How damn hard can it be to convert a CIELAB color to sRGB

Converting between color spaces varies between trivial and impossible.

@Root This is how it looks like btw. Very intuitive system

Or HLS, or CrCbCs, or bt601, or bt702, and what's this gamma thing people keep telling me about? Color is definitely simple.

I used to do video standards conversion. If *all* you have to do is convert between 2 color spaces, you've got it easy.

@jespersh depends what you want to. Do you want to map their vision into a color space that we can see, or extract the rgb light present?

If it's the former, then I'm assuming each dimension is a frequency response (hope their vision is simple. Ours isn't. Theirs probably isn't either). But you have a "response" from 1 to 12, rgb is a "response" from 1 to 3. HLS might also be useful, as you can represent the color as an angle (or phase) along that 1 to 12, and map that to the 1 to 3 range. But, our color isn't 1 to 3, its circular (weirdness, r+b is purple, our "red" light sensitivity is at the bottom end of the frequency spectrum, what is actually called "red" light and the top end, what is normally called "blue" or more specifically, "purple" light). So rgb has a 120 degree offset in the color wheel. I could script something later if you want, but I'm currently in the hospital. 😅

@atheist Don’t forget hacking colors.

Example: get something pure, bright white; the brightest and whitest possible. Get a gray sheet of paper, and place a black rectangle on it. Stare at the black for 30 seconds, then look at the white. You’ll see a rectangle of somehow brighter white.

You can do this for blue, yellow, anything, and trick your vision into seeing a white than white, bluer than blue, etc.

You can also see impossible colors by placing large e.g. blue and yellow squares next to one another and crossing your eyes. When you vision is not focusing on a single eye, you’ll see a fascinating bluey-yellow color that is not green. Similar for orange-green, red-blue, yellow-purple, etc. It’s the colors of magic.

Representing these in a colorspace or response… not possible.

@Root There's a thing (serious warning, if you work with color, this fucks your brain for months, do not do it. I've never done it) called the McCullough effect. It's a pattern you stare at and can literally mess with your perception of color for months. Our brains are weird.

Your suggestion is interesting though. I know a bit about how our brain interprets color and motion, like the pulfrich effect is where your brain is slower to interpret darker scenes, so you can create "fake" 3d by putting a dark lense over one eye and watching standard 2d video that contains motion, and our brains will see 3d images.