Ya’ll are a gold mine. Thank you. I only knew it from my forays into computer graphics and making things look right on (now older) LCD TV’s.

I pulled it from some old academia papers about why you can’t just max(uv.rgb) to do greyscale nor can you do float val = uv.r

This further gets funky when we have BGR vs RGB and have to swivel the bytes beforehand.

Thanks for adding clarity and history to where those weights came from, why they exist at all, and the decision tree that got us there.

People don’t realize how many man hours went into those early decisions.

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shagie 7 hours ago | parent [-]

> People don’t realize how many man hours went into those early decisions.

In my "trying to hunt down the earliest reference for the coefficients" I came across "Television standards and practice; selected papers from the Proceedings of the National television system committee and its panels" at https://archive.org/details/televisionstanda00natirich/mode/... which you may enjoy. The "problem" in trying to find the NTSC color values is that the collection of papers is from 1943... and color TV didn't become available until the 50s (there is some mention of color but I couldn't find it) - most of the questions of color are phrased with "should".

	▲	reactordev 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		This is why I love graphics and game engines. It's this focal point of computer science, art, color theory, physics, practical implications for other systems around the globe, and humanities. I kept a journal as a teenager when I started and later digitized it when I was in my 20s. The biggest impact was mostly SIGGRAPH papers that are now available online such as "Color Gamut Transform Pairs" (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/233784968_Color_Gam...). I bought all the GPU Gems books, all the ShaderX books (shout out to Wolfgang Engel, his books helped me tremendously), and all the GPU pro books. Most of these are available online now but I had sagging bookshelves full of this stuff in my 20s. Now in my late 40s, I live like an old japanese man with minimalism and very little clutter. All my readings are digital, iPad-consumable. All my work is online, cloud based or VDI or ssh away. I still enjoy learning but I feel like because I don't have a prestigious degree in the subject, it's better to let others teach it. I'm just glad I was able to build something with that knowledge and release it into the world.