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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

19 Comments

hankbond [3 hidden]5 mins ago
This is pretty cool. Seems like a somewhat similar concept to certain types of color blindness?

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.

QuantumNomad_ [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Pretty neat! I currently have night shift active on my phone (it’s 11 PM here), so I have to take into account that the preview of what it looks like with redshift on is filtered twice for me, but I can see from the preview images that have not had filtering applied ahead of time that it does look good and distinguishable :)

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.

carpdiem [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Example web pages is a great idea. It's a very new project (just did it over a couple of evenings during a trip last week), so there's nothing formal out there yet, but I'll add in some contrived examples later today.
RedShift1 [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Aww thanks for creating a color palette just for me <3
cnity [3 hidden]5 mins ago
I love this, and the example images are really beautiful. It feels sci-fi, but is actually practical too. Nice job and thank you for sharing.
carpdiem [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Really glad you liked it! I use an absurd amount of redshift personally, and have spent too much time thinking about / working on light-and-color related projects, so it came out of a place of need and love alike.
andai [3 hidden]5 mins ago
I wanted to say "under filter" ones look way better, but then realized I have redshift enabled, so I was looking at double filtered ones!
kangruixiang [3 hidden]5 mins ago
How did you end up so invested and becoming so good with colors? I ask because typically programmers aren't good designers. Did you learn color theory professionally or is this a hobby?
carpdiem [3 hidden]5 mins ago
That's a... surprisingly deep question. I'm actually a physicist by background first, so I got my start doing waaayyy too many calculations with blackbody and emissions spectra.

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...

enbugger [3 hidden]5 mins ago
I wish more apps adopt such actually functional themes rather than yet another iteration of Windows Vista-like glassmorphism

There is also https://warmburnout.com/

leephillips [3 hidden]5 mins ago
These will also be useful when I’m traveling away from my screen at very high speeds. Thanks!
1e1a [3 hidden]5 mins ago
This is what I originally thought this project was intended for, the name is confusing. I suspect it might not work as well with actual physical redshift, as that multiplies the frequencies by some factor (which would change the frequencies and spacing between the RGB channels), instead of merely selectively dimming the green and blue channels of a display, as the nightshift/redshift features do.
carpdiem [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Fair point on the naming collision. I know these sorts of color filters end up with different names via different apps on different platforms, so just describing it as 'redshift safe' seemed like the lesser evil.

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)

lsbussell [3 hidden]5 mins ago
This looks nice, I will try it out.

The README could use more of a human touch, though… it’s pretty hard to read.

carpdiem [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Can I ask which parts? I wrote the intro section by hand, and left the rest of it Fable-generated with significant "guidance" and rounds of re-writing.

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.

hankbond [3 hidden]5 mins ago
generally it helps to make the readme more of a map of content where you have the big picture for each section and then let people dive via links where they want to know more.
carpdiem [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Added in a Table of Contents at the top to improve it for now. May do more substantial re-writes later.
owaislone [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Looks so nice. What is the easiest way to use this in ghostty+fish?
notenlish [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Good project