The article was clearly written by an enthusiast, but is a bit muddled. I see nothing in what he has written that supports the idea that Color Wheels are wrong.
Color wheels are, in essence, highly abstracted slices across the equator of a color space. Only two color wheels are commonly used: the RGB and the RYB (aka the artists color wheel). Color from pigments and color from light are two wildly different things, but easy to confuse. For its absence of green as a primary, CMYK can be understood as a version of RYB. Black is used not just because it is cheap but also to add opacity to the inks (printing inks are more like dyes... very thin and transparent).
The color opposites the author describes are red/cyan in RGB and red/green in RYB.
One property of these opposites is that they mix to neutral. For this, the RBG pair works best. The other property is that they are perceptually antagonistic, for which the RYB pair works best.
Interestingly, the perceptually antagonistic pair set (red/green, yellow/purple, blue/orange) were spoken about well before Newton placed these colors in a circle. Leonardo Da Vinco refers to them as 'retto contrario', literally exactly opposite.
The author asks 'why a wheel'? which is a good question, and the answer he gives is reasonable. But... Newton was the first to employ this device, and he did so almost certainly because the harmony structure of the musical scale was commonly visualized as a wheel, and Newton was keen to draw an analogy between music and color and harmony and the music of the spheres and god etc etc. He may have been the first physicist, but he was also an alchemist.
Color is a frustrating beast... so many different ways to understand the same thing: perception, physics, aesthetics, chemistry etc. Truly the seven blind men and the elephant.
> Ask any artist to explain how color works, and they’ll launch into a treatise about how the Three Primary Colors—red, blue, and yellow—form a color wheel
I doubt that. More likely that they look at you akwardly or say a joke and try to carry on.
Some artist couldn’t care less about colours. A sculptor thinks much more about shapes, a 3d animator thinks much more about motion.
A writer or poet cares a lot more about what connotations different colour descriptors carry. “The sky above the port was the colour of television, tuned to a dead channel.” doesn’t quite hit the same as just calling it grey, for example.
Painters have a much more intimate connection with colour. But instead of thinking in primary colours they will be much more familiar with the mixing of the pigments they use. (Cadmium red, cobalt blue, burnt sienna, etc) A print artist or someone designing figurines or design objects would think in terms of pantone colours. Someone doing thread painting with embroidery floss will think about DMC colour codes.
And then of course there are colourist working on movie and TV productions who would know all the article describes and more. It is their job to know.
I don’t know why an otherwise quite okay article has to start with this image of the dum-dum arist “launching into a treatise” of kindergarden level colour understanding. It feels a bit degrading, as if the author has low opinion of artist. (And certainly not considering the full palette of the arts.)
I'd mention the book Blue and Yellow don't make Green, which taught me that my minimum set of paints should be:
* A purple-inclined red (crimson) and an orange-inclined red (scarlet)
* A green-inclined yellow (practically speaking, "spring green") and an orange-inclined yellow ("yellow")
* A purple-inclined blue (ultramarine) and a green-inclined blue (cerulean)
* White to make light tones (don't worry about black)
And these let me get almost all the spectral colors because, I think, the pigment grains don't interfere and don't cause subtractive mixing (there was some sketchy explanation about light bouncing between different pigment particles before bouncing properly back from the canvas). There are gaps due to the lack of any pure primary color, which we basically give up on being able to buy.
In my experience, artists have a very fuzzy understanding of color, even those who use it wonderfully. At art school we were taught 'color theory', almost all of which was hand-wavey fluff.
> instead of thinking in primary colours [Painters] will be much more familiar with the mixing of the pigments they use. (Cadmium red, cobalt blue, burnt sienna, etc)
Absolutely agree. A red is never just the abstract red, it is a cadmium red, alizarin crimson, rose madder etc.
