Corey P. Carbonara, Ph.D. Professor Film and Digital Media Department, Baylor University
I still remember the first time I saw the vivid colors of Lawrence of Arabia blaze across the screen at McVicker’s Theater in Chicago in the winter of 1962. Outside, a typical Chicago chill gripped the city, with bitter winds coming off Lake Michigan that cut straight through your coat.
As an academic for Baylor University, I’ve grown used to winters in the dry heat of Texas. But sometimes, the sky hits a certain shade, and I’m transported back to those Midwestern winters, where weeks-old snow turned the ground a dirty grayish white, with the sky above matching it perfectly. A seamless sheet of pale, heavy stillness. And for those who grew up braced against the severity of Midwest winters, you know: a sky like that doesn’t just hang overhead; it holds its breath. It is a sign that something is about to break through.
For me, the breakthrough came the moment I stepped into that theater. I left behind the dull gray of the city and sank comfortably into my seat. As the lights dimmed, I was instantly transported into a world where azure skies met the golden, sunbaked sands of Arabia. I sat transfixed as color was more than an element of the story; it became the storyteller. I watched as the brilliant whites of Lawrence’s robes gradually stained and dulled as the movie progressed, a powerful parallel to his moral decay over time. Color didn’t just capture my attention; it told me the story.
A few years later, our family bought our first RCA color television. The 60s were a time of rapid technological advancement, and as a child, I watched in awe as familiar characters from shows like Gilligan’s Island, I Dream of Jeanie, and The Man from U.N.C.L.E transformed from black and white to color, right before my eyes. It felt like a new world was unfolding right in front of me and was yet another milestone for me on the road to understanding the importance (and joy) of color.
However, the memory that perhaps had the greatest impact on what would become a lifelong devotion to (some would say obsession with) color was the first time my family watched a Chicago Cubs game in color on WGN-TV.
Years earlier, I experienced what would become a core memory of my childhood: my first time stepping inside Wrigley Field. I recall that I was small enough that I had to reach up to hold my dad’s hand, my fingers squeezing his as we made our way through the cool concrete maze of the stadium. The smell of hot dogs and popcorn hung in the air, and we were pressed on all sides by fans in white and blue pinstriped jerseys, laughing and shouting in the shared optimism that can only exist before the game begins.
Then, we stepped into the tunnel and suddenly the field burst into view. The grass was unlike anything I had ever seen before, an almost impossible shade of emerald green, uniformly cut without a blade out of place. The sky above Wrigley was the kind of perfect blue I had only seen in cartoons. Flags snapped in the breeze above the scoreboard, and I heard somewhere in the distance as the sharp crack of a bat met the ball. My senses were activated in a way they had never been before. The colors that day, from the crisp blue and white pinstripes of the Cubbies’ uniforms to the deep velvety green of the ivy on the outfield wall, were forever seared into my memory.
Years later, I ran my fingers through the long shag carpet from where I sat on the floor of my living room, I watched as our boys in blue pinstripes ran out onto an electric green field. Immediately, I was transported back to that day. While nothing can compare to the emotion of being at Wrigley Field, that first time of seeing my beloved Cubbies in color on TV came very close.
Color has always been at the heart of cinematic storytelling and live broadcasts. It’s been essential to how stories (and even baseball games) resonate emotionally on screen. But until recently, filmmakers and broadcasters were constrained by the limits of the RGB color system. Red, Green, and Blue have been the foundation of color imaging since the earliest days of television and cinema. In that sense, little has changed since I was a boy watching Gilligan come to life in full color in the middle of my Chicago living room.
Yet, even as display technology evolved, something became extremely clear: RGB alone could not reproduce the full spectrum of color the human eye can perceive. I remember making this point back in the 1980s, when I served as Sony’s first product manager for high-definition television. At the time, I often described HDTV’s leap in color fidelity as a tenfold improvement over analog RGB, a comparison that helped Hollywood studios in LA and top broadcast networks in New York grasp just how transformative the shift to HD really was.
Traditional RGB (Red, Green, and Blue) maps only about 45% of the visible spectrum. It does produce a white point and has served as a color standard for decades; however, it also inadvertently puts constraints on the very real emotional response that color in nature can evoke. In doing so, RGB actually limits creative intent. That constraint is part of what drove our team at Baylor to ask a new question: what if color wasn’t just a display feature—as it had been all those years ago during my time at Sony—but a datapoint? What might be unlocked if we could expand the palette entirely?
This new approach led to the development of 6P Color and its Full Color Range™ (FCR) and 6P Color Engine™, a breakthrough technology that doesn’t stop at RGB, but includes six primaries: Red, Green, Blue, Cyan, Lime-Yellow, and Emerald. This system unlocks 100% of the visible color spectrum, allowing filmmakers, broadcasters, and creatives to map color accurately across any device or display.
Taking this approach makes color processing agnostic to the actual number of primaries that can be displayed, but enhances color performance for any number of primaries, including RGB and beyond!
The impact of these additional colors reminds me of my earliest encounters with color in cinema and television! Just adding cyan, for example, stimulates a chemical in the brain known as melanopsin-sensitive ipRGCs. This is tied to a heightened sense of awe and awareness. This chemical is why the waters of the Caribbean create a sense of magic when you see them in-person but appear flat and lifeless in photographs after the vacation has ended.
The 6P Color Engine targets rendering for each display’s native gamut, enabling stunning and accurate images without an additional hint of bandwidth that is useful for streaming videos. As television and film continue evolving through HDR, UHD, and immersive formats, 6P Color ensures that visual storytelling keeps pace—not just with more color, but with more impactful and emotional color.
The biological impact of FCR underscores how color beyond RGB is not just technically richer, it’s emotionally deeper. The technology goes beyond standard innovation; it’s a biological and artistic use of how humans see, feel, and connect with stories. Legendary cinematographer Steven Poster, ASC, said it best: 6P Color reveals “the colors between the colors.”
From cinema screens to streaming platforms, gaming to AR/VR, and a universe of opportunities in between, 6P Color is redefining how we tell stories by letting us feel them more deeply. Because color should do more than convey the scene. It should stir something in us. It should transport us, the way I was transported that winter day in 1962, when a cold Chicago sky gave way to the startling blues and golds of Arabia. That boy in the darkened theater didn’t know about color fidelity or the limits of RGB (yet), but he knew what awe felt like. With 6P Color, we’re ensuring that feeling is given to viewers everywhere. Not just by more color, but truer color. The kind that doesn’t just support the story, but becomes it.
About the Author:
Dr. Corey Carbonara is a Professor in the Department of Film and Digital Media at Baylor University. He was the Co-Principal Investigator (along with Dr. Michael Korpi) of the 6P Color Systems Research Project and is one of the inventors of the Full Color Range system and is now a Board Members of 6P. He was the first Product Manager for SONY’s High-Definition Video Systems and has worked for Columbia Pictures/Editel, RCA, and served as the Chief Technology Officer of the Texas State Technical System. He is an associate member of the American Society of Cinematographers and a Life Fellow of the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers. In 2020, he was the recipient of SMPTE’s Excellence in Education Medal. He has both an undergraduate and graduate degree from the University of Iowa and a PhD from the University of Texas.
