Where to Find the Colors Your Screen Can’t Show You

There are colors that I want to show you, but I can’t. They exist in the real world. You probably saw some of them today, but I can’t show them to you on a screen. A digital photograph can’t capture them, and your screen can’t display them. No game you’ve ever played has contained them. Unless you have specialized equipment, they are entirely absent from the digital world. Most of them are cyans. On screens we live a life starved of cyans. It is shocking when you see one in person. They seem unfamiliar and intense in an otherworldly way. I want you to experience that, but again, I can’t show them to you. Instead, I have to show you how to find them in the real world. “You sound like a crazy person, what are you talking about?” (If colorspaces and the CIE chromaticity diagram are already familiar to you, you can skip to the next section.) Light is made up of wavelengths, and its collection of wavelengths is called its spectrum. Your eyes have three different kinds of cone cells for…