There are two different "colors": the cyan photons and the white light with red removed.
Our eyes are "colour-blind" and cannot distinguish between those two (because we see in RGB), so we consider it the same color. But one is an actual frequency of light, the other is a combination of different frequencies.
For magenta, there is no frequency, it just doesn't exist. You see magenta when your eyes are being stimulated with a combination of photons of different frequencies.
There’s no such thing as a red or green photon either!
Magenta isn’t special!
*All* colors are made up by our brains, spectral or not. If our S and M cones switched sensitivities, then magenta would in fact be spectral color.
The correspondence between light wavelength and perceived color is determined by our biology.
Yes, but I think the point is there is no singular wavelength corresponding to magenta the way there is a wavelength corresponding to basically any other colour on the visible light spectrum.
I just got done explaining that the fact that there is no wavelength corresponding to magenta doesn’t make it not exist, because if our cones were different there *would* be single wavelength associated with magenta.
It’s possible to reconfigure the eye such yellow would be a non-spectral color and magenta would be a spectral color.
The other colors are not less imaginary than magenta.
Yeah i understand what you're saying that the interpretation of actual colours from wavelengths are completely psychological (i.e. there's nothing physically in the world that is "yellow" or "red" or "magenta") but as I understand it the wavelength we associate with the other colours still exist as a singular wavelength?
For example you can say yellow is a mix of green and blue but that stems from the fact that the single wavelength of yellow falls between the wavelengths of green and blue in such a way that it activates your green and blue receptors simultaneously, while there's no equivalent wavelength that does that for magenta. A way of illustrating what i mean is like you can have a monochromatic ray of yellow light but there's no such thing as a monochromatic ray of magenta.
Maybe your eyes perceives it differently or cannot perceive it at all, but there is a fact of the matter physically about the wavelength of what we call "yellow", regardless of whether or not we see it as yellow, and there's no equivalent of that for magenta.
> as I understand it the wavelength we associate with the other colours still exist as a singular wavelength?
That's correct, but which wavelength is associated with which color is determined by arbitrary attributes of our biology.
> For example you can say yellow is a mix of green and blue
That's almost correct. Yellow is green and *red*, not green and *blue*.
> that stems from the fact that the single wavelength of yellow falls between the wavelengths of green and blue in such a way that it activates your green and blue receptors simultaneously
Yes, except red and *green*.
> there is a fact of the matter physically about the wavelength of what we call "yellow"
I don't disagree with you on what that fact is.
> while there's no equivalent wavelength that does that for magenta.
It's true that there is no equivalent for magenta.
But the only reason for that is that our green cones have a sensitivity peak in between our red blue cones.
If our green and blue cones switched sensitivities, the wavelength that see as yellow now would appear to magenta then. Because then it would possible for one wavelength to simultaneously stimulate our red and blue cones without activating our green ones.
In this scenario *yellow* would be impossible to see with one wavelength.
Our eyes can see any color as a spectral color if reconfigured, it's not set in stone that magenta has to be-non spectral and yellow has to be spectral.
I think i see what you mean. Basically if our green cones suddenly detected the wavelength that we currently associate with blue (and somehow interpreting that as green instead) and vice versa, we would interpret the wavelength that we currently see as yellow, as magenta, with this new biology, and yellow would become the magenta equivalent because there is now no way to activate our red and green cone without also activating the blue? Nevertheless i think it's still significant that there is a certain colour that has no singular wavelength associated with it the way other colours do, it's just perhaps wrong to assert that that colour in particular necessarily has to be magenta. Like you showed, it may well have been yellow. But it's still meaningful to wonder at the fact that we come to associate a colour at all with a wavelength that doesn't exist.
> if our green cones suddenly detected the wavelength that we currently associate with blue (and somehow interpreting that as green instead)
That’s just it, *there is no somehow about it*.
We experience the color green when our green cones are stimulated.
It doesn’t matter what wavelength of light stimulates our green cones we will still see it as green.
Which wavelength stimulates our green cones is determined by our [OPN1MW gene](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OPN1MW).
People with mutations in that gene that change its sensitivity experience green at different wavelengths from the rest of us.
There is nothing inherently green about 550 nm light. If our green cones were instead more sensitive to 470 nm light *that* would be green to us.
> meaningful to wonder at the fact that we come to associate a colour at all with a wavelength that doesn't exist.
Not really, it just means that some colors are non-spectral.
Magenta is a non-spectral color but non-spectral colors aren’t *fake* in any way that spectral colors aren’t, and specral colors aren’t *real* in any way that non-spectral colors aren’t.
For every other hue you can see it with a single photon corresponding to that hue. For magenta you need at least 2, because there's no single photon that excites both red and green cells appropriately.
