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So then what's going on with my cones when I see true indigo/violet wavelength? My eye and brain clearly know that something is happening that is different than seeing blue, but how if only the blue cone is responding?
@@jbtechcon7434 i'd assume that indigo is what you get when only your blue come is active and blue is what you get when your blue cone is active and your green cone is also slightly active
Matt McConaha thank you for saying this. I don't know what monochromatic rainbow this dude fell off of, but mangeta and purple and wildly different colors
Color names are really important in this discussion. ---- In fact, the concept being discussed here might be better phrased as, "The violet-colored light at the end of the rainbow is a completely different color from the other purple named colors we think we see." That's because the color of emitted light called "violet" in the rainbow is actually its own spectral color falling within approximately 380-420 nm. The red cones in our eyes are activated by that color's wavelength, and the blue cones don't need to be activated for a red cone response to true violet light - we'll see it faintly anyway. Meanwhile any other shade of "purple" (a.k.a. "magenta" and lots of other names) that falls outside of the wavelength range for "violet" needs both blue AND red activation to be seen as a shade of purple. It's important to remember that the color names given to our cones in our eyes are deceptive. The cones don't see one point of color. Each one sees a range, and the "red" cone has more than one range it responds to.
The 'red' (more accurately, 'L') cones are *not* activated by light in the 380-420 nm range, no. At least, not enough to matter in any meaningful way - at 420nm, the 'green' (or 'M') cones are triggered slightly more than the red ones are, but both are insignificant compared to the activation of the 'blue' (really 'S') cones. Here's the actual raw data for how sensitive to each wavelength of light the 3 types of cones are: www.cvrl.org/database/data/cones/linss2_10e_fine_8dp.htm Edit: And here's the data plotted: www.cvrl.org/pngimages/linss2_10e_fine_8dp.png
@Chris McNeil Because of how color is interpreted by the brain. The signals from the cones get remixed into opposites, so the brain requires there to be an opposite to green (the 'middle' of the visible spectrum). This is the color 'magenta', which is used by the brain when it sees the two opposite ends being mixed (blue/violet and red). You might not notice it in most cases, but there's also a faint hint of blue added to very super deep and pure reds, near infrared. This, and the red seen in violet, is because the brain starts to interpret these wavelengths as far enough away from green to be approaching the 'opposite of green', AKA magenta. For more information about how the color mixing occurs, refer to these diagrams: www.cvrl.org/gallery/Boynton-model.htm www.cvrl.org/gallery/Zone-diagram.htm www.cvrl.org/gallery/Rod-pathways.htm Man I love that website.
@@user4241 That is incorrect. Look at the curves on the Color Vision Research Laboratory's website. The L and M cones almost entirely overlap in terms of wavelength sensitivity, with only one bell curve shape for each. The L cones do NOT have a second 'bump' in the violet section - what you're thinking of is the 'X' color matching function for defining the CIE XYZ colorspace.
Yeah, a "brown" light physically cannot exist. You will never see a brown light, ever, because all brown is is dark orange. And so when you try and make a brown light, you end up with an orange light because you need absence of light to create brown, and a light is the opposite of absence of light
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@Tyneras If some people had substantially different eyes to them the word purple would have no meaning. Those hypothetical people might see the colors "plish", "vergile", and "snude". They could no more imagine red or purple than you can, at this moment, imagine plish. If I am reading between the lines correctly, you are thinking about the "violet" that lies beyond the "blue" in a rainbow. (The scare-quotes are to remind us that color is _not_ an attribute of light. When I speak of "blue light", that is shorthand for light of a particular wavelength band. ) Violet is a whole different kettle of squishy, wet, eye/brain-biology. We see purple when our R-cones and B-cones are stimulated and the G-cones not so much. The fact that most people see a purplish color violet at the shortest wavelengths visible to them is an artifact of how their R-cones respond. For most people, the R-cones respond not only to relatively long wave light ("red"), but also just a tiny little bit to the shortest wavelengths they can detect ("blue"). Graphically, their R-cone response curve (transfer function) has two humps, a great tall one at the longest visible wavelengths and a squat one at the shortest. So when their eyes are stimulated by those relatively short wavelengths, both their R and B cones get stimulated. The experience of that - by definition - is purple. Purple is something that happens in their eyes and brains. (So is red. So is pink. So is gray,) Personally, I do not see violet on that side of a rainbow. I guess my R-cones are not "bumpy".
