Colors that we could normally see

[NeedBioInfo]

So I could get a list of every wavelength that a color/shade is associated with and produce a list (illustrated with colors/shades instead of names) of all known colors/shades that way right?

Thanks

 

[zoobyshoe]

I have often wondered whether it would be possible to imagine a colour that does not exist, like a new primary colour other than red blue or yellow. I don't recommend thinking about this for too long though as it does tend to turn your mind inside out a bit!

Sometimes when I'm drawing with my colored pencils, I come to a point where I've already used a lot of all the main colors and desperately wish there was a new one.

 

[DaveC426913]

I have often wondered whether it would be possible to imagine a colour that does not exist, like a new primary colour other than red blue or yellow. I don't recommend thinking about this for too long though as it does tend to turn your mind inside out a bit!

Easy. Ultraviolet, infrared, to name merely two. We cannot see them, but other animals can. It is easy to extrapolate this and realize that arbitrarily longer or shorter wavelenths of EM radiation that can be picked up in a high enough definition and interpreted by the brain as a spatial pattern can be a colour.

As to what we'd see if we were sensitive to these colours, who knows, since it would require a rewiring of our brain to do so.

If you are talking about the colours that we see when white light passes through a prism they are; red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet.

There is no Indigo. There are only six colours in a rainbow. Newton made up the 7th out of superstition.

So I could get a list of every wavelength that a color/shade is associated with and produce a list (illustrated with colors/shades instead of names) of all known colors/shades that way right?

Perception is a tricky thing. You can combine two colours in the same space and get a colour that is perceivable, yet not correlated with a single frequency of light. A red and green cross-hatched swatch will not be representable by a single wavelength of yellow. Human perception is fuzzy that way.


Note, BTW, that magenta does not exist in a natural rainbow, now does it exist in nature. Magenta can only be formed from a combination of two frequencies which are at opposite ends of the spectrum.

 

[NeedBioInfo]

So I could get a list of every wavelength that a color/shade is associated with and produce a list (illustrated with colors/shades instead of names) of a fair amount of known colors/shades that way right?

 

[gerben]

You could do this for monochromatic light (i.e. light consisting of only one wavelength), you would then get a list like the colors in a rainbow going from violet to red (about 400 to 700 nm wavelength). But the light around you is hardly ever monochromatic and the nervous system assigns a color to all the almost infinite possible combinations of different wavelengths, so that would make a ridiculously long list.

Also, light consisting of the same wavelengths can give a different color depending on the colors surrounding it, which would be problematic for your list. The color of a patch in a visual scene is a function of the light from a large part of that scene, and not only of the light coming from that patch.
(not only the wavelengths are important but also the relative intensities of the different wavelengths)

http://eosweb.larc.nasa.gov/EDDOCS/Wavelengths_for_Colors.html

 

[NeedBioInfo]

Hypothetically, what ways could this ridiculously long list be made?
Thanks

 

[gerben]

You would have to list all the different "chromatic situations" (i.e. descriptions of the spectral content of the scene) and associate each of those with a name for the color that it gives. You would have to determine which of those situations give the same color and give those the same color-name. Whether any two give the same color could be established by asking human subjects.

 

[zoobyshoe]

Hypothetically, what ways could this ridiculously long list be made?
Thanks

What is it you want this list for? For all practical purposes, as people have mentioned, the road from red to violet is a continuum.

In reality none of the colors around us is pure, and it's pretty much arbitrary what you call anything. A tint somewhere between green and yellow, but more toward green, might be called "lime", but that is just for marketing purposes for fabric, or paint, or formica or whatever. "Lime" doesn't correspond to any exact position between red and violet because it will have white mixed in, and who knows what else. Pigments and dyes have particular qualities depending on what they're made of.

For an artist to paint a "green" leaf 10 different colors may have to be employed. "Greenness" is only the overall dominant impression you get when looking at a leaf. There are highlights and shadows, and a lot of plants we call green actually have a lot of brown in them, and brown is already a complex shaded orange. Some "green" plants have a lot of subtle red streaks, and some have a lot of blue, and some are very yellow, depending on how the light hits them.