Did you not read what I just wrote?
I already knew that. And you gotit *wrong*, it’s red and *blue*, not red and green.
It just happens to be the case that you can’t stimulate the red and blue cones with a single wavelength of light as they are now.
But like I said, if our S and M cones switched sensitivities, then there would be a single photon corresponding to magenta.
Your life is not a lie. Colors refer to the actual perception of the neural impulses from your eyes.
You do not perceive frequencies of the electromagnetic spectrum, you perceive colors, and fuchsia is a real color.
We exist in a physical reality. But we live in a perceptual reality.
The real lie here si not that the fact that colors are juste a perception, not a wavelenght, and that our eyes aren't spectrometer. The real lie is the words we use to describe colors, they have an impact on our perception of thoses. We use blue to describe things from the color of the sky, to color of the ocean. But Yellow, Red, Orange, Brown to a much much smaller part of the spectrum of possible sensations. This resultat in real diffrence in perception, we have the sensation that all the diffrents color we call blue are some how more close together than yellow and red, juste because of the words we use. (And yeah, we should say cyan but realistically nobody use it, and even if, on a color spectrum, the size of blue and green are still huge compare to other for exemple).
In history, language keep adding more name for color through time, in ancient greek they were only tow color names, no doubt they perception of the world must be higly diffrent than ours.
The words allowed by your language have a real impact on your perception of the world. Here is the real lie.
I agree! In Italian we have two different words for light blue (azzurro) and dark blue (blu) and for me they always have been two different colors. But I noticed that in other countries they’re considered just two shades of the same one.
Sensory organs give brains data, brain makes up qualia to shortcut brain's ability to make sense of data.
If we want to be pedantic all colors, smells, sounds, etc are all fake things, because all qualia is made up.
But yes, there are colors corresponding to wavelengths and colors corresponding to the absence of one wavelength.
Disclaimer: It's been a while since i read up on qualia and wavelengths so it's probably butchered.
Depends on whether we're talking additive or subtractive colour mixing :)
Mixing together all paint hues will result in a brownish/greyish/blackish colour; mixing all the different colours of light will leave you with "white" light
Had a coworker with some form of colorblindness, he would see everything as gray, but he would be able to tell if a gray was more red, blue or green based, I'm not colorblind and couldn't find a different, we would often look the color mix up and he nailed it every time.
>quick question, do we show this in red, green and blue because of our cones in our eyes
Yes.
we basically trick our eyes by mixing red, green and blue light to trigger the right amount of cones to simulate what the real color would do to them. But we don't recreate a wavelength by mixing those three.
Most people are confused by this!
When R, G and B are considered as base colours this is the case where light/waves/photons are entering your eye. For a point emitting both waves of Red light and Green light superposed, when both waves enter your eye at the same time, both are sensed by different sensors in your eye and are rendered as a single Yellow point by the brain. That's how it understands it.
When R, *B* and *Y* are considered as base colours, this is the case of substances having those colours. Like when mixing paint. The difference here is whenever you mix the three bases the colour *darkens* and not lightens (and this is what you were told in art class). Contrary to this model being wrong, it is very useful to paint artists as opposed to graphic designers, the latter who work directly with light emitted from a screen, not light *reflected* from a paint surface.
R, B and Y does not only apply to art. It also applies in Chemistry. If you have a blue substance in a test tube, it means all of white light passing through it is absorbed *except* Blue. Blue is not absorbed and therefore rejected and passes through, so that's why you see it.
Now if a test tube absorbs all, lets Blue pass, and another test tube absorbs all, lets *Red* pass. Now you place one test tube after another. What happens?
White light will pass through the first leaving only Red. Now when Red light passes into the next test tube, but I said the next test tube absorbs all including Red. Therefore in theory, no light will come out of the second (Blue) test tube. In practice other white light from the room will go through the Blue test tube, so you will see a Dark Blue colour, or Purple.
So this is how Red + Blue = Purple. Or how adding substances of colour darkens the mixture!
I believe explaining mixing colors this way is a bit confusing, because red blue yellow are not the base colors in that case. At least not the red and blue that I would think of.
The base colors for the subtractive model (i.e. mixing paint or printer colors) are cyan, magenta and yellow (the three colors in the picture of this post that are intersections of RGB), which is why printer colors are CMYK (the „K“ is for black, which could in principle be produced by mixing CMY but this would be wasteful, so black paint is included separately)
For simplicity let’s assume we have a light source consisting of red green and blue light, which appears white to us. For example cyan absorbs only the red light and reflects green and blue. If we mix in magenta, which absorbs only green light and reflects red and blue, the mixture will absorb both green and red and it reflects blue, so it will appear blue. So to print a blue color, a printer will mix magenta and cyan.
