https://doi.org/10.1002/col.22813
In this editorial, Richard Travis presents a follow-up to his 2021 pair of articles about color education and additive color mixing, which also serves to remind us all to have a look at both of his preceding works.
I recall reading his “New method I recall reading his “New method for observing, demonstrating, and teaching additive color mixture” [CR&A 46(5), https://doi. org/10.1002/col.22672 ] when it first appeared online, and as a color educator, I found his explanation to be a simple, accessible method for demonstrating the foundational color concept of additive mixing. We educators tend to gravitate to fancy LED systems or the unwieldy but amazing triple-slide-projector method to demonstrate this concept, but Travis’ methodology is much easier to implement, requiring only a normal display screen and a sheet of wax paper. You can try it right now, using the demo images in his paper!
Travis’ method – to separate an image into its red, green, and blue components and draw them as distinct stripes on the screen – is exactly what the pixels in a typical display do. So while this idea is by no means new, he almost urges us, with good reason, to try his demonstration: magnify the RGB stripes enough so that they are visible n paper in seemingly magical demonstration of the concept that makes the operation of our everyday display screens much more understandable. Travis builds on paper-based methods from the 1970s, which work much better with modern emissive displays, and I am also reminded that this method was used twenty years ago in the early development of OLED display screens to test alternative pixel patterns.
In the current editorial, Richard Travis reports that, while simple wax paper is good enough for the demonstration, he has identified some optical diffuser films that work even better. He explains the physical properties of the diffusers that are important, and he provides specific examples from the Lee gel filter catalog. This iterative improvement is straightforward and helpful, and I’m happy to see it in CR&A.
Contributed by Michael J Murdoch
