Musings on color management, CHROMiX products and services and other relevant topics.

Monday, June 10, 2019

Secret Color Codes


Microsoft recently announced that they are in development of a new Xbox gaming console.  Those who hang on these news items scoured the daily videos prior to the announcement, to see if Microsoft gave any advanced clues.  In the videos were screen elements that looked like "R 255"  "G 86" and such.  It turns out they were leaving a clue about the internal code name for the new gaming console:  It's called "Scarlett" and the RGB values they left as a clue were: 255, 36, 0.
 How about that?!  A color enthusiast can be one step ahead of his friends when it comes to guessing code names of upcoming gaming consoles!

If you are a card-carrying color geek, you probably already know that you do not define the color scarlet merely using the RGB numbers 255, 36, 0.   RGB numbers are merely device values and don't in themselves describe a color unless they are accompanied by a printing condition or profile.   (In a similar way, the number "4" on a toaster does not by itself tell you what color toast you're going to get.)

We can certainly make an educated guess, that because Microsoft was involved in the original creation of the color space: "sRGB", that they are intending to use that color space - and in fact that does define the color scarlet, according to Wikipedia

However, the illustration below shows that 255, 36, 0 in the ProPhotoRGB color space for example, is a much more saturated color than 255, 36, 0 in sRGB.  It's always a good policy to define your terms!