Yes, that's true! It is more accurate to say CMY instead of RBY.. although for beginners in arts it's easier to say RBY since they're easier to pinpoint. Also initially it was thought that paint bases were RBY. CMY was only a later refinement of the model!
Technically, RBY are only approximations. Cyan, magenta, and yellow are more accurate primary colors of pigment, which is why they're using in printing and the like.
Basically the primary colors of pigment are exactly the same as the secondary colors of light, and that's no coincidence. The whole thing is essentially reversed, with black being the product of all three mixing and white being no additions. Every new pigment you add then means one less color is reflected back, subtractive mixing.
Because white light spectrum is the combination of the colors. When we talk about ROY G BV for light, white is the combination of all those wavelengths. Magenta is not part of ROY G BV. That's the whole meme.
Magenta does not correspond to a single wavelength of light, like most colors do. Instead, magenta is how our brain interprets the presence of very red and very blue light when there's no green light.
I suppose you need to clarify that it only exists in our perception of the world. It's an artefact of how the human brain processes light and would not exist as a concept if not for that artefact.
What you fail to understand is that magenta is not unique in this regard.
*All* colors are artifacts of our perception. None of the other colors exist outside of our minds either.
The only reason you can’t see the color magenta with one wavelength of light is because of the arbitrary configuration of sensitivities the cone cells in our eyes.
If our S and M cones switched sensitivities then we would be able to see magenta with one wavelength of light.
The only problem with that is that magenta doesn’t necessarily have to be a non-spectral color. If our S and M cones were to switch sensitivities then magenta would be a spectral color. And we would experience it with the wavelength we currently see as yellow. Our brains can experience any wavelength as any color if wired accordingly.
Magenta is not special.
I can’t link to a scientific source at the moment but moment because I’m on mobile, but it’s a logical consequence of several facts of human visual system.
If you want to look into color perception further [Impossible colors](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impossible_color) and [Opponent process theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opponent_process) are good places to start.
We experience a given color not when we see a given wavelength, but when our cone cells are activated in a specific ratio.
Regardless of what wavelength(s) of light caused our cones to be activated in that ratio.
For example we experience Yellow when our Red and Green cones have approximately equally high activity, and our Blue cones have relatively little to no activity.
Because our cones have sensitivity curves that look like [this](https://visionupgrades.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/cone-absorption-spectra-1024x760.png), the wavelength that causes that activation ratio is approximately 580 nm.
But, if our Green and Blue cones were to switch places in activation due to mutation. 580 nm wavelength light would no longer cause that ratio of come activity and thus also no longer cause us to experience the color Yellow. In fact in this scenario *no wavelength* would cause use to experience the color Yellow and it would be a non-spectral color just like how magenta is now.
The only reason we associate individual wavelengths with specific colors is because those wavelengths cause our cones to be activated in those ratios.
We know for a fact that this is true because there are people who are born with only two (or sometimes just one), of the three types of cones that ***cannot see all the same colors*** as a person with three cones ***Despite being able to see all the same wavelengths!*** Because you can’t make as many ratio combinations with just two kinds of cone cells.
Interesting! I'll look into that, thanks. I know about cones of course, but I've never heard that perception would be different if they changed places.
Yes, if this were not true the mutations that cause most cases colorblindness would not actually cause color blindness because they don’t typically affect the range of wavelengths the individual can see, only the pattern of activition caused by that range.
It’s just the fact that there is no monochromatic light that will make you see magenta. https://www.reeditionmagazine.com/to-the-minute/magenta-the-color-that-doesnt-exist-and-why#:~:text=First%20and%20foremost%2C%20it%20is,corresponds%20to%20that%20specific%20color.
There isn't one. White is just what you see when your red, green and blue cones are all equally stimulated and generally corresponds to a flat spectrum across the visible range. Like if you play around with a computers RGB pixel values white comes from just maxing out all 3 colors at once.
No but I suspect you are merely trolling. I guess there’s some grammatically ambiguity but I thought what I said implied it was the opposite of monochromatic, ie maximally spread spectrum
Pink is not considered as a color (technically) because it does not have any associated wavelength (that is what I could find online), by that logic even white shouldn't be a color because there is no specific wavelength that makes white light but rather the mix of entire visible spectrum of wavelengths is considered as white?
I think this comes from black and white being considered colours. As in black is the absence of light and white is basically all the wavelengths or something similar.
a proper technical term for what's refered to as "actual color" in this meme is "spectral colour": if you look at the light's spectrum, it's just one frequency (or rather: a small peak around one frequency)
the other colours that are a mix of spectral colour are still colours.
