Summary We take it for granted every day, but creating and displaying vivid colors in our digital media is a complicated and often difficult process. There are different ways to represent color, the ways in which they are displayed can cause them to look different, and translating between systems can cause losses of information. To simplify the process of working with color information in code Thomas Mansencal wrote the Colour project. In this episode we discuss his motiviation for creating and sharing his library, how it works to translate and manage color representations, and how it can be used in your projects. Preface Hello and welcome to Podcast.__init__, the podcast about Python and the people who make it great. When you’re ready to launch your next app you’ll need somewhere to deploy it, so check out Linode. With private networking, shared block storage, node balancers, and a 200Gbit network, all controlled by a brand new API you’ve got everything you need to scale up. Go to podcastinit.com/linode to get a $20 credit and launch a new server in under a minute. Finding a bug in production is never a fun experience, especially when your users find it first. Airbrake error monitoring ensures that you will always be the first to know so you can deploy a fix before anyone is impacted. With open source agents for Python 2 and 3 it’s easy to get started, and the automatic aggregations, contextual information, and deployment tracking ensure that you don’t waste time pinpointing what went wrong. Go to podcastinit.com/airbrake today to sign up and get your first 30 days free, and 50% off 3 months of the Startup plan. To get worry-free releases download GoCD, the open source continous delivery server built by Thoughworks. You can use their pipeline modeling and value stream map to build, control and monitor every step from commit to deployment in one place. And with their new Kubernetes integration it’s even easier to deploy and scale your build agents. Go to podcastinit.com/gocd to learn more about their professional support services and enterprise add-ons. Visit the site to subscribe to the show, sign up for the newsletter, and read the show notes. And if you have any questions, comments, or suggestions I would love to hear them. You can reach me on Twitter at @Podcast__init__ or email hosts@podcastinit.com) Your host as usual is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Thomas Mansencal about Colour, a python library for working with algorithms and transformations to explore color theory Interview Introductions How did you get introduced to Python? What is color theory? How does Colour assist in the process of working with some of the practical applications of colour science? What was your motivation for creating Colour? What are some example use cases for colour? One of the aspects of color in digital environments that is often confusing is the number of different ways that it can be represented. What are the relative benefits of things like RGB, HSV, CMYK, etc.? How is the Colour library architected and how has that evolved over time? Are there new developments in the area of color theory that need to be periodically incorporated into the library? What have you found to be some of the most often misunderstood aspects of color? What have been some of the most difficult or frustrating aspects of building, maintaining, and promoting Colour? What are some of the most interesting or unexpected uses of Colour that you have seen? What are your plans for the future of Colour? Keep In Touch Website Picks Tobias Beasts of Olympus by Lucy Coates Thomas Coursera Mathematics Machine Learning Course Links Colour Color Theory Color Science Weta Digital Wingnut AR Visual Effects Artist Allegro AutoDesk Maya PyQT Isaac Newton Color Wheel Colorimetry CIE VY Canis Majoris (Red Hypergiant) Rigel (Blue-White Supergiant) Kelvin Temperature Scale Black Body Radiation HDRI (High Dynamic Range Imaging) Adobe DNG SDK ICC OpenColorIO MERCK Group Color Space RGB HSV CMYK CIE XYZ CIE RGB CIE Lab CIE Luv sRGB Gamma Correction Additive Color Space Subtractive Color Space Color Blindness Gustavo Machado Rods and Cones Dichromacy Color Appearance Model Uniform Color Spaces JOSS ArXiv CIECAM02 Color Appearance Model Cinematic Color Jeremy Selan (Author of OpenColorIO) Academy Color Encoding System Color Appearance Models by Mark D. Fairchild The Reproduction of Colour by Dr. R.W.G. Hunt Color Science: Concepts and Methods, Quantitative Data and Formulae, 2nd Edition by Günther Wyszecki and W. S. Stiles Katherine Crowson Google Colab The intro and outro music is from Requiem for a Fish The Freak Fandango Orchestra / CC BY-SA