It happens I was re-reading my sister's book about fabric ("Poetic Cloth") yesterday, and yeah, no mention of this idea of "Primary Colors". When she explains her practice she's basically just eyeballing it. Match a cloth or a thread against your target visually, hold them up to the light, that sort off thing. Which makes a lot of sense.
yeah, anyone that paints will care the most about other things, like which colors they actually have available, and the quality of the pigments. If you take, say, most single pigment reds that aren't very toxic, you'll see that they have relatively low coverage: Lay it over a dark color, and you aren't really getting red, but filtering the darker color with some red on top. Pure pigments however kind of mix into reasonable colors that more or less resemble what a color wheel will tell you, but many paints are reached through mixes, and mixing mixes is often not getting you the colors the wheel would predict: Chances are you are getting something pretty brown, with very low intensity. You can make fun tricks for students, like showing them two pairs of almost indistinguishable blobs of paint, but that mix to something different, because two of the colors were pure pigments, and the others a carefully made mess.
And then there's not just color, but finishes, and the body of the paint.
So yes, once actually talking colors in a real piece, while the color wheel is a very useful tool for determining pleasant schemes, just like in a website, your real primary colors you think about are never a bright yellow, a bright red, and a bright blue.
Since when were printer manufacturers concerned about saving the end user money? lol.
Black is included because if you mix typical dye based inks you do not get a black, you get this greenish looking thing that is clearly not quite black. A few here are old enough to remember when early color inkjets could only hold either the tricolor cartridge or the black cartridge (ex HP 500C).
Then you get oddness like my brother laser printer, that has seperate Black and CYMK toner packs, and you have to specifically choose 'black and white' if you want to use the massive black toner set for text rather than the tiny 'K' toner pack.
> Some of those frequencies we detect with our eyes, and the frequency determines its color
This is common misconception. It's not singular frequency of light that determines color, but the entire distribution of intensity over visible light spectrum.
And it is not one to one mapping from spectra to color either. In theory there are almost infinite spectra for each color.
So mixing red and green lasers might produce something appearing yellow(ish) despite the spectrum not containing any light corresponding to spectral pure yellow wavelengths.
As for the "art primaries", afaik it's not so wrong of a color model; it just is a reflection of common paints/pigments operate. Painters can not get nice spectrally pure pigments for primaries, not now and even less so historically, and so the color space of paints is significantly smaller than the entire human vision color space.
>> Some of those frequencies we detect with our eyes, and the frequency determines its color
>This is common misconception. It's not singular frequency of light that determines color, but the entire distribution of intensity over visible light spectrum.
Why can't it be both?
The CIE spectrum locus, which is a saturation plot for the visible spectrum, labels perimeter by monochromatic wavelength, yet the CIE color model is tri-stimulus (three primaries) with the plot providing helpful symmetry for calculating chromatic mixes.
Note that there's no contradiction in the language which regards a "spectrum" in the sense of physics with a model of mixed "primaries" in the sense the physiology of human vision.
As to the surrounding points in this thread regarding what does or does not constitute a logical color wheel, the arguments are too invested in labels for effects of a given medium, and lacking sufficient discrimination of context of media, application, psychology, history and science. Color is a subject wherein many seemingly divergent views can all be correct when regarded in specific narrow contexts.
I think there's an obvious bifurcation of understanding, between art and science.
Ultimately, the topic of color forces the thinker to confront the question that all understanding is purely psychological. The first step on a slippery slope towards this question is the observation that color is both as real as anything we experience, and that objectively color is a pure qualia. That people reliably atomize a perceptually smooth chromatic gradient into ROYGBIV is a true conundrum-- that we should so readily and implicitly partition a continuum seems characteristically linguistic, in the sense of counting, which is at once a form of pure vocabulary (naming) but also a system of reasoning (mathematics).
This conundrum prohibits coherent dialog about color topics because common thinking, such as immediate topic of the color wheel based on mixing primaries, ignores that the term "primary" has different connotations for additive versus subtractive media, so it can't distinguish that RGB (CIE) and RYB (classical artistic theory) are distinguishable taxonomically by observing the effect of silent (in context) "secondary" colloquially known as "cyan".
To be clear, by secondary I mean the negation of additive (projected incident light) primaries, colloquially known as RGB, which negation gives rise to secondaries CMY of the form –R, –G, –B. In painting the medium is inherently subtractive, incident light reflected by a medium. This gets confusing because "primary" in the taxonomy of color substantially predates the projector technology and the CIE model we now take for granted. Today "primary" should first mean the CIE vernacular because its model can explain painting and many other media, whereas the older vernacular of painting can't even explain itself, because it's not a science, it's merely a structuralist cataloging of particulars.