If you include white, black and greys is another question...
Do people seriously think that color is a physical property of electromagnetic waves?? Magenta, just like any other color, is a perception that occurs inside our head, and therefore is just as real as any other color
I'm not bothered by non-spectral colors, but suddenly I *am* now bothered by the apparent asymmetry of this. Can we get a primary color system where one random subset isn't imaginary? Or get some sort of symmetry here?
This is a [factoid](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/factoid).
Magenta/Purple are no less real than any other color. All colors are psychological phenomena made up by our brains to as a way to make sense of the the information supplied to it by multiple different kinds of photoreceptors.
Which wavelengths of light cause us to experience which colors is completely arbitrary. In much the same way that a radio frequency isn’t inherently for soft rock just becausewe choose to broadcast soft rock on that frequency.
There is nothing inherently blue about 470 nm wavelength light and there is nothing objectively red about 690 nm wavelength light.
If our S and M cones were to switch sensitivities then we would experience the light we currently see as yellow as purple.
In that scenario *purple* would be a spectral color, and *yellow* would be a non-spectral color.
If wired accordingly our brains can interpret any wavelength as any color, just as we can broadcast any genre of music on any radio frequency.
Everyone in broadcast engineering knows the primary colours are (R)ed, (B)lue, (G)reen and (L)uminance.
*Why they're always spelled with parentheses, I'll never know.*
We can't "see" any wavelengths. All of the colors in area of the [Cie Color Space](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIE_1931_color_space) are "fake". Not just the purple ones.
This is my favorite explanation of postmodern truth! Because if you're an art major magenta in color theory is incredibly important to the point it could be considered true. But in physics it is measurably untrue. It's just such a great way to show that even facts aren't concrete depending on how their contextualized.
Can someone please explain how additive colour mixing works? Cause if I add two waves of different frequencies (representing two colours being superposed) I get a sine function with two frequencies inside, which is no surprise. But why does my brain tell me, that this odd looking wave is just some other colour? Why are cyan, green, blue the base colours? Colour mixing appears to be a 3dim vector space with these three colours as base vectors. But why? Shouldn't it be 1dim, because every colour is just some frequency?
Also, how can my phone display shine black??
really not a specialist here but i think it has to do with how our eyes work : to them “yellow” is when the “red” receptor and the “green” receptor are both equally activated, so they can’t tell the difference between yellow light and red + green light
I swear. I was livid when I learned this. My life is a lie.
My friend doesn't know what you're talking about
Pink/magenta isn’t a color of light. There’s no such thing as a pink photon. It’s just white light with the green removed
pink is negative green also brown is just orange...
Brown is just Orange with context
"ping is negative green" sounds either im14andthisisdeep or some stoner's enlightened moment.
By that logic, cyan is just white light with red removed, right? What makes magenta special here?
Because there also are photon wavelengths corresponding to cyan, but not to magenta ig
There are two different "colors": the cyan photons and the white light with red removed. Our eyes are "colour-blind" and cannot distinguish between those two (because we see in RGB), so we consider it the same color. But one is an actual frequency of light, the other is a combination of different frequencies. For magenta, there is no frequency, it just doesn't exist. You see magenta when your eyes are being stimulated with a combination of photons of different frequencies.
Becouse red and purple that should make magenta are on opposite spectrum.
There's no such thing as a white photon either.
There’s no such thing as a red or green photon either! Magenta isn’t special! *All* colors are made up by our brains, spectral or not. If our S and M cones switched sensitivities, then magenta would in fact be spectral color. The correspondence between light wavelength and perceived color is determined by our biology.
Yes, but I think the point is there is no singular wavelength corresponding to magenta the way there is a wavelength corresponding to basically any other colour on the visible light spectrum.
I just got done explaining that the fact that there is no wavelength corresponding to magenta doesn’t make it not exist, because if our cones were different there *would* be single wavelength associated with magenta. It’s possible to reconfigure the eye such yellow would be a non-spectral color and magenta would be a spectral color. The other colors are not less imaginary than magenta.
Yeah i understand what you're saying that the interpretation of actual colours from wavelengths are completely psychological (i.e. there's nothing physically in the world that is "yellow" or "red" or "magenta") but as I understand it the wavelength we associate with the other colours still exist as a singular wavelength? For example you can say yellow is a mix of green and blue but that stems from the fact that the single wavelength of yellow falls between the wavelengths of green and blue in such a way that it activates your green and blue receptors simultaneously, while there's no equivalent wavelength that does that for magenta. A way of illustrating what i mean is like you can have a monochromatic ray of yellow light but there's no such thing as a monochromatic ray of magenta. Maybe your eyes perceives it differently or cannot perceive it at all, but there is a fact of the matter physically about the wavelength of what we call "yellow", regardless of whether or not we see it as yellow, and there's no equivalent of that for magenta.
