Show HN: Ember – Redshift safe color palettes
Most color palettes collapse if you've got a strong redshift/nightshift color filter actively suppressing green and blue channels. I made one that doesn't.Ember has terminal, chart, heatmap, and UI palettes designed and tested to be as distinguishable as possible under both the redshift & non-redshift condition... so no more duplicate color appearances (or worse yet, disappearing colors!).
93 points by carpdiem - 19 comments
On so many occasions I have been photo editing in the evening and not realized I am wildly overcompensating my balance adjustments because I forgot to turn off redshift.
The README having a lot of preview images is great.
If you could I would also much appreciate if there were a couple of example web pages linked that uses your CSS. For example if you make a GitHub pages branch in your repo and use it to host a couple of different kind of HTML pages (like an example blog post page with either lorem ipsum text or for example repeating parts of the text that you have in the README itself, and also an example dashboard page for example). So that one can look at that too in addition to the images in the README.
Then, back in 2010, when I was just getting into startups, I spent two weeks straight at Powell's in Portland reading through their graphic design section.
After that, I never got very far away from light or perception... AR/VR -> graphics -> silicon photonics -> physical AI (now).
I'm still very much learning, but if you like this stuff and want to learn more yourself there's a couple sources I can recommend:
- Interaction of Color, by Josef Albers. Amazing book, but you really want to get a physical copy.
- I really like this talk from SciPy 2015 to get a sense of how people work with and talk about color maps in practice: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAoljeRJ3lU
- This is a really, really thorough (and beautifully illustrated) article on what color spaces are: https://www.makingsoftware.com/chapters/color-spaces-models-...
- And last, I wrote a very technical blog post a few years back, if you want to see some math on a bunch of this: https://www.usuallypragmatic.com/projects/Generating-Color-T...
There is also https://warmburnout.com/
And it's an great question about relativistic redshift! That actually would end up with more or less the opposite result: you'd want to shift all of your palette colors and meaning into commanded-blue channels.
That's because the relativistic redshift pulls everything to longer wavelengths, so as you approached the speed of light, you'd start literally losing colors as they got red-shifted out of the human visual range.
The first thing you'd lose is the red channels (which would get shifted into the infrared, and thus be invisible). That happens at about 0.2c, depending on the wavelength of the red LEDs in your screen.
Then you lose green once you get to about 0.38c.
Blue doesn't disappear from your visible range until you get up to ~0.52c.
Faster than that, and the only things you'll be able to see with naked eye started off as ultraviolet frequencies (or above)! (aka - you'd need HW changes to your screen, so it's outside the realm of SW to fix)
The README could use more of a human touch, though… it’s pretty hard to read.
I think the current weakest part is the explanation of the science behind it, but I'm curious if there was anything specific that jumped out at you.