Things colored with pigments and dyes are intended for viewng in white light, and this is a different situation than trying to parse visible light into monochromatic "quanta" that can be named. For the latter no one ever gets much more detailed than, say, "red-orange" or "yellow-green", or "violet-blue".

With pigments and dyes you can get really creative: "raspberry," "chartreuse," "ecru," "tuscan red," "rosey beige," "midnight blue," and so on. There is no end to the combinations you could make and give names to.

 

[fuzzyfelt]

What is it you want this list for? For all practical purposes, as people have mentioned, the road from red to violet is a continuum.

In reality none of the colors around us is pure, and it's pretty much arbitrary what you call anything. A tint somewhere between green and yellow, but more toward green, might be called "lime", but that is just for marketing purposes for fabric, or paint, or formica or whatever. "Lime" doesn't correspond to any exact position between red and violet because it will have white mixed in, and who knows what else. Pigments and dyes have particular qualities depending on what they're made of.

For an artist to paint a "green" leaf 10 different colors may have to be employed. "Greenness" is only the overall dominant impression you get when looking at a leaf. There are highlights and shadows, and a lot of plants we call green actually have a lot of brown in them, and brown is already a complex shaded orange. Some "green" plants have a lot of subtle red streaks, and some have a lot of blue, and some are very yellow, depending on how the light hits them.

Its probably just confusing the issue, but in treatise on the colour system, Itten equated colours with a continuum of mental and emotional expressive values-

red+yellow=orange
power+knowledge=proud self respect

red+blue=violet
love+faith=piety

yellow+blue=green
Knowledge+faith=compassion

Is listing colours like trying to list all mental and emotional states?

 

[NeedBioInfo]

No I just...my ex-boyfriend was an artist and I thought it would be neat to really embrace the world of color even if I can't draw. Sorry I know that doesn't make sense. I guess I just wanted to go up to him some day and say like "Look! I know ALL THE COLORS THAT EXIST! I have them right here so I can be aware of them all the time! That makes me kind of artistic doesn't it?"

It's not that I have issues. It's just complicated. Oh, wait, it is that I have issues...okay, well, never mind

 

[somasimple]

Hi,

here is some colours with their names (click for complete chart)
http://www.bachlabel.net/newsite/color_chart.html

 

[Simetra7]

No I just...my ex-boyfriend was an artist and I thought it would be neat to really embrace the world of color even if I can't draw. Sorry I know that doesn't make sense. I guess I just wanted to go up to him some day and say like "Look! I know ALL THE COLORS THAT EXIST! I have them right here so I can be aware of them all the time! That makes me kind of artistic doesn't it?"

It's not that I have issues. It's just complicated. Oh, wait, it is that I have issues...okay, well, never mind

Maybe you would be better off borrowing some art books from the library. There are some really great ones with heaps of info about mixing colours and how colours interact with each other in an artistic sense. You really don't need to be able to draw well to create beautiful works of art with colour.

 

[zoobyshoe]

Maybe you would be better off borrowing some art books from the library.

Yeah. Just get a couple books with titles like How To Paint With Oil Colors, and there is sure to be an explanation of the color wheel. That tells you how to mix colors from primaries.

Then you could visit art stores and just look at the paints, colored pencils, colored markers, etc and see what they're called.

 

[fuzzyfelt]

Yeah. Just get a couple books with titles like How To Paint With Oil Colors, and there is sure to be an explanation of the color wheel. That tells you how to mix colors from primaries.