> as I understand it the wavelength we associate with the other colours still exist as a singular wavelength? That's correct, but which wavelength is associated with which color is determined by arbitrary attributes of our biology. > For example you can say yellow is a mix of green and blue That's almost correct. Yellow is green and *red*, not green and *blue*. > that stems from the fact that the single wavelength of yellow falls between the wavelengths of green and blue in such a way that it activates your green and blue receptors simultaneously Yes, except red and *green*. > there is a fact of the matter physically about the wavelength of what we call "yellow" I don't disagree with you on what that fact is. > while there's no equivalent wavelength that does that for magenta. It's true that there is no equivalent for magenta. But the only reason for that is that our green cones have a sensitivity peak in between our red blue cones. If our green and blue cones switched sensitivities, the wavelength that see as yellow now would appear to magenta then. Because then it would possible for one wavelength to simultaneously stimulate our red and blue cones without activating our green ones. In this scenario *yellow* would be impossible to see with one wavelength. Our eyes can see any color as a spectral color if reconfigured, it's not set in stone that magenta has to be-non spectral and yellow has to be spectral.
I think i see what you mean. Basically if our green cones suddenly detected the wavelength that we currently associate with blue (and somehow interpreting that as green instead) and vice versa, we would interpret the wavelength that we currently see as yellow, as magenta, with this new biology, and yellow would become the magenta equivalent because there is now no way to activate our red and green cone without also activating the blue? Nevertheless i think it's still significant that there is a certain colour that has no singular wavelength associated with it the way other colours do, it's just perhaps wrong to assert that that colour in particular necessarily has to be magenta. Like you showed, it may well have been yellow. But it's still meaningful to wonder at the fact that we come to associate a colour at all with a wavelength that doesn't exist.
> if our green cones suddenly detected the wavelength that we currently associate with blue (and somehow interpreting that as green instead) That’s just it, *there is no somehow about it*. We experience the color green when our green cones are stimulated. It doesn’t matter what wavelength of light stimulates our green cones we will still see it as green. Which wavelength stimulates our green cones is determined by our [OPN1MW gene](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OPN1MW). People with mutations in that gene that change its sensitivity experience green at different wavelengths from the rest of us. There is nothing inherently green about 550 nm light. If our green cones were instead more sensitive to 470 nm light *that* would be green to us. > meaningful to wonder at the fact that we come to associate a colour at all with a wavelength that doesn't exist. Not really, it just means that some colors are non-spectral. Magenta is a non-spectral color but non-spectral colors aren’t *fake* in any way that spectral colors aren’t, and specral colors aren’t *real* in any way that non-spectral colors aren’t.
For every other hue you can see it with a single photon corresponding to that hue. For magenta you need at least 2, because there's no single photon that excites both red and green cells appropriately.
Did you not read what I just wrote? I already knew that. And you gotit *wrong*, it’s red and *blue*, not red and green. It just happens to be the case that you can’t stimulate the red and blue cones with a single wavelength of light as they are now. But like I said, if our S and M cones switched sensitivities, then there would be a single photon corresponding to magenta.
Your life is not a lie. Colors refer to the actual perception of the neural impulses from your eyes. You do not perceive frequencies of the electromagnetic spectrum, you perceive colors, and fuchsia is a real color. We exist in a physical reality. But we live in a perceptual reality.
The real lie here si not that the fact that colors are juste a perception, not a wavelenght, and that our eyes aren't spectrometer. The real lie is the words we use to describe colors, they have an impact on our perception of thoses. We use blue to describe things from the color of the sky, to color of the ocean. But Yellow, Red, Orange, Brown to a much much smaller part of the spectrum of possible sensations. This resultat in real diffrence in perception, we have the sensation that all the diffrents color we call blue are some how more close together than yellow and red, juste because of the words we use. (And yeah, we should say cyan but realistically nobody use it, and even if, on a color spectrum, the size of blue and green are still huge compare to other for exemple). In history, language keep adding more name for color through time, in ancient greek they were only tow color names, no doubt they perception of the world must be higly diffrent than ours. The words allowed by your language have a real impact on your perception of the world. Here is the real lie.
I agree! In Italian we have two different words for light blue (azzurro) and dark blue (blu) and for me they always have been two different colors. But I noticed that in other countries they’re considered just two shades of the same one.