@@benanderson89 What?? They're all on the visible, or course. In physics colors have no name. What you're differentiating is not just hues, but colors with names given by civilization. Some of these colors are usually thought off in the subtractive mode (starting with white paper and adding pigment to reach black). None of those concepts exist in phisics. in physics we just have hue, luminosity and saturation. The rest are just social constructs.
50 years ago my 64 box of crayolas agree. I've always felt Magenta was a petty dark pink, but not really pink. Kinda violet, but not purple. I have full vision, no colored blindness. It's not purple or red but a mix of both. Maybe we can see what others can't. Can you stand to eat a refrigerated banana? To me they taste like a bar of ivory soap smells. But only 1% of the population can taste the enzyme a banana produces once it goes below 40 degrees Fahrenheit.
Naw, though 'purple' is really called 'violet' in the visible spectrum ('purple' doesn't exist); _magenta_ though, should really be beyond red and violet, thus "invisible". At least that is what I tell myself. And isn't it cool to think that a visible color can be... _INVISIBLE_!?! 😎
@La Serpenta Canta -I completely agree. And maybe it's just where I was educated, but we were taught that purple is created by mixing red and blue. If you add more red than blue, you get violet...when you mix more blue than red, you get lavender. No real mystery here and this guy needs to get his facts straight and his eyes checked because violet has always been in the rainbows around my neck of the woods. And in a rainbow the purple hue is always next to the red..on one side and blue on the other, so it comes across more violet. I hope that clears up the confusion he is creating.
In the color printing process, the colors used are Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black (Key). CMYK. These 4 colors generate all the colors you perceive in most printed matter. This demonstration explains the CMYK relationship to the additive RGB colors in a way I never saw presented. Very interesting.
As a physicist this intrigued me so much that I looked up pictures of real rainbows to check if magenta was there; indeed magenta IS present in natural rainbows, but not for obvious reasons! It's because the red from the inner supernumeraries overlap slightly with the blue of the primary bow.
I have had an interesting problem with painting the sky when the sun is relatively low over the horizon. The main part of the sky is in a crisp blue, while the area around the sun is clearly yellow. There is never an obvious split between the yellow and the blue area, like a visible green line or area, or even a white line or white area. Pretty hard to get that painted in acryl colours, without a tree or something interposing between the blue and the yellow.
Stefan B I get around this (at least with water colors) by going from the yellow to orange to purple slowly to blue. Kinda like going around the wrong way on the spectrum as if the ends met up like this video is about. As for acrylics it would probably be harder.
That's because paints are pigments (subtractive colors that added together = near black) while a sunset is an expression of light (additive colors that mixed together = white). There are a lot of instructional videos that can help you to mimic the blend, but the easiest way is to use an airbrush and reduce your application of color where the colors mix. If using watercolor, thin the stronger color and blend into wet - once dry use pre-thinned color of the lighter shade on top - re-wet as you go!
As hakobo mentioned, I find the best way to recreate the transition is through the introduction of oranges and purples. When the sun is still somewhat high in the sky and the sunset not so intense, a yellow-white/grey-blue transition works well; when the sun is lower in the sky and the sunset more intense, you can achieve a smooth transition from yellow-orange-red-magenta-purple-blue.
That's a backwards way of thinking about it. Most light being emitted in the universe is by stars, which emit radiation in all wavelength bands (from radio to gamma). That light can be "split" or diffracted into its constituent wavelengths. In other words, its much more common for light to split apart than to come together.
The coolest thing for me is yellow. It just comes out of nowhere. Like how tf does that even work? The "magenta" looked more like a sort of pink and is obvious that it's just kinda a lighter red. the cyan is obviously just blue, not a new color. But yellow? tf? Intuitively I'd have figured I'd see something like a lime green.
In the comment section, I notice a lot of confusion about additive vs. subtractive color mixture, differences in color naming, and an awful lot of misunderstandings about human color perception.
This sounds mind blowing, but remember that white light is the exact same. It has no wavelength, so our brain invents a color for when all three eye cones are activated.
Emilioh888 Emilio, that is the point. White does not have a single wavelength number somewhere between 400 and 700. It is what one perceives when you get photons of all, or a broad sampling of wavelengths in that range.
There may be a bit of confusion for those that are associating Purple with Violet. Purple and Violet are not the same, although they may look similar. Their hues are different. Violet is an actual True Color and part of the visible light spectrum (380nm -450nm). Purple is a composite color made from the mixing of Red and Blue.
