[ta8645]

Very interesting. Is this just a limitation of our current hardware? How much of this problem would still exist if everyone had a wider gamut monitor, say full DCI-P3? That still doesn't cover the full gamut of Oklch, but would it make the problem practically disappear?

[chrismorgan]

No. We’re talking about colours way beyond the ranges of human perception.

For this specific gradient, see https://oklch.com/#0.7017,0.3225,328.36,100 and https://oklch.com/#0.86644,0.294827,142.4953,100, and look at the Chroma panel, see how far out of our screen gamuts they are (even tick “Show Rec2020”, which adds a lot of chroma around blue–green and magenta–red), and try to imagine the colours between the lime and magenta (in either direction). The red direction is probably the easier to reason about: there’s just no such colour as a light, bright red. You can have bright or light, but not both. (Its 3D view can also be useful to visualise these things: you’re building a straight-line bridge between two peaks, and there’s a chasm in between.)

[shrx]

I don't get it, why am I seeing the "out of gamut" colors if my sRGB monitor is unable to display them? Would the charts look different on a P3 monitor?

edit: Also, you mentioned the colors "beyond the ranges of human perception" but I don't think there is any such limitation here, the bottleneck is the hardware (computer monitors).

[the_af]

Wow, I never thought about bright light red when thinking of undisplayable colors. It makes a lot of intuitive sense, thanks!

[ta8645]

But once an algorithm to drag the colours back in-gamut was applied, would the lost perceptual uniformity still be a problem practically speaking, with DCI-P3 monitors?

[layer8]

The underlying problem is that the color space humans can see doesn’t have nice uniform linear boundaries. The larger your color space, the more relevant that issue actually becomes.