i’ve been spending way too much time on a recent project. i’m stuck at the point where i play floating point imagery back to the screen and the chroma is eating my nice clipped luminance values. most likely this is clear as mud to you. me too. i need to read this thing. maybe it’ll help me finger it out.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tone_mapping

[edit 2007.12.19] Turns out that it is helpful to think of HSB colorspace as a sphere instead of a cylinder. As B approaches white or black, S should approach 0. Works like a charm.

[edit 2008.03.24] Here is the Wikipedia entry for HSL/HSV colorspace. Includes some useful math for RGB to HSL and back.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HSV_color_space

[edit 2008.03.26] Scroll down on this page to get to their description of HSV2. This thinking may apply to my float lightness gain problem.
http://ilab.usc.edu/wiki/index.php/HSV_And_H2SV_Color_Space

And then there’s Charles Poynton, who has done a lot of thinking about color.

We also have couleur.org, by Philippe COLANTONI, with short explanations and 3D graphs of several color spaces.
http://www.couleur.org/index.php?page=transformations