Understanding the physical properties of a medium is insufficient to generation of clarity. Arguments about the correctness of color wheels that don't scrupulously examine assumptions about the vernacular of qualia are ideological even when attended by a coherent physics of stimulus. We can't rectify contentions of color ideology with appeals to a narrow physics of any artistic medium. The science of the CIE avoids color names except as a sort of adjunct mapping just to be helpful for correlating conventions of vernacular with the spectrum locus. To the CIE, the primaries are idealizations of long, medium, short wavelengths that excite a normalized model for human retinal cone photoreceptors. It's the Munsell color system that truly bridges the gap from the CIE's science to aesthetics via a rigorous system of correlation of effects.
The takesway here is that arguments over the objective correctness of any color wheel are pointless.
But such arguments do strongly indicate (or illuminate, so to speak) that we regard color as profoundly real. This realization is interesting as it deeply troubles epistemology: any example of a profound reality of qualia disrupts the prospect that we can truly understand anything but ourselves. We are trapped in Plato's cave with no way out but a sort of divine resurrection (in the Christian sense) of thought. A large rock must be moved from the cave entrance by God to free the soul to fully manifest itself.
This topic has been written about in more depth by people who didn't try to work it out by themselves.
The classical artists color wheel is based on pigments. Printers use dyes. Screens use light. That's the whole reason why the primaries are different. The wheels are just tools.
Blue and Yellow Don't Make Green by Michael Wilcox covers the mechanisms behind subtractive colours (paints) pretty well. Also explains why it will never make a really bright green.
The way traditional artists think and thought about colors is definitely not in the shape of color wheels.
Traditional artists think in terms of palettes and of mixtures of colors on the palette. They also think about colors in relation to each other. They think of layering, and about the perception of the eye.
The point is, when you discuss colors as a multi-dimensional coordinate space, you already lost (from the perspective of the painter).
Painters will explore the medium they are working in for its capabilities. Is "dark on bright" (watercolors) or "bright on dark" (soft pastel) the way to go? Can I dilute and perform washes (watercolor), or will the medium break down (acrylic).
I can only recommend James Guerney's "Color and Light" book to get impressions.
Then again, if you do digital art to scren, or if you are printing things from a computer, you need to anticipate how the devices render your colors. This is where color spaces and coordinate systems for colors and how to translate between them becomes relevant.
> The way traditional artists think and thought about colors is definitely not in the shape of color wheels.
Slightly disagree. I find that knowing the location of the pigments on the rtyb wheel is a very useful skill. A color too saturated or too light? add its opposite!
Color is hard, but this article doesn't do it justice. Wheels aren't broken, perception is just weird and filled with all sorts of fun non-linearities.
The article begins to touch on color spaces, which is where I'd suggest curious folks to begin if they're interested in color.[0] The article fails to note the fact that MANY other color spaces have been invented in attempts to address the problems it mentions![1] OKLab is a modern one that may be familiar to folks here. Scroll down to some comparisons vs other spaces, it's a nice uniform circle again![2] (OK, maybe not entirely uniform. Color is hard.)
Tangent: Why the heck are there alpha-blended images in an article about color!?
Everything in the article, from start to finish, seems to make perfect logical sense.
The problem is: to me, that perceptual colour wheel at the end does not appear to be perceptually uniform at all. The left hand side (yellow->green->blue) appears to vary far less than the right hand side (yellow->red->blue).
To me, the artist's one at the top looks most perceptually uniform, despite not being quite right from a physics perspective. The physics based one, with red/green/blue and yellow/cyan/magenta equally spaced is somewhere in between for me. This probably explains the myth of yellow/red/blue being the primary colours – they appear most perceptually different.
So why is that so if, by the sensible reasoning of the article, the wheel at the end should look most uniform? I don't know the answer to that. Maybe it's due to one of those later layers of processing mentioned? Maybe the non-uniformity is just baked into our brains for some evolutionary reason, to do with colours commonly encountered in the wild?
