The Wonderful World Of Color

[Auspex]

How Animals Hacked The Rainbow And Got Stumped On Blue:

LINK

[painshill]

Fascinating!

Here's a little more colour trivia about human perceptions.

Several New Guinea tribes only have words for 2 colours – black and white. In Africa, the Tiv have 3, the Ibo have 4, the Bushmen have 5 and the Hausa have 6. In a study of 98 languages around the world by researchers at the University of California, all languages which started with black and white, added red as the 3rd colour. Those with 4 colours always added green after red. The 5th colour was usually yellow, then blue, then brown – but always in that sequence. No language ever got to brown unless it already had green, yellow and blue.

[Herb]

very interesting!

[Mike Pocock]

Very Interesting, however have you noticed that the "new colours" are all related to objects or other items such as, Light Oak, Dark Oak these are shades of Brown but we feel the need to increase the spectrum of Colour's to fit our ever expanding world.

[squali]

Ha I didn't realize politicians came from New Guinea

[Wrangellian]

I have always wondered how we came up with Indigo and Violet in the 'standard' rainbow sequence - whatever happened to Purple? Considering that the 3 primary colors are Red, Yellow and Blue, and the secondary ones formed from combining two of the primary ones are Orange, Green and Purple... It would make more sense to me to have 6 'main' colors - Purple Blue Green Yellow Orange Red and consider Indigo and Violet to be sub-shades like Lime Green, Magenta, and so on.

[painshill]

I have always wondered how we came up with Indigo and Violet in the 'standard' rainbow sequence - whatever happened to Purple? Considering that the 3 primary colors are Red, Yellow and Blue, and the secondary ones formed from combining two of the primary ones are Orange, Green and Purple... It would make more sense to me to have 6 'main' colors - Purple Blue Green Yellow Orange Red and consider Indigo and Violet to be sub-shades like Lime Green, Magenta, and so on.

When Isaac Newton devised his “colour circle” to explain the way in which additive colour mixing worked, his initial thinking was based on five colours – red, yellow, green, blue and violet (ie purple). He based his thinking on artistic tradition from the Renaissance, when artists were toying with the idea of a set of primary colours from which all others could be mixed and there were several competing theories using up to seven colours. Newton also ultimately settled on seven – adding orange and indigo – to match the number of musical notes in the major scale used in music. He apparently found that analogy aesthetically pleasing in its arrangement and equal spacing.

For us in Britain, that often becomes lodged in schoolchildren’s minds as “Richard Of York Gained Battles In Vain” and for non-Brits as other mnemonics like “Rinse Out Your Granny’s Boots In Vinegar”.

Albert Munsell’s colour system (devised in 1905 and still in use today in colourimetry) provided a way of accurately and numerically specifying a “colour space” in three dimensions – hue (colour), value (lightness) and chroma (colour purity). The system uses five “principal hues” - red, yellow, green, blue, and purple – plus five “intermediate hues” which lie halfway between them.

Edited November 29, 2014 by painshill

[Wrangellian]

What was the basis of those particular colors for the principal hues? The way I understand the red/yellow/blue system is those are the 3 color receptors in our eyes and so every other color registers as different combinations of these 3.

[painshill]

Munsell was a professor of art at what is now the Massachusetts College of Art & Design, and – in his own words - wanted to create a “rational way to describe colour” instead of names, which he regarded as “foolish” and “misleading”. The only reason the names are referred to at all in his system is (was) to help his students get their minds round the concept, which is a combination of mathematics and physics.

He decided to use decimal notation – so the five “principal hues” (colours), together with the five intermediaries laying halfway between adjacent principal hues provide ten equal colour spacings. Each of those is then broken down into ten equal sub-spacings to create a hundred hues given interger values from 1-100 that run in a continuous circle starting with “reds” and ending with “purples”.

He might just as easily have divided the circles into 360 degrees and had some multiple of that as his "hues" but it would have been mathematically less neat and more difficult for people to get their minds round. The choice was semi-arbitrary (as was Newton's choice of seven) and not influenced by the cone-receptor sensitivities of our eyes, which in any case vary between individuals.

In terms of the physics, it works on the basis that two colours of equal value (lightness) and chroma (purity) on the opposite sides of a hue circle, are complementary colours and if mixed additively will produce a neutral grey of the same value.

We use this system in the food industry for quality grading purposes, geologists use it, dentists use it for teeth matching and it’s a fundamental tool in forensic analysis.

Edited November 29, 2014 by painshill

[Missourian]

I've heard the dayflower (Commelina communis) is able to produce a truly blue pigment: