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kzgrey t1_j1yaevs wrote

Reply to comment by breckenridgeback in ELI5: How is that Pantone colors don't have direct RGB counterparts? by ExternalUserError

Every color that a standard human can perceive can be represented by RGB. These are the colors our eyes see. RGB on an electronic display screen is different from how something appears on paper because RGB represents both color and magnitude on a computer screen which is emitting light while RGB in paint pigments is not additive -- it gets darker with each pigment added. This is why red and green on a computer screen produce yellow but red and green paint will produce a crappy shade of brown. Light emission is different from light reflectance. Pantone is just a methodology for simulating how things on the screen will appear in print. There's other crazy stuff happening in our heads when it comes to color. The blue/gold dress is a good example -- the colors around an object influence what color we perceive things as.

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breckenridgeback t1_j20chmx wrote

> These are the colors our eyes see.

No, they aren't.

The three cones in your eyes respond most strongly to deep blue-violet, green, and yellow-green. But they see a distribution of colors around those peaks.

What you're getting at here is the idea that color is about tristimulus values, not the spectral power distribution. And that's true, at least under the assumption of humans with normal color vision.

But red, green, and blue light are not the tristimulus values, and don't cover all possible stimulus values that can be produced by a spectral distribution.

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