Okay, Color Spaces

color spaces are all constructs. People just make them up! Useful ones are constructed in order to do useful things, but there’s no, like, One True Fundamental Color Space.

There’s no “right” color space. Only useful ones:

colors – like tastes, touches, and smells – don’t have any kind of innate geometric relationship to each other. When we arrange colors around a wheel, or set them into any other space: we did that.

All of this is to say: color spaces can’t really be “right” (or “wrong.”) They can only be useful.

Why you’ll want oklch:

Oklab is pretty good!

People tend to think about color in terms of three variables: lightness, chroma, and hue.

Oklab does a good job of isolating these variables, but in order to use them, we have to navigate it using polar coordinates instead of rectangular ones. When we navigate Oklab this way, we call it OKLCH.

The visualization on of polar coordinate referencing was eye-opening.

Everything about this article satisfies my long-running desire to have someone write a piece on color spaces I can understand.