Alright time to hop on my soapbox real quick.

Graphics friends: we *really* need to do a better job of talking about color. Right now color science is basically a dark art that never actually gets taught by graphics learning resources unless you seek it out specifically.

Because of this, so many new to intermediate level people (and perhaps even very advanced people if they never needed it for their specific discipline) have basically no idea about color beyond “linear vs srgb”... and they don’t actually understand linear vs srgb either!

“Linear vs sRGB” being such a standard colloquial dichotomy is an example of exactly the issue I’m talking about because it’s used as a simplification to teach to newcomers, but until you have a deep understanding of color science you don’t actually understand what it means!

“Linear” is not a color space. It’s referring to linear sRGB space, I.e. using srgb primaries & white point but without applying the srgb EOTF (the non linear transfer function). And “sRGB” in that comparison is sRGB with the EOTF applied.

BOTH are within the sRGB color space!

This is CONFUSING! And it leads to lots of mistakes and frustration with trying to get colors to be correctly converted and displayed, which often ends up just becoming a case of “try every combination till it works”.

If we were more precise w/ terminology and actually taught

the fundamental color science needed (which I’d argue is a core part of graphics programming considering we always want to display our images as colors!) then we could avoid this ambiguity and stop all that frustration, and make conversations about color much more fruitful!

Hahaha! I’ve absolutely made some big oopsies when trying to explain this stuff when I definitely did not understand it..