I was looking for a nice simple video explaining this phenomena to send over to some friends.. Even if this video is 10y old, Steve Mould remains absolutely BRILLIANT at explaining things.. THANK YOU :D
What artists call 'purple' is actually created by mixing magenta with a lesser quantity of ultramarine blue if pigments are used. Purple color, sometimes called violet, can also be achieved with light at about 450 nanometers wave length or slightly longer wavelengths up to about 480 nanometers; stimulating cones in the eye's retina with a fraction of intensity in red, and a much smaller fraction of green when both are compared with the intensity on blue-sensitive cones; in the featured demo, this would mean that his magenta mix would require more intense blue light to get purple. What's commonly referred to as 'pink' is *not* magenta, but is a pale red ranging to a pale magenta; a mix of those two colors as artist's pigments with an addition of white, or a mix of colored light that's closer to a reddish balance that achieves some neutrality closer to the white mix shown at the end of this video. Note that my RU-vid thumbnail icon has magenta in it!
I work at a hospital. I very much love my organization. Many of the staff have bachelor of higher degrees or education. I'm a veteran. So, I began using science, physics, and various thought problems as a personal coping tool. All of that is purely for me to make quiet intrusive thoughts and memories. I hold no degree in anything. I think very highly of the people that I work with; they are amazing humans. Flooring them with ideas and concepts never conceived in their worlds is gratifying. Watching their faces drop when a color their eyes perceive is revealed to be a construct entirely created within their brain is like tasting chocolate and peanut butter together for the first time. Then, I get to show them the rods and cones of the Mantis Shrimp.
MandJTV Pokevids Speaking of cr*p, where's your brown cone? That's not in a rainbow either. And I definitely see in on TV, for example whenever I (accidentally) see Faux News.
Ross Parlette brown is a primarily combination of red and green, but some blue. i believe the percentage is about 40% red, 40% green, and 20% blue, but i could be wrong there.
You just blew my mind. The best explanation on color and perception of light I have ever stumbled across. It might not be the most accurate in detail, but it is easy to understand. In the end color is light of a certain wavelength and the cones in our eyes are tuned mainly to the red, green and blue wavelengths. So it makes sense that our brain interpolates the "in between" wavelengths in regard to how the spectrum works. Then as the brain tries to wrap the spectrum around itself to make that interpolation algorithm work, it freaks out and produces magenta. You gotta love the brain! :)
kevnar Human eye has 3 cones (red, green, blue). Butterflies have around 5 cones. Mantis shrimp has around 16 cones. If 3 cones are enough to produce millions of discernible colors, imagine how many colors you'd see if you had 16!
Hi there, Im a painter, I recently worked on the film Loving Vincent which required me to be obsessed with colour mixing. But I am a little confused about mixing light, and I have a question about RGB. Ok so Im just taking R and G as an example. You mix them to make yellow. I can do the same with paint, but only if either the red or the green tilts towards the yellow side of the colour wheel. If my red and green are exact opposites Ill get a grey (a neutral just like your white) and if one of my colours tilts towards the violet (I use violet to identify purples and magenta) then I can mix a weak version of magenta. So my question is, with coloured lights, could you skip the blue and use a green and red which are exact opposites to go straight to white? and if you wanted could you choose a green and red that would produce a weak magenta instead of a weak yellow? I want to try this myself, but I have no way of knowing if Im using pure or mixed coloured lights, where as Im in complete control with paint. Seamas
Seamas Olabhradha it’s because light and paint are different in how we perceive them with light by mixing every color in the spectrum you get white due to it being the color that pure light take while in paint you see black the absence of light because the colors negate each other’s reflection so with paint you instead need to use cyan magenta and yellow
this video was fun, I always hate when people try to be poetic and say "can you imagine a new colour" or philosophical saying "what if we don't if every individual sees the same colour the same way" not realizing we do both all the time
One subtle thing. There is purple light. It has it's own spectrum, with a slightly shorter wavelength than blue. I think the reason we see it as a mix of red and blue is that purple light is half the wavelength of red, so red cones are triggered by harmonic resonance with purple light, and blue cones are triggered because purple light is close enough to their peak sensitivity. Our brain then mixes these as it would the other secondary colors.
