I'm in search of a practical and orthogonal solution that preferably:
- Affect any blending mode.
- Can produce the most correct possible additive mixing.
- Produce the less posterization possible on mixing and possible over-mixing even in really low intensity values.
Why:
Working in a linear rgb and/or high precision is not perfect.
- It turns operations more propense to posterization, (dark values suffer the most), for example, left canvas is a mix over 16 bit XYZ, right one is 8 bits over linear sRGB, both visualized perceptually in nonlinear sRBG:
It would be great to work in 8 bits, it would result in a more performant canvas.
- It will not produce absolutely real additive color math as you will not get a constant intensity value, for example:
The expected blend is in the small gradient on top, zero intensity variation.
- Mix tends to lighter values, for example nonlinear sRGB tends to darker values, this is an advantage in nonlinear, we are more aware low intensity changes and it plays nice in terms of contrast construction, the left one is linear color mix and right one is non linear, both, top smudge without pressure variation from left to right and reverse on bottom also without pressure change:
working on bigger colors spaces than linear srgb with high precision turns mixing better but still don't give much more benefit. For sure linear is not as bad as nonlinear mixing but it would be great to get something better.
Im totaly open for programs that automatically linearize rgb or do any auto-trick if it expose any real advantage in terms of mix quality or performance.
Apart from that, even memory footprint is not of my interest.It is just that, in fact, behind the scene it is just doing the same, calculating in a linear RGB high precision internal stack, and maybe worst, adding round precision errors and making me more confuse about some possible problem in painting process, another point is, I'm better served if I understand it.
The nearest I've got from something really interesting in terms of color mixing was with CIE XYZ working color space mixing, as I've got results like:
Until you get hitten by CIE XYZ weirdness:
So, I'm still open to new processes, as always I can gain something in artistic terms from it, I'm still examining working in CIE XYZ with limited color selectors. Or any suggestion given here.
And if there is some wrong perception of mine going somewhere I would appreciate a lot.