It's a shame the article doesn't go deep enough to encounter perceptual uniformity. In short, the human visual system is strongly non-linear. We perceive more greens than blues or reds. None of the color systems mentioned in the article (including the CIE 1931 chromaticity diagram at the end) are perceptually uniform. The 1976 color spaces (CIELuv and CIELab) were introduced as an attempt to deal with this, and there's been many other attempts since.
Your intuition is right, and can be explained by looking at both the visible spectrogram and also the CIE diagram. In the former, what we call green takes up an inordinate amount of the spectrum. In the latter, green clearly takes up the largest amount of area of any well defined color.
Your eye is most receptive to green, in both the narrow and broad sense. The absolute peak is a green, and of any reasonable, well defined broad grouping of spectra, the greenest one is the one your eye will be most receptive to.
Also interestingly, the two colors that dovetail into colors we cannot see on either end, red and violet, we are the least receptive to.
This was a good explanation - they simplify at points, but make it obvious they're doing so, which I'm fine with.
I would have liked to hear more about how the artists' color wheel came to be. It's a model, after all, and models don't have to be true as long as they're useful. The RYB color wheel is definitely not useful for setting colors in CSS, but as far as I know, the story goes something like this:
Before today's industrial processes, the colors of paint you could make or buy were those one could make from natural ingredients, for example cobalt for blue if I remember correctly. Artists and their suppliers noticed that if you had red, yellow and blue paint, all of which one could make from the materials available, then you could mix them to make any color you wanted (possibly with some white or black added to lighten/darken, or tint/shade if you're being pedantic). Further, you could make a lot of colors by mixing at most two of these colors, and it was purely the proportions of the mix that mattered, not the raw amounts.
So these got called "primary" colors, and it was natural to represent them in some way - to the engineer, a triangle seems like an obvious choice where the mix with 25% red and 75% blue lies 0.25 along the line from red to blue. Artists chose a circle instead, which is really the same model (mathematicians would say it's a topologically continous deformation from one to the other). At the time, the color wheel model turned out to be useful, and so it stuck around and got taught in art schools.
Magenta, Cyan and Yellow would have done just as well as starting points, but were harder if not impossible to get from the natural materials used at the time.
On the other hand, orange or brown as a starting color would not have got you the same mixing abilities as far as I'm aware. Brown is an interesting data point on its own because you can make it by taking orange and shading with a small amount of black, but you can also make it by taking orange and adding some blue (among many other ways), so now you're using all three primaries and fall off the color wheel. And that's before we talk about perceptual brightness and gamma correction and all that.
Red, Green and Blue on the other hand is a useful starting point for things that emit rather than absorb light (with similar but different caveats).
FWIW, I was exploring teaching color in K-2 using spectra. Here's[1] an old development snapshot, showing a color "wheel". Intent was a correct 3D perceptual color space (that snapshot isn't quite it), coupled with perceptual ("color") and physical ("light") spectra. Sort of the old art-school teaching from Munsell, but able to deal with materials and light. Absent an existing pedagogical perceptual color space (pedagogical: one without lots of "first thing you notice" features that are all bogus model artifacts), I kludged CAM16UCS with JzAzBz hue linearization and tweaks.
The author isn't wrong about current color instruction having dreadful content and outcomes. Ask first-tier non-astronomy physical-sciences graduate students what color the Sun is, and you commonly hear answers like "it doesn't have a color" and "it's rainbow color". Kids attempting to apply the models taught to their paints and pens and programs get... mixed results.
> Ask any artist to explain how color works, and they’ll launch into a treatise about how the Three Primary Colors—red, blue, and yellow—form a color wheel
I don't think the author asked _any_ artists how color works before writing this line.
//(Diagram) Josef Albers, Folder IV-1
Actually, the squares are exactly the same color! The surrounding context dictates the perceived color, on top of all that wavelength-physiology we just did.//
There's a difference between a color and a perceived color?
To add to the absurdity, I don't think you can argue that the example presents the same stimulus!