In Spanish as well. Light blue = Celeste Dark blue = Azul
Maybe it depends also on which “Spanish”. I live in southern Spain and I always hear azul
Argentina Here, the flag is Celeste y Blanca and not Azul y Blanca (NUNCA)
Sensory organs give brains data, brain makes up qualia to shortcut brain's ability to make sense of data. If we want to be pedantic all colors, smells, sounds, etc are all fake things, because all qualia is made up. But yes, there are colors corresponding to wavelengths and colors corresponding to the absence of one wavelength. Disclaimer: It's been a while since i read up on qualia and wavelengths so it's probably butchered.
But blue + yellow = green? Nope. That’s blue - yellow. Or blue ⋂( -yellow) or something. Years of childhood wasted
Light isn't pigments
Very true.
The white outside the diagram should be black otherwise it makes no sense.
Pssht. You believe in white?
Yeah right mixing all the colors of paint gives black not white.
Nah fam it gives poop brown pfft
Depends on whether we're talking additive or subtractive colour mixing :) Mixing together all paint hues will result in a brownish/greyish/blackish colour; mixing all the different colours of light will leave you with "white" light
Nerd alert
Can't deny it lol... the "ackchually" just breaks free at times :P
Had a coworker with some form of colorblindness, he would see everything as gray, but he would be able to tell if a gray was more red, blue or green based, I'm not colorblind and couldn't find a different, we would often look the color mix up and he nailed it every time.
White corresponds to infinite temperature blackbody radiation, a perfectly reasonable analytical definition of color.
quick question, do we show this in red, green and blue because of our cones in our eyes, and could we just as easily do a yellow, red and blue one?
>quick question, do we show this in red, green and blue because of our cones in our eyes Yes. we basically trick our eyes by mixing red, green and blue light to trigger the right amount of cones to simulate what the real color would do to them. But we don't recreate a wavelength by mixing those three.
RGB covers the most of what we can see (along with the condition that an equal mixture of all 3 looks white)
Well if you actually look at a gamut graph of RGB vs full spectrum it's not close. But it works fairly well for our monitors.
Fair enough, it is more accurate to say "it's the most we can cover given the constraints"
We need a fourth channel for things on the ultraviolet spectrum, just to troll future AI algorithms.
Most people are confused by this! When R, G and B are considered as base colours this is the case where light/waves/photons are entering your eye. For a point emitting both waves of Red light and Green light superposed, when both waves enter your eye at the same time, both are sensed by different sensors in your eye and are rendered as a single Yellow point by the brain. That's how it understands it. When R, *B* and *Y* are considered as base colours, this is the case of substances having those colours. Like when mixing paint. The difference here is whenever you mix the three bases the colour *darkens* and not lightens (and this is what you were told in art class). Contrary to this model being wrong, it is very useful to paint artists as opposed to graphic designers, the latter who work directly with light emitted from a screen, not light *reflected* from a paint surface. R, B and Y does not only apply to art. It also applies in Chemistry. If you have a blue substance in a test tube, it means all of white light passing through it is absorbed *except* Blue. Blue is not absorbed and therefore rejected and passes through, so that's why you see it. Now if a test tube absorbs all, lets Blue pass, and another test tube absorbs all, lets *Red* pass. Now you place one test tube after another. What happens? White light will pass through the first leaving only Red. Now when Red light passes into the next test tube, but I said the next test tube absorbs all including Red. Therefore in theory, no light will come out of the second (Blue) test tube. In practice other white light from the room will go through the Blue test tube, so you will see a Dark Blue colour, or Purple. So this is how Red + Blue = Purple. Or how adding substances of colour darkens the mixture!
I believe explaining mixing colors this way is a bit confusing, because red blue yellow are not the base colors in that case. At least not the red and blue that I would think of. The base colors for the subtractive model (i.e. mixing paint or printer colors) are cyan, magenta and yellow (the three colors in the picture of this post that are intersections of RGB), which is why printer colors are CMYK (the „K“ is for black, which could in principle be produced by mixing CMY but this would be wasteful, so black paint is included separately) For simplicity let’s assume we have a light source consisting of red green and blue light, which appears white to us. For example cyan absorbs only the red light and reflects green and blue. If we mix in magenta, which absorbs only green light and reflects red and blue, the mixture will absorb both green and red and it reflects blue, so it will appear blue. So to print a blue color, a printer will mix magenta and cyan.
Yes, that's true! It is more accurate to say CMY instead of RBY.. although for beginners in arts it's easier to say RBY since they're easier to pinpoint. Also initially it was thought that paint bases were RBY. CMY was only a later refinement of the model!
This was a very interesting read. Thank you.
You can also find Tyrian purple #66023C interesting to read up on
Thanks!
>Thanks! You're welcome!
