How do we see color? WHAT IS A COLOR EVEN?! This started as a simple question and led me on quite a journey into how our visual system really works. Let me know what you think!
I would add one interesting fact which should be in this video: Not just we cannot sense certain colours, there are colours that we can see but doesn't exist. There is no corresponding wavelength to magenta or cyan. basically it is made up by our brain.
@minutephysics had a video sponsored. It was about Ssabilizing buildings during earthquakes, and Henry used the Lego Saturn V Rocket set to demonstrate.
J: "This one looks green." M: "Nope that's yellow." J: "This one looks red" M: "That's still pretty yellow." J: "This one looks black." M: "Yeah that's dark blue." I tend to be able to perceive and explain colors to people better than most people with regular vision though, since I've loved optical physics for a while now. It never gets any less weird when I think something is orange until I pick it up and realize it's a leaf and it magically becomes green in front of my eyes.
I actually think about this a lot. Would it be hypercolored or would the shrimp zone out other colors just as we zone out other environmental noise? Some birds see the Earth's magnetic field, how would that be like? How is Superman's regular eyesight be like? Can he see the same image on the screens of tv's, computers, and phones as we do?
It would look the same. Certain humans have 4 cones and they don't see extra colors. They are just extra unnecessary points of reference on the color wheel.
@@trapez77 Well, we don't know that, do we? They have the same words for colors as we do, because that's how language works. And they're seeing the same wavelengths of light, because that's how physics works. But what their brains actually tell them they're seeing? It almost has to be different, in ways we trichromats can never experience.
@@geniusmp2001 There was a painter that lost some coating on one of their eyes, that allowed them to see in ultraviolet can't remember the guy's name but he's a 19th century painter.
I just love the "easter egg" in the music track of the video when Isaac Newton holds the prism ( at 1:42 ) - you can hear a short bit of the song titled Time by Pink Floyd from around 5 minutes in the song. Which is a cool reference to the graphic design of the album titled The Dark Side of the Moon... I already loved this channel, but now I'm completely amazed! :)
3:50 Hooray! Finally a chart that shows that red sensing cells get slightly activated by blue light. That's the reason we see violet wavelength looking like purple, and why humans are one of probably very few creatures for which a color wheel makes sense. That very important little bump usually gets left out of most chart.
Finally, a proper explanation on color and color theory! Most science channels do a terrible job explaining color, and they make inaccurate statements. But you did a great job! Only thing is that I wish you went into more detail explaining how the color opponent process actually relates to what colors we perceive, but still a great job overall.
I have not watched yet But i am assuming its based on the fact that we dont actually see yellow our brains extrapolate the colour. Besides there is only one Cavendish banana all plants are effectively clones.
I was hoping you'd touch on tetrachromacy here, because I find that fascinating. I wonder if people with 4 kinds of cones have different opposite-colours or can see see blue-yellow as an actual colour.
Back when Micheal actually made RU-vid videos without the "RU-vid Premium" brand malarkey. I miss the old style videos which always came off as equal parts scientific and philosophic by the end
As an artist that spent their whole life exploring light and hues and values.. It all comes naturally now when I draw , but Every time I had that same thing explained I wondered..” how do you dye the same thing multiple colours? Why everything has their own shade ?” And it was all in front of me.. why does wet paint look more vibrant? And duller when dry.. thanks for this. Helped me figure out most of my questions
I looked up this specific video just to say, thank you, I remembered certain concepts from this video which were out of our exam syllabus but came in the question paper anyway and it saved me from losing a lot of marks!
Wow, I’m 36 and have never understood how we see color. I have a masters degree and it still just never made sense. Over the years, I just repeated how the process works and that was it. But when you used the bucket explanation and showed how the brain doesn’t differentiate from when we collected just the yellow “balls” from when we collected the red and green....well it finally clicked. Thanks dude
This episode reminds me of an essay by Oliver Sacks, “The Case of the Colorblind Painter.” The painter could only see a monochromatic world from the blue side of the spectrum. Blue would appear white and red would come out as black.
i avoided watching this video for quite a while because I thought it'd be the same "everyone could see colors differently and we'd never know" argument. once again, I've underestimated this channel. i am not disappointed.
