Color Space - Understanding The Concept

Understanding The Concept

A wide range of colors can be created by the primary colors of pigment (cyan (C), magenta (M), yellow (Y), and black (K)). Those colors then define a specific color space. To create a three-dimensional representation of a color space, we can assign the amount of magenta color to the representation's X axis, the amount of cyan to its Y axis, and the amount of yellow to its Z axis. The resulting 3-D space provides a unique position for every possible color that can be created by combining those three pigments.

However, this is not the only possible color space. For instance, when colors are displayed on a computer monitor, they are usually defined in the RGB (red, green and blue) color space. This is another way of making nearly the same colors (limited by the reproduction medium, such as the phosphor (CRT) or filters and backlight (LCD)), and red, green and blue can be considered as the X, Y and Z axes. Another way of making the same colors is to use their Hue (X axis), their Saturation (Y axis), and their brightness Value (Z axis). This is called the HSV color space. Many color spaces can be represented as three-dimensional (X,Y,Z) values in this manner, but some have more, or fewer dimensions, and some, such as Pantone, cannot be represented in this way at all.