I see the color violet in real rainbows all the time (the rainbows in the sky, or the rainbows that come out of prisms). It sits there just on the edge of dark blue. And, no, I'm not lying. This is science, and needs to be discussed. Here's the thing: When you arrive just past the blue area of the spectrum, you end up with frequencies that are almost double that of red. A color "octave", if you will. Because the frequency is double that of red, it ever so slightly activates our red cones. Not a whole lot, but just enough for that end of the spectrum to create violet. For this same reason, UV-A lights activate mostly our blue and red receptors (and a little bit of green because of frequency harmonics, but that's another topic) and thus we see magenta. So to those of you who say you've seen violet in rainbows, you are correct, however, it is an illusion because the red cone that is activating is being tricked into thinking that the frequency activating it is an "octave" down.
supercooper92 - If you're talking about a double rainbow, the cause of that is very different and is actually just the regular colors. For the double green and double blue, their wavelength is too short to heavily trigger our cones even though they are multiples. They're there, but just as violet is super faded and not very bright, the next red green and blue are even more so.
Ah, no I actually put "real rainbow" into google images and can see it faintly right next to the main rainbow. Wasn't sure if that's just an illusion created because it was taken on a camera.
It's red, green, and blue for light mixing, but magenta, cyan, and yellow for pigment mixing… the ink in colour pictures in newspapers, for instance. Funny how that works.
Yeah. Ink mixing is subtractive, rather than additive. So the secondary colours are used. Magenta ink is just a material that subtracts/absorbs green light. And cyan is just a material that absorbs red. Hence you are left with the secondary colour, comprised of the 2 remaining. And hence mixing magenta (subtract the green) and cyan (subtract the red) gives you blue (the only primary left). Add primary colours on top of black (an absence of colour) and you can make any colour, and subtract from white (a fullness of colour) with secondaries and you can make any colour.
I'm a colorist I understand color theory very well and u are right on about the eye not being able to detect certain tones,but your talking strictly about light not actual pigments. It's pretty simple if you understand the basic color wheel it explains what colors make another color and why opposite colors cancel each other out
Not sure what you mean by "different." Daylight has a higher color temperature than a flashlight if that's your comparison point. And it has 'different' in that it contains the full spectrum. Is that what you mean?
Shining the flashlights in pitch black would've given more prismatic colors during the demo, because white desaturates colors. This was an amazing demo, helped me understand the colors rly well.
This is really dumbed down to the point it's inventing concepts that don't really exist. This is less easy to understand than if he just said what happens directly.
the only way to see other colors is to lower one of the color brightness like for example, lower the red brightness against blue and you will see a purple color, same as to green you will get a orange color against red.
Max Power This is particularly problematic. I got half way and had to stop. I think a speech therapist would be useful as he is interesting to learn from, but not so good with speech style.
No it isnt. As blue and red are at opposite ends of the spectrum its impossible to make purple. he just explained that. Any purple put in a representation of a "rainbow" is purely an invention of man and incorrect. So all those pride banners are technically wrong!
75IFFY Then we really need to stop teaching elementary and junior high school students the ROY G BIV mnemonic when learning about the visual spectrum. As far as I know, all American children have been learning it like this.
Violet used to be a shade of blue, somewhere between police blue and navy. Roses are red, etc. Purple has never been considered part of the rainbow. The blue in the rainbow is a robin's egg blue, or deep sky blue, or light turqoise, which we call "cyan" now.
The "blue cone" is really sensitive to violet light more than any others. The other cones don't have much violet sensitivity, so your "low wavelength" cone sees the light, the others don't, you perceive spectral violet this way. Blue light has that same cone still excited, but the green cone triggers a bit too. The brain does some subtraction and you perceive blue. Red and green subtract from each other in the brain as well- that's the delta function used to get that yellow that he's showing. This means when you have red and blue at the same time, the red part in the red subtracts from the green part in the blue, and perceptually you see "purple", or magenta- which is using different inputs to get the same perceptive output that violet light causes. So it's not so much that magenta is imaginary, its just that you are getting to the "this is violet" output from a different way. I was waiting for him to actually shine a violet light up there, and it's silly that so many of the color mixing things leave this out.
In fact, there is magenta in rainbow, sometimes. It occurs when drops and droplets of rain has various sizes, and there are multiple inner rings of rainbow. So, first order of diffraction overlaps with second order, second order diffraction overlaps with third order... and at place where it overlaps, there is magenta "color". In case of lack of multiple rings, there is more pure violet light or color.
Illusion. Rainbows can repeat in bands. So you see the start of a second rainbow with the red at the top of this second rainbow and blue at the bottom of the first rainbow. where these colors collide you see magenta.