I really enjoy watching these videos, it's really cool to learn his w things create other things and vice versa. That and the guy that introduces this show is a stud and really puts out for this show.
That’s an absolutely great video on color, Joe! One of the best I’ve seen. As an artist and color nerd, I just have a little correction to make: the opposite of red is not green, it’s cyan. Red and green are like two vertices of a equilateral triangle; they are not opposites to each other. You gotta think of RGB and CMY as integrated to visualize the correct complimentary couples. You can imagine an RGB triangle where red is at the top, and then imagine the CMY triangle overlapping it but at a 180° angle, forming like a 6-pointed star. In between green and blue, at the bottom point will be their product: cyan, which is opposite to red. In the same way, the opposite of green is magenta and the opposite of blue is yellow. If you don’t believe me, you can do the afterimage experiment, tiring your eyesight of the red stimulus and then looking at a blank screen. You’ll see cyan, not green. And the color that’s in the middle of the hue circle/star/triangle is gray; it’s what all colors have in common, and that’s why it’s a lot easier to harmonize any two colors that are closer to gray than two very saturated colors.
6:48 This is fascinating! I have red/green color blindness, so the afterimage I see doesn't have any red in it - I see the blue star background, but I also see the stripes as blue (maybe a little bit purple... But mostly blue)
Was just about to post something about that section of the video! I'm red/green colorblind as well, didn't notice difference in the 'opposite' color, saw the same
I was also going to post something similar. I'm also slightly colorblind and I didn't see any red. I also had not noticed that part of the flag was green, I thought it was all yellow! I was surprised when he said the stripes were red. I didn't think that color blindness had an effect on the color perceived on an after image, although I guess when thinking about it, it does make sense.
Heard part of this on a podcast just recently so this video is perfectly timed for me! Explained more than what I knew. The tricking your eye into seeing yellow on screens is crazy
What color is a banana? Me: Well, it depends on how ripe it is. Could be green, yellow, or black during its life... oh, ummm, or based off the light you use. 😐
You took me back to when I was at school 20 years ago... what our science teacher said was roughly the same as you just spoke except our science teacher said 'That is why our brains are the wrong way round' The left controls the right and the right the left. I can remember all of the students (including myself) asking 'Why does each side control the opposite side of our brain?' To which the teacher just said 'That's why we have mirrors.
Amazing, I'm a colour specialist, I literally talk about this subject( in a bit more depth) to other designers in a course called Colour Matters. ❤️❤️❤️
@Henry Stax I mean it's an extremely complex subject specially for us Interior Designers and as I always say, one can not control colour but try to understand it's fluid behaviours, that's all I try to teach them....
Cyan is just as valid of a colour as yellow ! Looking at cyan magenta yellow light is just like looking at red green blue light because it looks white. We can have a material that looks white under sunlight but purple under RGB light - it only needs to absorb a very specific wavelength of green light that coincides with the wavelength of the green light in rgb.
HA Man, that "keep staring and watch what happenes" had me looking so intently at the screen...I was definitely not prepared for that ad! Gotta say, hats off, one of the most comically timed ads I've ever experienced lmao Thanks for the laugh. Having me 4 inches away from phone screen looking at a kholes ad, I felt played, I was so invested 🤣
8:08 I beg to differ: how animal visual systems work is much more elegant than what cameras do. Even if us vertebrates have evolved a retina back to front...
Magenta, cyan and yellow are based on the printing model. These are the colours printers use. White is the paper colour and if you remove red from white you get Magenta, remove blue and you get Cyan and remove Green then you get Cyan.
I’m really surprised you didn’t mention that there is no such thing as magenta. I think that’s such a cool example of how our vision isn’t quite “real”.
Joel Hjerten Yeah, cyan is supposed to be opposite of red, green from magenta/purple (depending on what kind of green you started with), and yellow from blue.
I tried lsd once and honestly the most trippiest part was colours, I’d look up to the night sky and light would just keep changing wave length. Many colours. Really made me think how our minds work.