Maybe the author regards the term "color" as having a meaning in the sense of common-sense, except in this sense the common-sense sense of the sense has no common sense.
On what planet is blue the opposite of yellow? I was taught that blue is opposite of orange and yellow opposite of purple, which is symmetic.
I found the whole article a bit rigid and huffy. The standard color wheel and CMYK are just different ways of reducing color to basics from which other colors can be made. The watercolor set we used in elementary school is another, just less economical.
For a page about color, most of the images are sure washed out. Their white is visibly gray. I don't figure out why though. When you open up the images in a new tab they look fine, and I don't see opacity or a color transform in the CSS. It looks pretty bad though.
> In fact A and B are the same color (#787878), but you can’t see it even when you know this. To prove it to myself I had to open this picture in an image editor and actually move one square over another to see it was the same.
I'm not sure that I'd get "color wheels are wrong," from that, but it is a really good article on color perception and management, which is a huge topic.
[+] [-] Daub|1 year ago|reply
Color wheels are, in essence, highly abstracted slices across the equator of a color space. Only two color wheels are commonly used: the RGB and the RYB (aka the artists color wheel). Color from pigments and color from light are two wildly different things, but easy to confuse. For its absence of green as a primary, CMYK can be understood as a version of RYB. Black is used not just because it is cheap but also to add opacity to the inks (printing inks are more like dyes... very thin and transparent).
The color opposites the author describes are red/cyan in RGB and red/green in RYB.
One property of these opposites is that they mix to neutral. For this, the RBG pair works best. The other property is that they are perceptually antagonistic, for which the RYB pair works best.
Interestingly, the perceptually antagonistic pair set (red/green, yellow/purple, blue/orange) were spoken about well before Newton placed these colors in a circle. Leonardo Da Vinco refers to them as 'retto contrario', literally exactly opposite.
The author asks 'why a wheel'? which is a good question, and the answer he gives is reasonable. But... Newton was the first to employ this device, and he did so almost certainly because the harmony structure of the musical scale was commonly visualized as a wheel, and Newton was keen to draw an analogy between music and color and harmony and the music of the spheres and god etc etc. He may have been the first physicist, but he was also an alchemist.
Color is a frustrating beast... so many different ways to understand the same thing: perception, physics, aesthetics, chemistry etc. Truly the seven blind men and the elephant.
[+] [-] interludead|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] adastra22|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] krisoft|1 year ago|reply
I doubt that. More likely that they look at you akwardly or say a joke and try to carry on.
Some artist couldn’t care less about colours. A sculptor thinks much more about shapes, a 3d animator thinks much more about motion.
A writer or poet cares a lot more about what connotations different colour descriptors carry. “The sky above the port was the colour of television, tuned to a dead channel.” doesn’t quite hit the same as just calling it grey, for example.
Painters have a much more intimate connection with colour. But instead of thinking in primary colours they will be much more familiar with the mixing of the pigments they use. (Cadmium red, cobalt blue, burnt sienna, etc) A print artist or someone designing figurines or design objects would think in terms of pantone colours. Someone doing thread painting with embroidery floss will think about DMC colour codes.
And then of course there are colourist working on movie and TV productions who would know all the article describes and more. It is their job to know.
I don’t know why an otherwise quite okay article has to start with this image of the dum-dum arist “launching into a treatise” of kindergarden level colour understanding. It feels a bit degrading, as if the author has low opinion of artist. (And certainly not considering the full palette of the arts.)
[+] [-] card_zero|1 year ago|reply
* A purple-inclined red (crimson) and an orange-inclined red (scarlet)
* A green-inclined yellow (practically speaking, "spring green") and an orange-inclined yellow ("yellow")
* A purple-inclined blue (ultramarine) and a green-inclined blue (cerulean)
* White to make light tones (don't worry about black)
And these let me get almost all the spectral colors because, I think, the pigment grains don't interfere and don't cause subtractive mixing (there was some sketchy explanation about light bouncing between different pigment particles before bouncing properly back from the canvas). There are gaps due to the lack of any pure primary color, which we basically give up on being able to buy.
