Nathaniel Sloan's List: Visual Colors

• Unlike the RGB and CMYK color models, Lab color is designed to approximate human vision. It aspires to perceptual uniformity, and its L component closely matches human perception of lightness.
• Unlike the RGB and CMYK color models, Lab color is designed to approximate human vision.
• Additionally, many of the “colors” within Lab space fall outside the gamut of human vision, and are therefore purely imaginary; these “colors” cannot be reproduced in the physical world.
• author Dan Margulis claims that this access to imaginary colors is useful going between several steps in the manipulation of a picture.^[7]

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• The system consists of three independent dimensions which can be represented cylindrically in three dimensions as an irregular color solid: hue, measured by degrees around horizontal circles; chroma, measured radially outward from the neutral (gray) vertical axis; and value, measured vertically from 0 (black) to 10 (white).
• Professor Munsell, an artist, wanted to create a “rational way to describe color” that would use decimal notation instead of color names (which he felt were “foolish” and “misleading”)^[8], which he could use to teach his students about color. He first started work on the system in 1898 and published it in full form in A Color Notation in 1905.