Similar happened to me on shrooms. I was staring at my friend's tapestry and it started cycling through different colors (and the concentric design on it changed and moved, almost looked like at eyeball at one point). That was the first time I did shrooms and I haven't been able to recreate that experience sadly, but it is a cool memory at least.
As I understand it, cyan and magenta are primary colors only in the way printers use ink - in fact, magenta isn't even a wavelength of light (unlike other colors like cyan and green), it's the result of our eyes/brains interpreting the average of a bunch of red light and a bunch of blue light, which are on opposite ends of the visible color spectrum. Cyan, magenta, and yellow are "primary" colors in printing because printing uses additive coloring, so they need to use very light colors so that layering them over each other doesn't make the resulting colors too dark. The ""real"" primary colors of visible light are red, green, and blue, for the reasons listed in the video.
Finally! This thing was bugging me for more than a decade, when i first learned that colors are just wavelengths in the spectra, but some how also can be mixed. Thanks!!!
"Try imagining a color between blue and yellow." "Green." "You can't. Try imagining a color between green and red." "Yellow." "You can't" "You lost me."
I have been teaching color for 7 years now and was hoping this would be a video I could share without pausing the video to make comments to my students... Red and teal are opposites not red and green. Colors that are simultaneously red and green at the same time are brown which is dark yellow. True opposites become neutral or gray such as magenta and green. Nonetheless, I do like the video. Thank you for your hard work.
I can't tell you how many times people have tried to explain eyes to me -- those rods/cones never made sense! But I finally get it! The probability explanation was one I've never seen before and it just clicked. Thanks!!
I think you made amistake. In the tri-axis system you positioned yellow against blue and green against red. But in the same sense that yellow is anti-blue, shouldn't cyan be anti-red and magenta be anti-green? White-black would be on a 4th axis.
You are absolutely correct. Somehow, this part of the video is wrong. If you invert the US-Flag you'll actually get cyan stripes, not green. The illusion works even better that way too. I tried to find the source of that complementary model he presents in the video but the sources are actually not listed in the description (just the name of one professor). It's surprising how few people are pointing this out. Thanks for mentioning it.
@@jacquejac1840 A surprisingly large portion of the population are color blind and don't know it. It takes some odd experiment like this one for them to realize they have been seeing things a little different from most other people their entire life.
@@kindlin Huh. I didn't know that. I still saw red & blue when he pointed them out, but the afterimage was more like a shadow flash for me. Black became white like he said, but the yellow & green became two shades of grey. Guess that's kinda colorblind of opposites, if that's a thing?
If you cross your eyes at 5:54, and focus on the yellow and blue overlapping, you actually do see a new color. It's weird because it's a color I've never really seen before
It seems like a new color because of its context, Blue and Yellow are almost complimentary colors, which means they are colors with none of the other's temperature qualities (color only tells you about temperature: Orange warm, blue cool) this means that when combined they cancel their saturation out leaving just a grey in the middle. Since grey doesn't have color your color cones are getting saturated by the extremes of the gradient and thus imparting a slight saturation over the grey part. The reason it looks more purplish than grey is because Purple is Yellow's complimentary. Since warm colors have more presence than cool colors, the yellow is dominating over the blue and since your mind is getting more saturated of the yellow you imprint the saturation of its complimentary color in the grey area. The colors he said that don't mix are complimentary colors, I don't completely agree with Blue and Yellow, but there is definitely no fully saturated color that can come out of Blue and Orange, Red and Green, and Yellow and Violet, since these (if you look at them in the color wheel) are opposite colors.
Some colors, like pink, are just not colors -- they are not a wavelength in the electromagnetic spectrum. Our brain create these colors from thin air. You are awesome.
As a digital artist I have a superpower of sorts, I can see both the colour that something is and the colour I'm supposed to put down to have it make sense. Also additive mixing and multiplicative mixing _don't even get me started on that_
That happens if the object reflects only a narrow band of yellow photons, because the RGB lights themselves produce light in narrow bands of the spectrum. If they don't overlap, no photons are reflected and so the object appears black. Sunlight meanwhile has photons of the whole spectrum.
