Does sarcasm actually exist?
Seems like the last time I heard a conversation like this was while walking through a room of people getting high and laughing at what the wallpaper just said.
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At the risk of making things too philosophical (as if this isnât inherently a deeply philosophical debate to begin with, whether people like it or not), if we come right down to it, in some ways nothing exists.
That is, there isnât a single thing in the entire universe that has the category we put it in without us putting it into that category. And the universe could not care less about those categories. They are entirely our own inventions, meant to extract meaning from the world.
And then we tried making that meaning shareable and created an entirely new concept to do so, namely language.
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Yeah, I may at some point, but I still have enough trouble with basic PBR. I mean so much can change what a material and hence object can look like, from monitor abilities/calibration, to colour management, to what lighting one uses to render any said object can all totally change how the render looks (on top of the render engine used).
So how on earth does anything make a ârealâ 3D object and know that yes, that will look correct in any given lighting setup/render engine/colour space.
Like Iâve said before, it just all does my head in. At the end of the day if I make a red ball and it looks red, then Iâm good.
Sorry to troy, etc who Iâm sure have put a lot of work into it all and no doubt it matters for various people, but Iâm getting to old to worry about most it.
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Actually⌠yes we can!
I think this discussion would be much better if we were all just blinding each other with pink lasers instead of trying to use words 
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I type 255/0/0, and I call that âredâ. Is it the same color in Photoshop when I import it as it was on the Blender magic screen? Yes? Ok, weâre good.
I donât really care what color it might look like if someone in the future downloads the image, drops a green lighten layer on top of everything, and says that the ball is yellow. Or if their phone screen is wonky. Or if they have glaucoma. Or if they had a poor education as a child, and never learned the names of their colors.
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The mind blowing thing is, there are color transforms such as Filmic which closely preserve the hue⌠If I pick a color, render it with white light, the hue is more or less preserved.
Thing is, âcorrectâ isnât even the right way to think about it.
This entire debate here is about what is âcorrectâ, and the whole issue is, that there isnât a Catch All Standard that could cover all use cases.
Never will be.
Never could be, even in principle.
âCorrectnessâ in this context is entirely artistic choice.
AgX made certain choices that I, personally, agree with a lot. But clearly some people here would have preferred different choices.
Ultimately, mapping a possibly spectrally saturated and infinitely bright medium down to just the much more limited sRGB is a severely underspecified problem. There are infinite ways to accomplish this.
So you need extra conditions to narrow down the space of solutions.
Things like âgenerally speaking, stuff thatâs brighter ought to look brighterâ or âif a gradient is smooth in data, it probably should also look smooth in the final imageâ or âPlease donât fall for the Notorious Sixâ etc.
If you want to make, like oldschool vapor wave type art, you probably want really crunchy color management (or lack thereof), for instance, as that simply just comes with the territory.
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It is not Troyâs fault that Blender is restricted in library use because of the GPL (that dang license might be great for keeping things FOSS, but it also keeps getting in the way), and the BF definitely does not have the resources to roll its own solution (so OCIO it is).
The best the devs. can do is try to ensure OCIO sees development for the purpose of making highly advanced transforms like AgX work better (so we can get annual improvements).
Well actually not really. You can mix colors so the eye sees the same as if it saw some single wavelength of light. You donât have to. You can see the same color as a mix of wavelengths or as a single wavelength. Unless itâs pink. Which as we have established does not exist. There is no single wavelength for pink. We imagine it. 
Itâs not real in a sense. Brown is also not real, but in a different sense - itâs just dark orange, isnât it? I just think this illustrates that there is no color without perception and that obviously what screen emits is not the same as we see naturally. Itâs more complex than it seems.
Give me a beige please
Well, pink is different. Leave it alone. Not the point.
What the Blender devs are doing is making (among other things, but this is about color) tools to get specific phosphors on the screen to produce specific glows. Anybody arguing about how important human cognition is to color perception (and it is, granted) or any of the analog stuff are (IMHO) profoundly off-topic here.
