// HACKER NEWS — CYBERSECURITY
Show HN: Ember – Redshift safe color palettes
Terminal, chart, heatmap, and UI palettes that remain usable before and after aggressive warm-screen filtering.
Ember was created to solve the problem of traditional color palettes having colors that appear indistinguishable once you turn on redshift. With Ember, the primary goal is distinctive colors under various color temperature filters. Only once that's satisfied do we further tweak the redshift-degenerate color channels to improve visual separation during daytime (aka - with no redshift applied).
The 3400K palettes are good for general use, and approximately optimized for a Macbook's maximum Nightshift effect.
The 2000K and 1200K palettes are more specialized for true "deep redshift" fans (and astronomers).
One interesting consequence is that the 2000K and 1200K extreme redshift palettes have fewer distinct colors than the 3400K palettes. This is because such extreme redshifts dramatically reduce the size of the perceptual color space available to choose colors from! More on this below...
Each palette is authored in commanded sRGB,
verified under its corresponding color temperature's modeled per-channel RGB gains, and exported as terminal
themes (Alacritty, iTerm2, Windows Terminal), UI surface roles, categorical chart
colors, a 256-sample sequential map, and Matplotlib/CSS/JSON/Python artifacts.
Ember does not apply the filter; keep using the one you already have.
These are the exact commanded sRGB values shipped in every export. The deeper the
target filter, the fewer color identities a family authors; aliased terminal slots
are labeled as aliases instead of posing as additional colors.
A warm filter is not a tinted overlay: it multiplies red, green, and blue by
different gains. At Ember's 1200 K model the blue gain is zero, so colors that
differ only in blue produce identical output. The deeper palettes therefore author
fewer identities instead of pretending aliased colors remain distinct.
Filtered rows are deterministic signal simulations — commanded sRGB multiplied by
each profile's published gains. They are not photographs, calibrated physical color
temperatures, or predictions of every display pipeline. Turn off any active warm
filter before judging them, or your screen applies the transform a second time.
Start with 3400k-dark unless you deliberately run a deeper filter. The 2000 K
and 1200 K profiles are dark-only because a filtered light canvas becomes a large
orange-red field.