Magenta here is more a Pink than a Purple (and Pink itself is negative Green), whilst what most folks think of Purple as Indigo & Violet are more Blue than Red. The old 7-colour Rainbow was ROYGBIV - Red Orange Yellow Green Blue Indigo Violet. Thus Infra-Red (Below Red) & Ultra-Violet (Above Violet). The current Rainbow combines Indigo with Violet (lumped under Purple), making it a 6-colour band and closer to the classic 6-colour Colour Wheel of art class with Primary & Secondary colours.
Mark Hibbard en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magenta Violet as a single wavelength exists. Magenta is more of a pink or red-purple. Magenta and other pinks are a mix of 2 light wavelengths instead of a single wavelength. This illustration is correct and well done, except he made the mistake of saying purple since that includes Violet which can be shown as a single wavelength. The pink/red-purple region cannot be shown as a single wavelength EVER. That is it's classification.
Mark Hibbard en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbow Notice that pink is not seen in the rainbow, along with magenta. Violet is seen on the opposite side of red.
+Cryptid The imperial colour. Because it was associated with _imperium._ Only emperors, magistrates, and their sons were allowed to wear it. Though all young boys wore the the purple-striped _toga praetexta_ until they came of age, and certain others were permitted to wear it on special occasions. +Average Joe The colour so prized by the Romans is actually a lot closer to burgundy than it is magenta and, as Cryptid stated, is properly called purple (which is literally where the word purple comes from; _purpura_ is the Latin name for the colour).
Purple is dark magenta. They share the same hue (300°) but have different lightness. So they are the same color in some sense (hue) but different colors in a different sense (lightness, also known as value).
Username0123456789 Good question, violet is the mixture of red and blue but only your paint colours, just like your primary paint colours are instead red, blue and yellow. Light colours however don't work like that, in fact, true paint red is more orangeish while true light red is pink/magentaish, it's weird, but let's just sum it up by saying colours don't follow all rules all the time, in light, they have a different order than they do in paint. Or it's just our eyes, if our brain registered what we see as "green" instead as a more "yellow" colour, we'd see a spectrum a lot like our paint palette, however, the reason why it's red-blue-green as our prime colours for light is because that's what our eyes pick up. The reason why red-blue-yellow is our prime colours for paint is because it's near impossible to mix other colours to make those colours.
LOLFlyingPotatoes They are in paint, ever taken art, it's because back in the day you could use plant's chemicals to make any colour out of other colours except for blue, red and yellow, while in light yellow is replaced by green.
Really good, it explains a lot so easily. And I would always have thought that the 3 colour cones in the eye would be blue red and yellow, as they are the primary colours and green is a mixture of blue and yellow anyway. You never stop learning
A late reply but there are two distinct sets of primary colors! RGB are the primary colors of additive light, where each source adds photons CMY (cyan, magenta, yellow; quite close to blue, red, and yellow) are the primary colors of subtractive light, where each source takes away photons. Paint is subtractive so it uses these. (Printers use CMYK, with the extra blacK because its cheaper on ink and makes for a darker result)
Purple is dark magenta. They share the same hue (300°) but have different lightness. So they are the same color in some sense (hue) but different colors in a different sense (lightness, also known as value).
Fede Aragon I thought of this too. Who's to say that instead of a "line" like a rainbow...it was a circle. Then magenta WOULD be between those 2. However, I am assuming he is referring to wavelengths and maybe blue is as wide of a wavelength as you can go and red is narrow. Anyway, I am not physicist, and I was just using those for examples. But I had the same thought as you :)
Fede Aragon well if you look at the wavelength sprectrum, youll see that magenta cant appear because if we connect them at each end youll end up having infered and ultraviolet light inbetween the red and blue and dont say ultraviolet light is purple cause its actually black ;)
***** It's exactly as stated in the video. All the colors we see are actually made up from our brain, they don't physically exist. They are a helper we got from evolution probably to distinguish fruits from leaves. It's absolutely logical that we have a different color for magenta than for green because of how the cones work. Brilliant video btw.
Love topics about our senses ands how our brain perceives the signals it gets. I poetically would have been lost a bit here if I hadn't had my primers in high school. Thank you for the vid. Very eloquent.
