12Gadgets: Smart Apps for Windows!
Spectrum Color Picker
Unlike most color pickers, this arranges colors
by physiologically perceived colors, that is, based on human color vision.
We take real-world color wavelengths and calculate them into an RGB triplet.
Humans have three receptors for red, green, and blue
(the corners of the triangle).
It's the brain that calculates all colors in-between, in fact, almost identical for everyone!
Recognizing that let to the CIE 1931 XYZ perception data, still the reference today.
Picture processing, photos and videos, monitors and cameras,
they all have standards based on human perception, like rec.2020 and sRGB for TVs and computers.
Our color picker takes those human-based standards into account.
This is not some gradient
This is not just a percentage of some arbitrary HSV color space.
The color triangle follows the actual rec.2020 specification for your monitor on how to draw a color.
Each pixel you see has its color calculated to match the wavelength at that particular x,y-coordinate.
The line from the center crosses the spectrum line (in red)
exactly at the wavelength of that selected color.
Color picker? THIS is a color picker!
- 16-bit colors!
- triangle as in "three colors"!
- color spectrum (1 nm steps)
- Kelvin line
- rec.2020 and sRGB
- CIE 1931 XYZ
- Adobe/DCI-P3/Aces outlines
- Color cards for similar colors
- Copy in hex, RGB, or floats
- Spectrum/Kelvin/x,y-grid can be turned on/off (add-on)
Settings
Resolution and Spectrum (add-on)
To reduce the work to one quarter (2x2=4!)
we only calculate every second pixel.
On a slow 4K display in fullscreen
even a quarter resolution may make sense (one 16th of the workload).
The perceived color wavelength coincides with the line from the center crossing the spectrum line
(except at the 'purple line').
Knowing the exact wavelength may help you choose the most suitable color.
The temperature in Kelvin is often used to define a 'white point'.
These colors are emitted by natural light sources, warm candlelight, ember, or bright sunlight at noon.
We calculate the Kelvin line precisely from the radiation law and integrate over the CIE 1931 XYZ perception data.
It may be a good indicator on how warm or cold a color is perceived, in different scenarios.
+ full or quarter resolution
+ show or remove spectrum line
+ show or remove Kelvin line
+ show or remove spectrum line
+ show or remove Kelvin line
