value of an RGB slider changes the intensity of light emitted from a single channel of our display. Depending on… Read more: Question #2: What the F*ck Does 0.6 Mean?
- Question #1: What the F*ck Happens When We Change an RGB Slider Value?
For reasons that are still somewhat alien and strange to me, I get weekly emails reaching out from digital image makers in smaller studios to independent one-person-army types. Every single… Read more: Question #1: What the F*ck Happens When We Change an RGB Slider Value?