Introducing Wide Gamut Wednesdays

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This week I’m kicking off a new series of posts that set out to answer a simple question:

“Can an HDTV accurately reproduce these colors?”

I’m calling the new weekly feature “Wide Color Gamut Wednesday” or #WideColorWednesday in social media speak. Each week we will analyze a new wide color gamut image and post the results to our @dot_color Twitter feed.

In the process, I think we’ll find that “wide gamut” colors – colors that fall outside the BT.709 color gamut used by HDTVs – are actually fairly common beyond classic examples like Brazilian tree frogs or Coca Cola cans. In fact, in our first test, we found a simple image of spring flowers, taken in Rochester, NY, contained mostly colors that fall outside the BT.709 gamut.

Wide Color Gamut image analysis

62.5% of the colors in this springtime flowers image fall outside the BT.709 color gamut used by HDTVs #WideGamutWednesday

I thought it would be helpful to write up the first #WideColorWednesday image as a blog post with some background on the process used to create these images.

Source Image

Since it’s springtime here in Northern California I chose a vibrant photo of spring flowers for our first image. It’s also a great example of a commonplace scene that benefits from wide color gamut colorimetry.

2 thoughts on “Introducing Wide Gamut Wednesdays”

  1. Hi Jeff,
    Thank you for starting this series on wide gamut imagery. I am looking forward to these posts.

    I am doing research on gamut mapping, developing both gamut reduction and gamut extension algorithms. Getting good images with many out-of-BT709 colors is difficult, which is why it would be great if you could please share with us these wide-gamut images (that we can download).

    Thank you.

    regards,
    Shah

    Reply ↓

    • Hi Shah, it’s great to hear about the work you are doing on wide color gamut imagery! I cannot share our images with you due to copyright restrictions. However, I recommend you take a look at 500px.com. This website allows you to search for images based on color profile. You can find a huge number of wide gamut-encoded images available for licensing there. This blog post is a good overview of the functionality and may help you get started: https://iso.500px.com/500px-color-profiles-file-formats-and-you/

      -Jeff

      Reply ↓

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