This is nonsense spoken by a person who lacks knowledge on the subject. Do you disagree to this statement as well?
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why oh why wonât they just add this ass a tool-tip in the user interface. If I wasnât active in forums where someone repeat this information at least once every 9 months Iâd never remember it.
Has nobody at the Blender foundation ever used Zbrush to experience just how spectacularly helpful tool-tips are in that fugly app?
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It isnât though
itâs mine tho 
Basically, there is a single tiny set of spectral colors which correspond to a single pure wavelength, where the presence of any other wavelength is enough to change those colors into something else, i.e. this is a really small amount of colors that can only be produced in a single way.
And then there is the vast majority of colors that are not right on the spectral locus, none of which you can produce with just a single wavelength, all of which require at least two âpureâ spectral colors to accomplish (but any spectral mixture will do so long as it affects the cones in our retina accordingly. In particular, any three non-spectral lights can be used to produce any shade within those three light sources. But as you canât go negative, you canât go to anything more saturated than your light sources)
In practice, you practically never see pure spectral colors. - Not even when looking at a rainbow. Because a rainbow doesnât exist in isolation: The light from the sky behind it, say, is going to get added to the rainbow itself.
Same with a CD. Youâll see other colors reflected on top of just the structural refracted interference based colors caused by the many tiny dots in a CD.
Closest you get is going to be a laser pointer in an otherwise unilluminated room
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Claiming that certain colors arenât ârealâ is just as much, if not more so, nonsense. Are you going to say that microwaves arenât real next, because we canât directly observe their spectral emission? X-rays? Radio? The internet?
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Honestly, while sure, a tool tip could help, I donât really see it mattering much? Because it does, in fact, do exactly what you want it to do. You pick a color from an image, and it gives you the correct corresponding color for the scene linear result.
I would like to formally make a statement. I apologize about pink. It was insensitive of me to doubt itâs existence. I now realise it was very politically incorrect for me to word it like that. I did not mean to hurt anybodyâs feelings. Pink is a very nice color. I like it a lot.
Itâs not really about being âinsensitiveâ or âpolitically correctâ, itâs about mixing two completely different notions of color, one of which is based on photonic energy, which is a concept from physics and relates to one particular nice spectral decomposition (it technically isnât the only one, though for calculations in physics itâs no doubt the most useful one), and the other about perception, which is far more relevant to the discussion at hand.
In the physics sense, sure, pink is not one of the colors you will encounter when sweeping across the energy or wavelength spectrum a coherent photon could appear in.
In that physics sense, as @joseph mentioned, there also are energy levels we donât even see at all. (though some, like heat radiation, we can see, and others, like ultraviolet light, we can detect indirectly through it causing substances to fluoresce in the visible part of the spectrum)
If you take that physics definition, Iâd actually argue joseph drew the wrong conclusion and itâd mean youâd have to insist that X-rays and what not actually do have a real color when, perceptually speaking, they clearly do not.
As perception is what we actually care about here, the existence of X-rays is largely irrelevant, but the ability to perceive colors of mixed spectra in many more ways than merely pure colors is not. (It shouldnât be taken for granted either. For instance, Mantis Shrimp famously have like twelve or so different color receptors, so youâd think they have extremely crazy color vision, but apparently this is not so: They have extremely poor hue resolution. Probably because, while their eyes could perceive colors in crazy detail, their visual processing is not nearly refined enough to actually make use of that information in the same way we can with our measly two to four but usually three.
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I mean, thatâs an issue of insufficiently good tool tips, not an issue of tooltips per se lol.
Not that I ever did this, but, as I understand it, these things are really easy to change and it ought to be pretty easy to write up a commit that changes any given tool tip to be more useful. Itâd probably also be vetted really quickly as itâs a tiny one liner level change that takes no time flat to test and approve.
somebody help my poor yellow ball please
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