In which case Itten's The Art of Color, or The Elements of Color, are a good place to start. He explains how to construct a regular 12 hue colour circle, starting with the primaries red, yellow and blue, mixing equal amounts of two of these respectively to make secondaries(orange, green and violet), and then mixing equal amounts of the colours nearest each other to make yellow-orange,red-orange, red-violet,blue-violet,blue-green and yellow-green. These could be further mixed to make 24 or 100 hue circles, but he says there is not much point, an artist needs to be able to have a mental picture of the wheel, not obscured by too many hues.
There are the achromatic colours, too -black (which is very hard to make this way, but correctly is made useing all the hues) and white, and these add to or subtract brilliance from the 12 hues. Hues have differing brilliances ( for example,red and green are equally brilliant, yellow is more and violet less) and to completely incorporate those into a colour wheel would be to add varying amounts of black or white to each hue, creating rather than a colour wheel with 12 hues, a sphere of 144 shades, moving from white at the top, to black at the bottom.
Then within there would be a neutral grey area running vertically down the centre, and taking a horizontal cross section, by adding measures or their tonally opposite colours, these colours would gradually become saturated to meet the grey in the middle.
'By painting all the horizontal and vertical sections of the sphere in this manner, we complete our color catalogue. Horizontal sections contain the degrees of saturation of the hues, and vertical sections contain the tints and shades of a given pair of complementaries, pure and diluted'.

It is how this is used that is really important to artists, with different types of contrasts- hue, Dight-dark, cold-warm, complementary, simultaneous, saturation and extension, amongst other things to do with colour.

Did your ex boyfriend paint? What sort of art does he like?

 

[Moonbear]

No I just...my ex-boyfriend was an artist and I thought it would be neat to really embrace the world of color even if I can't draw. Sorry I know that doesn't make sense. I guess I just wanted to go up to him some day and say like "Look! I know ALL THE COLORS THAT EXIST! I have them right here so I can be aware of them all the time! That makes me kind of artistic doesn't it?"

It's not that I have issues. It's just complicated. Oh, wait, it is that I have issues...okay, well, never mind

This may come across a bit blunt, but just knowing colors isn't what makes you artistic. That would be somewhat like saying memorizing all the words in a dictionary would make you a poet. You may simply be too technical in your thinking to really relate to the creative/artistic side of things. Maybe it's good that he's an "ex" boyfriend if you think and view the world from such very different points of view as to make it difficult to relate to each other.

Did spending time with him give you the desire to develop more artistic/creative thinking, or was some competitive side just trying to play a game of one-upmanship because he had a talent you don't have?

 

[NeedBioInfo]

Well I know that: A: there's more to being an artist than simply knowing and applying knowledge of color

And B: Without being able to apply the knowledge of color, the knowledge wouldn't be very much use

But I mean, I thought that if artists were more aware of color (and as a result able to use color better) their artistic abilitie(s) would improve. Anyways that was my line of thinking

This thread/desire didn't really have anything to do with him originally (Well maybe it did without me realizing it) but then I thought it would be neat to be able to relate to him (in regards to this thread) if I ever saw him again, which I might not. I think I also thought later that me making this thread DID have more to do with him than I thought.

 

[NeedBioInfo]

But anyways Gerben said that my list could be made by

listing all the different "chromatic situations" (i.e. descriptions of the spectral content of the scene) and associating each of those with a name for the color (The different ones, not the identical ones) that it gives.

 

[NeedBioInfo]

(I edited the above two posts so um, read them again I guess to make sure you didn't miss the editing) (thanks)

 

[NeedBioInfo]

I mean, would it be possibly to just list- with colors, not names- all the different "chromatic situations" (i.e. descriptions of the spectral content of the scene)?

 

[NeedBioInfo]

phrase

Somebody said this:

"list all the different "chromatic situations" (i.e. descriptions of the spectral content of the scene)"

What does it MEAN though? How would you do that? etc

thanks

 

[gerben]

Spectral content just means the wavelengths and the intensity of those wavelengths. To describe the spectral content of a scene you would have to describe the wavelengths (and their intensities) of the light coming from every point in the scene.

This is quite complicated, it depends on the direction from which you look onto the scene and on (the spectral content of) the light that illuminates the scene, but nowadays there are devices that can measure this.

The spectral content describes the physical aspects of the light coming from the scene. However, humans experience this as a scene filled with colors, that is what I meant with "chromatic situation": in human beings the physical situation (i.e. the spectral content of the scene) gives rise to a chromatic interpretation (i.e. a colorful scene).

