I am not a color scientist, I do work in VFX though. Pixels and their generally-vector-valued contents are what we've mostly delivered to our clients for many years.
I'm not code-shy, but I haven't worked on our color pipeline very deeply myself - I did definitely get the impression from those around-me that did, that some of the hoop-jumping we've had to do to deliver the expected result color-wise have been quite complex indeed (especially if you rewind 10-15 years!)
For example our desire to do-color-well more easily led our sister-company 'Rising Sun Research' to develop a sophisticated color-management, calibration and viewing-environment software product called: 'CineSpace'! (which was ultimately acquired by Cine-Tal and is now owned by THX.)
I guess the above is all to try to help illustrate that color (and its representation/manipulation as values on a computer) can be a very complicated topic indeed!
I do think though, that making-things-look-good might not be something that color theory is really going to help directly with?! Of course, knowing your tools better is always a good thing! With greater capabilities can come increased flexibility and perhaps speed/efficiency advancements too. Definitely worth exploring if it piques your interest!
Not particularly good links I apologize! But hopefully somewhat-of-a-springboard for investigation?:
If you're going to delve in, you might like to look up some of the following topics too:
"Linear-to-Light Color" (this is probably the most important one for VFX/CG in my opinion, it affects everything from CG rendering/lighting to comp or even mip-map generation.. warping, image resizing (anything that 'filters' values), the list goes on! It's very important (and helpful!) to use values that are linear-to-real-world-light-intensities in cases where it is called-for!)
"Display Gamma" (This should explain why colors on most computers are all stored pre-raised to a particular power!)
"HSV/HSL Color Spaces" (transformation of color between spaces, sometimes the operation you want to do is trivial in another space and if you have good to/from transforms you can use, that can unlock some really powerful things!)
"High Dynamic Range Color" (This seems obvious in a way, but how bright is looking-at-the-actual-Sun compared to a full-white image (or an image of the sun) on a computer screen?!.. Using a less-limited-range (ie float values instead of integers, simplifying somewhat) to represent color is hugely important in some cases. It's mostly an issue on the very-bright-side but is also sometimes important on the dark-side too.)
Maybe for fun could you look into 'Spectral' color models?.. I find the idea fascinating but have not played with it much yet myself.
None of that is gonna help heaps with the creative side much though I wouldn't think.. but hopefully interesting if you're into this kinda stuff!
I'm not code-shy, but I haven't worked on our color pipeline very deeply myself - I did definitely get the impression from those around-me that did, that some of the hoop-jumping we've had to do to deliver the expected result color-wise have been quite complex indeed (especially if you rewind 10-15 years!)
For example our desire to do-color-well more easily led our sister-company 'Rising Sun Research' to develop a sophisticated color-management, calibration and viewing-environment software product called: 'CineSpace'! (which was ultimately acquired by Cine-Tal and is now owned by THX.)
I guess the above is all to try to help illustrate that color (and its representation/manipulation as values on a computer) can be a very complicated topic indeed!
I do think though, that making-things-look-good might not be something that color theory is really going to help directly with?! Of course, knowing your tools better is always a good thing! With greater capabilities can come increased flexibility and perhaps speed/efficiency advancements too. Definitely worth exploring if it piques your interest!
Not particularly good links I apologize! But hopefully somewhat-of-a-springboard for investigation?:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_space
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_model
If you're going to delve in, you might like to look up some of the following topics too:
"Linear-to-Light Color" (this is probably the most important one for VFX/CG in my opinion, it affects everything from CG rendering/lighting to comp or even mip-map generation.. warping, image resizing (anything that 'filters' values), the list goes on! It's very important (and helpful!) to use values that are linear-to-real-world-light-intensities in cases where it is called-for!)
"Display Gamma" (This should explain why colors on most computers are all stored pre-raised to a particular power!)
"HSV/HSL Color Spaces" (transformation of color between spaces, sometimes the operation you want to do is trivial in another space and if you have good to/from transforms you can use, that can unlock some really powerful things!)
"High Dynamic Range Color" (This seems obvious in a way, but how bright is looking-at-the-actual-Sun compared to a full-white image (or an image of the sun) on a computer screen?!.. Using a less-limited-range (ie float values instead of integers, simplifying somewhat) to represent color is hugely important in some cases. It's mostly an issue on the very-bright-side but is also sometimes important on the dark-side too.)
Maybe for fun could you look into 'Spectral' color models?.. I find the idea fascinating but have not played with it much yet myself.
None of that is gonna help heaps with the creative side much though I wouldn't think.. but hopefully interesting if you're into this kinda stuff!