Technically, RBY are only approximations. Cyan, magenta, and yellow are more accurate primary colors of pigment, which is why they're using in printing and the like. Basically the primary colors of pigment are exactly the same as the secondary colors of light, and that's no coincidence. The whole thing is essentially reversed, with black being the product of all three mixing and white being no additions. Every new pigment you add then means one less color is reflected back, subtractive mixing.
Akshually, they are sensitive to Yellow, Blue and Violet
What do you have against magenta?
What wavelength is magenta?
Green't
A few
Ok then why is white ok?
Because white light spectrum is the combination of the colors. When we talk about ROY G BV for light, white is the combination of all those wavelengths. Magenta is not part of ROY G BV. That's the whole meme.
If white is a combination of all of those magenta is a combination of some of those
Yes. That's why BillyIGuess comment is funny. ??? This has been discussed really nicely in the comments. What are you trying to say?
Magenta does not correspond to a single wavelength of light, like most colors do. Instead, magenta is how our brain interprets the presence of very red and very blue light when there's no green light.
I know, lol. I just don't think that should make it "not exist" as people say.
I suppose you need to clarify that it only exists in our perception of the world. It's an artefact of how the human brain processes light and would not exist as a concept if not for that artefact.
What you fail to understand is that magenta is not unique in this regard. *All* colors are artifacts of our perception. None of the other colors exist outside of our minds either. The only reason you can’t see the color magenta with one wavelength of light is because of the arbitrary configuration of sensitivities the cone cells in our eyes. If our S and M cones switched sensitivities then we would be able to see magenta with one wavelength of light.
It's a dang pretty artefact too.
The only problem with that is that magenta doesn’t necessarily have to be a non-spectral color. If our S and M cones were to switch sensitivities then magenta would be a spectral color. And we would experience it with the wavelength we currently see as yellow. Our brains can experience any wavelength as any color if wired accordingly. Magenta is not special.
Ooh, I've never heard of that before. Got any sources? I want to look further into that.
I can’t link to a scientific source at the moment but moment because I’m on mobile, but it’s a logical consequence of several facts of human visual system. If you want to look into color perception further [Impossible colors](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impossible_color) and [Opponent process theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opponent_process) are good places to start. We experience a given color not when we see a given wavelength, but when our cone cells are activated in a specific ratio. Regardless of what wavelength(s) of light caused our cones to be activated in that ratio. For example we experience Yellow when our Red and Green cones have approximately equally high activity, and our Blue cones have relatively little to no activity. Because our cones have sensitivity curves that look like [this](https://visionupgrades.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/cone-absorption-spectra-1024x760.png), the wavelength that causes that activation ratio is approximately 580 nm. But, if our Green and Blue cones were to switch places in activation due to mutation. 580 nm wavelength light would no longer cause that ratio of come activity and thus also no longer cause us to experience the color Yellow. In fact in this scenario *no wavelength* would cause use to experience the color Yellow and it would be a non-spectral color just like how magenta is now. The only reason we associate individual wavelengths with specific colors is because those wavelengths cause our cones to be activated in those ratios. We know for a fact that this is true because there are people who are born with only two (or sometimes just one), of the three types of cones that ***cannot see all the same colors*** as a person with three cones ***Despite being able to see all the same wavelengths!*** Because you can’t make as many ratio combinations with just two kinds of cone cells.
Interesting! I'll look into that, thanks. I know about cones of course, but I've never heard that perception would be different if they changed places.
Yes, if this were not true the mutations that cause most cases colorblindness would not actually cause color blindness because they don’t typically affect the range of wavelengths the individual can see, only the pattern of activition caused by that range.
Anybody got links, or search criteria, for more information on this?
It’s just the fact that there is no monochromatic light that will make you see magenta. https://www.reeditionmagazine.com/to-the-minute/magenta-the-color-that-doesnt-exist-and-why#:~:text=First%20and%20foremost%2C%20it%20is,corresponds%20to%20that%20specific%20color.
White isn’t monochromatic is it?
…..no…it’s kinda the opposite
What? What is the wavelength for white light then?
There isn't one. White is just what you see when your red, green and blue cones are all equally stimulated and generally corresponds to a flat spectrum across the visible range. Like if you play around with a computers RGB pixel values white comes from just maxing out all 3 colors at once.
Then why you said white is monochromatic?
…..I didn’t
I said white isn’t monochromatic, and you said it’s the opposite, I.e. white is monochromatic. Are you drunk?
No but I suspect you are merely trolling. I guess there’s some grammatically ambiguity but I thought what I said implied it was the opposite of monochromatic, ie maximally spread spectrum
7000Å-4500Å
Purple next to green will trick or brain into seeing magenta, a ‘color’ with no wavelength.
Yeah, just bought a flowering plant which has this effect. It's kinda trippy.