 

[Moonbear]

Somebody said this:

"list all the different "chromatic situations" (i.e. descriptions of the spectral content of the scene)"

What does it MEAN though? How would you do that? etc

thanks

This is from the color thread:
https://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=88705&page=2&pp=20

If you're going to quote someone here, use quote tags and identify the person/source you're quoting (in this case, the quoted text was written by Gerben). There's no need to start a new thread every time you have a question about someone's reply in a previous thread; the point of a discussion is you can ask them to clarify or explain in the same thread. Why have someone else try to explain what a member meant in a reply when you can ask them directly in the thread they posted it in? When you quote it out of context, you lose meaning. In the proper context, the answer to your second question was partially answered in the other two sentences of Gerben's reply.

You would have to determine which of those situations give the same color and give those the same color-name. Whether any two give the same color could be established by asking human subjects.

It would be a ridiculous undertaking though. The other replies in that thread already pointed out how difficult it would be. You could come up with A list, but I doubt you could ever come up with a comprehensive or complete list.

 

[Genecks]

It would be a ridiculous undertaking though. The other replies in that thread already pointed out how difficult it would be. You could come up with A list, but I doubt you could ever come up with a comprehensive or complete list.

Because of that from lack of digital device being able to go through the complete range of analog color, would that be?

Digital devices have their limits.

 

[hypnagogue]

Please note that the last four posts in this thread were originally posted in a separate thread titled "phrase." Since "phrase" was merely a continuation of the discussion started in this thread, I have merged the two together.

 

[hypnagogue]

It would indeed be impractical to try to exhaustively list all the chromatic situations one could possibly come across. For instance, suppose we take a very simplified situation-- suppose we want to find the number of chromatic situations one could display on a computer monitor. Suppose we ignore the environment in which the computer monitor is viewed, and suppose that we hold viewing distance, lighting conditions, and angle of view constant. Suppose the computer monitor has a 1024x768 resolution, with each pixel capable of displaying one of 16,777,216 colors. (These are fairly standard settings for a computer monitor.)

So what can our monitor display? Since it's at 1024x768 resolution, it has 1024 * 768 = 786,432 pixels. Each of these pixels can display one of about 16.8 million colors, so the range of possible displays on the monitor is

786,432 pixels * 16,777,216 colors/pixel = 13,194,139,533,312 chromatic situations!

So even in a highly constrained and artificial scenario like the one outlined above, for a single computer monitor, there are over 13 trillion chromatic situations. Of course, that number balloons even larger if we take into account lighting conditions or the visual content of the surrounding environment, etc. So, no, it's probably not a good idea to bother trying to come up with all the possible chromatic situations.

 

[NeedBioInfo]

My dad said this:

There are 16,777,216 ^ 786,432 chromatic situations, where "^" means* "to the power of".* Since there are only about 10 ^ 80 atoms in the* universe, you would need a much larger universe in order to create a* list long enough to list all the chromatic situations.

so I'm looking for info about that...
thanks

 

[hypnagogue]

whoops, sloppy mistake on my part. Your dad did the calculation correctly.

What further information can you want though?

 

[NeedBioInfo]

I guess I just wanted to check that that was correct, and, if it wasn't, to find out about it

anyways, thanks

 

[hitssquad]

Hyperphysics and the C.I.E. color space

Could somebody give me a list of all the colors that we could normally (Except for when we're color-blind, etc) perceive?

Also, could somebody give me a list of all the different shades, etc (Eg an illustrated list) that we could normally (Except for when we're color-blind, etc) perceive? Or at least, for example, a numerical amount of the shades that we could normally perceive?

The best information you can get on this is at Hyperphysics (I think you might want to be sure to follow all of the links from this primary link):
hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/vision/rodcone.html

 

[fuzzyfelt]

The best information you can get on this is at Hyperphysics

Great link!
Especially if the aim of this thread is, as it says, perception of colour.
If the thread is for painting then how this perception is translated by pigments is also important.