Macintosh Color Picker Rant

Apple has fallen victim to the bogus HSL calculations that plague the computer graphics industry.

To view this page requires that you are running with a 24-bit ("millions of colors") display: all other bets are off. (The inline images are high-quality JPEGs; they'll take a moment to load ....)

Here is the Apple Mac OS 7.6.1 Color Picker dialog:

Do you notice that the coloring seems to divide the hue circle into a pie with three slices, rather than showing a smooth variation of coloring around the circle? Do you suppose those three spokes represent some feature of human vision, or do you think it's more likely that the code contains some artifact of the trigonometric calculations used to compute hue?

All of the colors in the hue circle are supposedly at 50% lightness level, according to the Lightness field at the bottom right corner of the dialog. Do you notice that the yellow colors - at 60°, where the crosshair is located - look much lighter than the colors near blue, at 240°?

It gets worse. Switch your Monitors control panel to grayscale. You get this:

Now, all of these colors are supposed to be at the same shade of gray - a lightness of 50%. Does this disc look evenly shaded to you?

What do you trust more - your eyes, or the formulae used to translate colors to HSL?