Colour 101: Why Do I Need a Colour Accurate Monitor?

In the 1800s a British scientist and physician named Thomas Young had a theory about colour and how the human eye sees it. His “wave theory of light” was built around the idea the eye had three types of cone cells, or photoreceptors, that could see either red, green or blue. Young proposed that, unlike Sir Isaac Newton’s belief that color was made of particles floating around, colour was frequency, or wavelengths. The three main colours each had a unique wavelength, and different parts of the eye responded to these different wavelengths when light hit the retina, helping the brain interpret them as color. Blue had a short wavelength, green was medium, and red had a long wavelength. Young thought that all the colors the human eye can see were made up of combinations of red, green, and blue.

The German scientist Hermann Grassmann expanded upon Young’s work and developed the concept of colour space. Grassmann’s Law said that all colours existed on an infinite dimensional scale, and each colour was a point in that “space.” Grasmann’s Law explained how colours mixed from their red, green and blue origins.

In 1997, Adobe was working on a little application called Photoshop and trying to develop a standard for its color management functionality. Adobe wanted to make Photoshop compliant with the ICC standards, and since very few applications and computer operating systems had color profile standards, they created their own. In 1998, Adobe RGB was born. Adobe RGB was meant to create a standard across graphic design applications and computer monitors. People began to complain, though, when images created and edited in Photoshop looked “washed out” when viewed in a web browser. The problem was, the Adobe RGB standard wasn’t really…standard.

Hewlett Packard and Microsoft created a “standard” RGB color space that was designed to control consistent color values between computer monitors, in print, and in internet browsers. The color gamut, or range, of sRGB is narrower than Adobe RGB and brings the number of colors that can be created down so a wider variety of devices can display them. The wider color gamut present in Adobe RGB looks great on high-end displays, but lower quality ones just can’t reproduce that range and colors look desaturated and “washed out.”