I think I’ve wrapped my brain around this a bit more, and it has everything to do with the illuminant. I may be regurgitating a few things @Elle has already said, so bear with me.
In order to make any color “warmer”, we need an illuminant that is a warm color, and then we can just “desaturate” our color and it will progressively become “warmer”. Likewise, in order to make any color “cooler”, we need a cool illuminant and then, again, desaturate our color.
I think the specific term is “Excitation Purity”, Colorfulness - Wikipedia. Basically the distance from your arbitrarily set white point, which is your illuminant.
I’m going to add another “picker” thingy to MyPaint so that you can pluck the illuminant from the canvas. My thinking is that if you’re painting a picture you can define your light sources either in the painting or off to one side. Then you can swap illuminants whenever you want and adjust your brushcolor accordingly. We’ll see how that goes.
Ok I’ve got an “illuminant picker” thingy working and it is kind of interesting. Here’s a little demo:
So I started off with that violet color on the first flower in the middle. After I painted the center, and “picked” that color as the illuminant and then increase the chroma just a bit. Then I rotated the hue and drew the petals. So, for a cool illuminant, all the hues are cool and the hues were limited to one side of the color wheel, just like a limited palette. This was keeping CIECAM J+M static and only adjust the hue.
As I progressed from flower to flower, I picked a new illuminant for each center and adjusted the chroma a bit (so that the hue stayed on one side of the color wheel), then rotated the hue around and tried to guess which hue was most “north/south/east/west” of the whitepoint, which was difficult because the whitepoint was not the center of the HSV wheel but some point elsewhere. The only way to identify the center was to hold down the rotate hue button and visualize the circular shape it was making. Sometimes the shape is very oblong or erratic depending on the illuminant.
Here’s an example of a single “hue” (that blue color on top) modified via lightness and colorfulness (CIECAM), with a very warm orange illuminant. It really is pretty neat, although it turns everything upside-down… lightening or reducing the colorfulness of the blue brushcolor moves it towards the orange illuminant… whilst darkening or increasing colorfulness moves it towards the original blue. Does this make sense? I’m not sure, but it is pretty lovely to play with.
Hi @briend - your new color code makes awesomely lovely colors with artistically valid uses. As far as conceptually what the code is actually doing, I’m still confused about how the paint swaths turn from blue to orange back in post 55. I understand that “A” is much warmer than “D65”, but I don’t have any clue how mathematically you are producing these results. The fact that you can manipulate the CIECAM02 equations is very impressive - to me those equations are not easy to figure out. And python is not a language that I can read.
I guess for the blue–>orange–>white behavior it seems to make sense if you consider that reducing the colorfulness or making a surface color lighter both imply that you’re going to see more of the illuminant color. I’m still a bit foggy as to why it goes to white eventually, but I read somewhere that with enough intensity all colors turn white because our visual system is peaked out on all channels (or something to that effect).
Now I’m trying to figure out if it makes sense to mess with the gui and the picking of colors from the palette. Right now it is a bit odd in that it lets you choose impossible colors for a given illuminant. Normally with D65 the range of lightness and colorfulness is between ~0-100 and ~0-40 for any given hue. But things get wonky with extremely colorful illuminants. Say I make my illuminant a pure sRGB blue (0,0,1). It should be pretty hard to get a pure yellow surface color, right? Nope, if I pick yellow from the palette, it will happily paint with that color. Internally it computes a ridiculous set of ciecam attributes to accommodate the color-- a lightness of 12,000 and colorfulness of 3,000. I guess that might be totally rational-- in order for an object to appear bright yellow under a pure blue light it would have to be super-natural?
The other thing I just noticed is that the blue illuminant is the most extreme example, any other colors for an illuminant are not nearly as bad, only increases the lightness range to 0-400, and colorfulness 0-300 or so. I suppose that means that a blue light is possibly the worst light for color reproduction?
CIECAM02 is not easy… You may also have a look at the ciecam02 functions in RawTherapee. They are quite mature now and solve some special cases which are not solved in the original equations. I (and also @jdc) can point you to the relevant part of the source in case you’re interested.
Edit: for example this case is not handled in the original ciecam02 implementation:
Thanks @heckflosse. @jdc sent me a code link as well in regards to gamut mapping. I’m afraid my programming skills are not quite there to be able to understand much of this; if it’s not a python library I can import it’s probably beyond my grasp for now. Fortunately I haven’t really noticed anything horribly broken with python-colorspacious library, other than it leaving me with out-of-gamut sRGB results which I think I’ve solved more or less.
Ciecam02 began to be implanted in RT in 2012 … with many problems related to the gamut of Ciecam
Since working on one hand on these limitations and on the other hand on an optimization, we have Ingo @heckflosse and me, made ciecam02 usable in a majority of cases
Last fall, @Elle Elle Stone , proposed to add the “symetric” mode which allows in particular to fully use the chromatic adaptation functions. I have create a branch “cat02wb” where this adaptation is used complementary to WB (whithout using GUI of Ciecam, and limited to cat02).
This adaptation has 2 interests:
1 - catching the errors of WB, because it is obvious that except for special case the WB is a kind of black box, where the real WB comes out of the riddle rather than science
2 - to use ciecam as it is intended, that is to say, to adapt the colors as do our eyes and our brain and not only in a Cartesian way, for example taking a picture in tungsten light (2856K) for example in a shop.
If you look the photo, and what your eyes seen, without Ciecam you will see a big differences, with Ciecam virtually no.
Of course, Ciecam is not limited to cat02…
One of the last limitations of ciecam02 is the nature of some illuminants.When the CRI is bad (less than 90 I think, for example Illuminants Fluorescent) the results will be bad, and I think there is no solution except not using these illuminants.