Good question! We're an independent charity based in London. We were established in 1799 with the aim of 'diffusing science for the common purposes of life', and 200 years later we're still at it, through videos like this, public lectures, a museum, loads of education initiatives for young people, and the CHRISTMAS LECTURES, which were founded my Michael Faraday. Our history includes the discovery of several elements, a couple of Nobel Prizes, and some of history's greatest scientists. Loads more info on our website, if you're interested: www.rigb.org/
+SHACA LACA Fun fact - a lot of the things that you experience in reality are illusions. For example, colours, sounds and the sense of hotness and coldness are just ways that your body register waves and enthropy in a meaningful way - those things don't actually exist "out there".
Anmol Yes, I exist, because I consist of physical matter and I interact with a physical environment. My presence and my actions have real effects on other people - if I open a door, then other people can pass go through it, and if I stand somewhere then nobody else can take up that space. However, things like colours, sounds and temperatures don't exist in the outside world, because they are just they way that your brain interprets wavelengths and energies. Colours are electromagnetic waves, and only exist "out there" as wavelengths, and similarly, sounds are pressure differences that travel through a medium, and temperatures are different levels of entropies and kinetic energies. THOSE things certainly exist "for real", because x-rays (which is a form of light at a very low frequency) can damage your body, sound waves can cause pressure changes in other objects, and temperatures exist as kinetic energies in molecules - the reason why a hot and cold object that are put into physical contact always aim for their average common temperature is because their atoms collide with each other until all atoms have reached the same speed. This is the pure physical meaning of colours, sounds and temperatures.
In actuality, you see yellow mostly because of the "Red" cones, as those cones are most sensitive to Yellow-Green, than they are to red. In fact, the brain amplifies what little red it can pick up to give you an approximation to what red looks like. The Green cones will pick it up as well, but not as well as the "Red" ones.
White light is fascinating and is different than pigment. When the Earth turns in the evening the only wave length that can make it through that's longest is red which makes the sunset colors. I learned a little about this when I went to art school. It's so cool.
I call shenanigans on this, because there were very clear and well-defined Sumptuary Laws in most of Europe starting in the Medieval period, forbidding people not of Royal lineage from wearing clothing made of “purple” materials. If purple was the same as magenta to most non-Americans, then why are the closes described in those laws--and depicted in every medieval and Renaissance painting closer to violet, and not dark pink (Magenta)? Because Purple is NOT Magenta. It’s much closer to violet than magenta. Royal Purple was made mostly with dyes derived from sea snails of the family Muricidae, and was commonly known as Tyrian Purple. And it a LOT closer to Violet than pink. The idea that "magenta" is the same as 'purple" is not just silly--it is easily provable as historically, perceptionally, and spectrally incorrect.
Alexander White Different people could actually perceive colors differently. We agree on the colors of the rainbow, meaning we agree to call a specific range of wavelengths a certain color (e.g. yellow). It is completely possible that my brain perceives yellow to look like some sort of "green" in my mind, and you see yellow as some sort of other "color", but we agree that yellow is yellow since true color is a physical property of the light (wavelength). To answer your question, when we both see a color like blue and red mixing to make magenta, we are simply agreeing that there are a few light particles with "blue wavelengths" (450-495 nm) and a few light particles with "red wavelengths"(620-750 nm) reaching our eye. Our brain interprets this signal differently than if just red or blue light were hitting your eye, so it "invents" a color like magenta so your eye isn't switching/flashing back and forth between red and blue every time you simultaneously see both wavelengths. This constant perceived "strobing" between colors when both are present would be extremely annoying in my opinion. Having a color in place of this constant switching is easier on the brain it seems. Keep in mind though that violet is a part of the spectrum (video doesn't address this), so there are wavelengths that are naturally purple but this video is specifically talking about magenta.
Alexander White Not necessarily. An individual's brain just have to keep creating purple constantly. If a man showed you a new color, and he calls it purple, then you know that color as purple. Even if you and the man perceive that color differently, it is still purple to both of you.
Alexander White "We" invented the color millions of years ago. Some primates saw pink at some point and some didn't. Over the years the primates that saw pink must have bred more and the trait was eventually passed to humans. Dogs, cats, etc. see with a mix of 2 colors not 3. This allows more rods so they can see at dark better than us. We are day hunters so naturally color identification was the trait we went for. Some day hunting birds have a broader view of color to help them hunt.
Clay Norrbin Note: even though we know everyone without colorblindness interprets wavelengths the same. The resulting "color" is still unknown. Also it really doesn't matter. We are taught to like a color or not. So technically, we teach our kids to like the wavelength not the resulting "color" for their shirt.