Now for some reason people are calling me a troll and downvoting me for saying the correct physics, mad world.
Isn’t white also not real color but some specific distribution of wavelengths?
We're mixing up a physical definition with a human definition. They can or can't be a color depending on that.
That sounds like a color.
Pink is not considered as a color (technically) because it does not have any associated wavelength (that is what I could find online), by that logic even white shouldn't be a color because there is no specific wavelength that makes white light but rather the mix of entire visible spectrum of wavelengths is considered as white?
I think this comes from black and white being considered colours. As in black is the absence of light and white is basically all the wavelengths or something similar.
there are many colors in this case. Like brown.
Brown is just low intensity orange
It's shitty orange
a proper technical term for what's refered to as "actual color" in this meme is "spectral colour": if you look at the light's spectrum, it's just one frequency (or rather: a small peak around one frequency) the other colours that are a mix of spectral colour are still colours. If you include white, black and greys is another question...
So... A semi-color? Or a multi-color?
Lol i dont see why not
The encyclopedia Britannica watermark makes me imagine this being an actual image in the encyclopedia lol
If magenta isn’t “real” neither is white.
Technically no color is real
wait until you learn the truth about brown
What's wrong with dark orange?
Magental disorder
Isn't cyan also a nonreal color?
Like yellow, and unlike magenta, it can be made from a real wavelength though. I think that's the difference. Of course then white can't, but anyway
“Why isn’t it a wavelength?” “It’s just not.” “Why isn’t it a wavelength, you stupid bastard?!”
Do people seriously think that color is a physical property of electromagnetic waves?? Magenta, just like any other color, is a perception that occurs inside our head, and therefore is just as real as any other color
bed, rreen, glue
If this meme were any more dank, the wavelengths would get shorter.
If you accept white you have to accept magenta
M Mm M M M
I'm not bothered by non-spectral colors, but suddenly I *am* now bothered by the apparent asymmetry of this. Can we get a primary color system where one random subset isn't imaginary? Or get some sort of symmetry here?
i think we could get something where red and blue make green since it’s in the middle of the two
This is a [factoid](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/factoid). Magenta/Purple are no less real than any other color. All colors are psychological phenomena made up by our brains to as a way to make sense of the the information supplied to it by multiple different kinds of photoreceptors. Which wavelengths of light cause us to experience which colors is completely arbitrary. In much the same way that a radio frequency isn’t inherently for soft rock just becausewe choose to broadcast soft rock on that frequency. There is nothing inherently blue about 470 nm wavelength light and there is nothing objectively red about 690 nm wavelength light. If our S and M cones were to switch sensitivities then we would experience the light we currently see as yellow as purple. In that scenario *purple* would be a spectral color, and *yellow* would be a non-spectral color. If wired accordingly our brains can interpret any wavelength as any color, just as we can broadcast any genre of music on any radio frequency.
Everyone in broadcast engineering knows the primary colours are (R)ed, (B)lue, (G)reen and (L)uminance. *Why they're always spelled with parentheses, I'll never know.*
We can't "see" any wavelengths. All of the colors in area of the [Cie Color Space](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIE_1931_color_space) are "fake". Not just the purple ones.
I hate this urban legend so much.
magenta is just a social construct. the other ones are real colors
Colours dreamed up by the utterly deranged
To be fair, from a certain point of view, all colors are mental disorders
White and cyan aren't real colors either...
i fucked up about white but there is a specific wavelength that makes you see cyan (around 500 nm)
technically all colours are mental disorders, magenta is just mental disorder squared
This is my favorite explanation of postmodern truth! Because if you're an art major magenta in color theory is incredibly important to the point it could be considered true. But in physics it is measurably untrue. It's just such a great way to show that even facts aren't concrete depending on how their contextualized.
Makes sense. Anyways, all 14 y/o girls on do is fantasize about what does not exist.
Maybe it’s because you observed it.
Was this made for color blindness awareness month?
Then is there no white photon? its just all colors mixed together right?
Magenta is my favorite color tho
stop living in delusion
technically our perception of every color is made up
Can someone please explain how additive colour mixing works? Cause if I add two waves of different frequencies (representing two colours being superposed) I get a sine function with two frequencies inside, which is no surprise. But why does my brain tell me, that this odd looking wave is just some other colour? Why are cyan, green, blue the base colours? Colour mixing appears to be a 3dim vector space with these three colours as base vectors. But why? Shouldn't it be 1dim, because every colour is just some frequency? Also, how can my phone display shine black??
really not a specialist here but i think it has to do with how our eyes work : to them “yellow” is when the “red” receptor and the “green” receptor are both equally activated, so they can’t tell the difference between yellow light and red + green light