Displaying Digital Color

Drawing by me

In the past, artists worked with color through physical means (e.g: paint pigments). Nowadays, artists and designers alike are able to create any color of desire within a program, allowing for countless possibilities. All of this is possible because of technology's ability to accurately display color. 
Although physical objects are "colored" via reflections and absorptions of light, how do monitors show a range of colors? As mentioned last week, I'll be going over colors in our monitors!

The Power of Pixels

Retrieved from Web Style Guides

Computer monitors consist of millions of pixels, and each pixel consists of three colors: red, blue, and green (RBG) — similar to how humans contain three cones that sense the very same colors. This color system mimics how humans register color in the natural world, which I mentioned in last week's blog post.

Memories are assigned to each pixel (in "bits"), allowing for different colors to be portrayed. Because bits can only register positive or negative (1 or 0), older black-or-white monitors contained a 1-bit display system. In other words, the more bits of memory a pixel can hold, the more colors it can display. In an 8-bit system (as shown by the figure to the right), 256 unique colors can be simultaneously shown on a screen. Nowadays, most monitors use a 24-bit color system, allowing for millions of colors to be displayed. In a "true-color" display — 24-bit system — each pixel has 24 designated bits of memory: 8 for blue, 8 for green, and 8 for red. The higher density of memory for the three elementary colors allow for a wider range of color to be shown. If you'd like to understand how this system works on a computer science level, then this page will do the job! 

Interestingly, the way monitors work only mimics the human eye's perception of color; so, to animals with different amount of cones, our screens could totally look different and bizarre. 

Retrieved from Web Style Guides

Color Quirks in Monitors

Why are monitors different from one another? Even though pixels can seemingly carry unlimited color memory, most displays can only capture a subset mathematical spectrum of color (organized into color space). Different displays may choose different color spaces, resulting in huge color/brightness variances in monitors (this short Youtube video explains it).

Why are there some colors incorrectly portrayed? As someone who often draws digitally, I notice that some blending/blurring of colors result in ugly dark intermediates. This phenomenon is explained by this video (I recommend watching it!). In short, dark intermediate colors occur because companies take the incorrect average color values.

How are different colors — beside RBG — shown? Similar to how our brain registers a spectrum of colors using only three colored cones, displays utilize combinations of brightness and RBG signals to create different colors. This site gives a good visual on how RBG and brightness can be altered to form new colors, like cyan, orange, etc.

Of course, my post glosses over a lot of nuances in computer science and color space in technology; however, I hope the links I provide can provide a more comprehensive view on these topics. Because I draw digitally, it's very crucial to have color accuracy and have it relate back to the physical world (via prints). It's simply amazing how we've gone from physical pigments to having an entire color spectrum at the tips of our styli. 

Next week, I'll branch off from the science of color and dive into more subjective topics, like color harmony and color themes in some of my artworks. Look forward to it!