3:18 The real question is, is there any Yellow colour ? You definitely mix colours for anything to emit that colour. And another question I have is are there any colours at all ? As I have always said, it's our interpretation. And maybe we have 3 primary colours because our eyes are designed to pick up those, colours or things. It's kind of hard to explain at the moment as I lack energy. But this definitely gives me hope.
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readyrepairs :| Touche, I am very serious, its just blue over red. Probably just shitty youtube videos. Although when you google search magenta, I just get pink as a result..... idk if thats right
I really wish the video was more balanced. For example, it could have shown a CIE chromaticity diagram. Since we have three kinds of cones, instead of sorting light into wavelengths on the line of the electromagnetic spectrum, we sort colors into a circle - so purple connects the two ends of the rainbow on the other side of light. Purple isn't a wavelength, but color isn't wavelength, so purple can be a color.
Magenta is not technically the same colour in substrative and additive colour systems, nor is magenta pink or purple but somewhere in between of them. Magenta can be described as combination of visible hues leading to ultra-violet and infrared, an imaginary colour joining the two ends of colour spectrum visible to (average) human eyes as stated in this video. Therefore in practice there is no single pure magenta colour as such but multitude of hues (and semantical variations) of magenta depending of the way it is produced.
so yellow really is in the color spectrum, since we don't have yellow cones, then would not yellow light be invisible to us? what about those fancy TV's with a 4th yellow led ?
***** actually, later i find out yellow is detected by red and green cones, both at same time detect a tiny bit of yellow and when that happens, our brain just figure out it should be yellow.
"4th yellow led" - really? Wow, that's a sleek marketing campaign. Might be even better than 4k video playback on a mobile phone. Both of them absolutely useless.
***** marketing, money. It works. Look at the QHD smartphone displays, with 2560x1440 resolution on a 5.7" display. The DPI is over the roof. Our eyes can't really see the difference between FHD and QHD on these phones. So why spend money developing a new matrix, and producing it for the people? Because people will upgrade to the newer device because it has QHD. People look at the numbers and announced features. I see it all the time. Even in the AMD vs Intel debate, I saw one nutcase that was using general CPU scores to argue that the performance of one particular AMD CPU is higher than a particular Intel CPU, when all real world applications work faster with the Intel CPU. But he did not care. The numbers were there. AMD has more cores and more GHz. It must be better. In other views, an advantage was pointed out that you could "Play a game, encode a video, listen to music, all at the same time". Who does that? It's like Jon Stewart said "That thing could sure tow the boat I don't have up the mountain I don't leave near". Same with "organic" food. People use it as a marketing trick. Consumers believe it tastes better and that is full of flavor. I've seen a double blind experiment that showed the opposite. So about the 4th subpixel. Here's the marketing: "Regular TVs have 3 subpixels, and are fooling your eyes, but what you're seeing is not a clean yellow, it's ugly, bad, whatever. But we present only the TRUE, REAL colors, in the most color-accurate display on the planet, for just $9999.99". Aaand people will believe that, and actually buy it, thinking it is superior.
Donnieman, I almost reported this as spam!I had to read further to see your point. I thought it was some kind of ad or smth XDYes, you are right and I wonder what makes me/us look so retards, so alienated that those ridiculous teleshopping ads perform that systematic bizzare-grotesque circus chinese water torture postures and incantations.
Amaizing explanation, well done!! I am looking for the answer for my daughter Sciences proyect and after several research, here I found the correct and easy explanation!!! Thank you very very much
Tautologically (am I using that word right?) speaking, I'd argue that purplish colors technically exist as much as any other color does. A more accurate statement is to say that there's no "purple" wavelength. Purple is electromagnetic radiation containing mostly high and low frequency waves, with relatively less middle-frequency EM radiation. White is EM radiation from all across the spectrum, and black is no light at all.
Interestingly, when you were doing the red and green lights they made what really looked like yellow to me. However, the blue and red lights made a sort of temporary magenta. It's like I could see my brain was trying to show me magenta, but the moment a light was moved slightly the illusion vanished and I was looking at a red and blue light. At the end, when you shine all three lights I could clearly see magenta. Strange.
Elinia Tollea in light the photons are going into your eye. With paint, the color you see is what the paint doesn't absorb. A green light source shoots out green photons. Green paint absorbs light and rejects the green photons.
It is amazing to me how smart people are after the fact. Post your U tube to refute. All information an all ideas are accepted in my brain. Thank you sir.
"That's like saying red, as green, shows up in traffic lights, so I don't have to stop." It's not the same argument at all. The video is using a definition of purple as meaning any non-spectral light with a hue between violet and red. But if we go by common usage of purple (and usage found in many dictionaries), it can also mean any color with a hue between blue and red.
+HakingMC Purple is a lower intensity Mixture of red and blue. On a 0-255 RGB light scale Purple is 50% intensity on Red (128), and 50% intensity on Blue (128). Or in terms of Complementary colors (CMYK) used in dye/printing/pigments its 2 parts Magenta to 1 part Black (0,100,0,50). Magenta light is 100% intensity Red (255) plus 100% intensity Blue (255). Or CMYK (0,100,0,0). Violet. Which appears like a mix of Blue and Red is actually 380-450nm wavelength. Now the Cones don't just see one color, its a range. So violet triggers the Blue cone a bit and the brain goes "I see something more blue then blue here". Oddly however we have a strange bit of wiring in our brains that fools us into thinking Blue with a bit of Red is the same thing as Violet. RGB (127,0,255) or CMYK (50,100,0,0) hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/vision/colcon.html
That was an interesting tid bit at the end. 60+/- years ago I remember being taught that white was all light colors and that black is the total absence of light. So actually black doesn't exist either.
Hi, I'm not affiliated with RI or Steve Mould, but I'm trained in and have taught design, so I know a bit about color theory. Here's some help for anyone confused by the video above. I'll also answer a few questions below, but this should help out with the basic color theory stuff. ----- There are two main types of color, "additive" and "subtractive". What Steve is discussing in the video is "additive color" (AC). The primary colors of AC are red, green, and blue (a.k.a. RGB like your monitor). AC comes from an emitted light source (colored LED's, sodium lights, the sun, etc.), and it's called "AC" because the primary colors, when mixed together, add up to white light. ------ The other type of color is "subtractive color" (SC). You may be more familiar with SC, because that's the color wheel everyone learns in grade school. SC is the type of color used in pigments (paints, dyes, inks, etc.). The SC primary colors are red, yellow, and blue. When mixed all together they approach black which is a total absence of light - Get it? "subtractive=no light". SC isn't emitted color. It doesn't come from a light source. SC is reflected color, and what we actually see when we view it is the mix of color that's less absorbed. So, a "green" leaf has more yellow and blue than red reflecting off of it.
P.S. Whether talking about light or pigment, "magenta" is a very specific color of purple. In printing, 4 colors are typically used for full-color "process" printing. They're called cyan, yellow, magenta, and black (CMYK). In subtractive color (pigment), C+M=primary blue. Meanwhile, in additive color (light), "magenta" is the color you get when you mix red and blue in equal parts with no green added.
I saw a color spectrum painted round. And in that case, there are to ways to, say, mix those red and blue colors. After blue, looking to right is UV which we cant see and to the left from the red is infrared. So magenta is basicaly mix of ultraviolet and infrared, whose both can't be seen, but we see it. Theaoricaly it's impossible, but we see it, breaking the physics!
I think a lot of confusion is coming from the fact that in America, what we call purple and magenta are two distinct colors. Both colors are an illusion caused by mixing light, but purple looks the same as violet, and magenta looks more pinkish than that. Violet does have an actual wavelength in the rainbow, but the purple that your computer screen displays is a merely a combination of red and blue wavelengths, heavier on the blue, that just looks the same as violet to your brain. Magenta, on the other hand, is an equal combination of red and blue that does not look like the light from any single wavelength and is therefore absent from the rainbow.
This is why I like the color wheel better than the color spectrum, while it doesn't have to do with light necessarily, it bridges the gap between blue and red
Eric Ihnen You're intellect, or lack thereof, is showing. Unless you have a legitimate condition that causes sounds to bother you in an abnormal way, you're just being a whiny person.
The sine waves of red and blue would be imposed on each other and form a complex wave. The wavelength of blue would manifest as the period between consecutive peaks in the waveform, and red would manifest as the wave period of the waveform. The ROYGBIV colors are all simple sine waves - their wave period and frequency are equal. Magenta and countless other colours aren't on the EM spectrum because they do not have simple sine waves. (the EM spectrum only shows simple frequency waves, not all periodic waves.) Magenta as a complex sine wave represented in time domain s(t) could be converted to a frequency domain representation S(ω), where you would see two spikes, one representing red and one representing blue. Our brain virtualizes all colors, but it doesn't make up the color magenta anymore than it does yellow.