[+] [-] Daub|1 year ago|reply
> instead of thinking in primary colours [Painters] will be much more familiar with the mixing of the pigments they use. (Cadmium red, cobalt blue, burnt sienna, etc)
Absolutely agree. A red is never just the abstract red, it is a cadmium red, alizarin crimson, rose madder etc.
[+] [-] tialaramex|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] ta_1138|1 year ago|reply
And then there's not just color, but finishes, and the body of the paint.
So yes, once actually talking colors in a real piece, while the color wheel is a very useful tool for determining pleasant schemes, just like in a website, your real primary colors you think about are never a bright yellow, a bright red, and a bright blue.
[+] [-] epcoa|1 year ago|reply
Since when were printer manufacturers concerned about saving the end user money? lol.
Black is included because if you mix typical dye based inks you do not get a black, you get this greenish looking thing that is clearly not quite black. A few here are old enough to remember when early color inkjets could only hold either the tricolor cartridge or the black cartridge (ex HP 500C).
[+] [-] NikkiA|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] zokier|1 year ago|reply
This is common misconception. It's not singular frequency of light that determines color, but the entire distribution of intensity over visible light spectrum.
And it is not one to one mapping from spectra to color either. In theory there are almost infinite spectra for each color.
So mixing red and green lasers might produce something appearing yellow(ish) despite the spectrum not containing any light corresponding to spectral pure yellow wavelengths.
As for the "art primaries", afaik it's not so wrong of a color model; it just is a reflection of common paints/pigments operate. Painters can not get nice spectrally pure pigments for primaries, not now and even less so historically, and so the color space of paints is significantly smaller than the entire human vision color space.
[+] [-] _wire_|1 year ago|reply
>This is common misconception. It's not singular frequency of light that determines color, but the entire distribution of intensity over visible light spectrum.
Why can't it be both?
The CIE spectrum locus, which is a saturation plot for the visible spectrum, labels perimeter by monochromatic wavelength, yet the CIE color model is tri-stimulus (three primaries) with the plot providing helpful symmetry for calculating chromatic mixes.
Note that there's no contradiction in the language which regards a "spectrum" in the sense of physics with a model of mixed "primaries" in the sense the physiology of human vision.
As to the surrounding points in this thread regarding what does or does not constitute a logical color wheel, the arguments are too invested in labels for effects of a given medium, and lacking sufficient discrimination of context of media, application, psychology, history and science. Color is a subject wherein many seemingly divergent views can all be correct when regarded in specific narrow contexts.
I think there's an obvious bifurcation of understanding, between art and science.
Ultimately, the topic of color forces the thinker to confront the question that all understanding is purely psychological. The first step on a slippery slope towards this question is the observation that color is both as real as anything we experience, and that objectively color is a pure qualia. That people reliably atomize a perceptually smooth chromatic gradient into ROYGBIV is a true conundrum-- that we should so readily and implicitly partition a continuum seems characteristically linguistic, in the sense of counting, which is at once a form of pure vocabulary (naming) but also a system of reasoning (mathematics).
This conundrum prohibits coherent dialog about color topics because common thinking, such as immediate topic of the color wheel based on mixing primaries, ignores that the term "primary" has different connotations for additive versus subtractive media, so it can't distinguish that RGB (CIE) and RYB (classical artistic theory) are distinguishable taxonomically by observing the effect of silent (in context) "secondary" colloquially known as "cyan".
To be clear, by secondary I mean the negation of additive (projected incident light) primaries, colloquially known as RGB, which negation gives rise to secondaries CMY of the form –R, –G, –B. In painting the medium is inherently subtractive, incident light reflected by a medium. This gets confusing because "primary" in the taxonomy of color substantially predates the projector technology and the CIE model we now take for granted. Today "primary" should first mean the CIE vernacular because its model can explain painting and many other media, whereas the older vernacular of painting can't even explain itself, because it's not a science, it's merely a structuralist cataloging of particulars.
Understanding the physical properties of a medium is insufficient to generation of clarity. Arguments about the correctness of color wheels that don't scrupulously examine assumptions about the vernacular of qualia are ideological even when attended by a coherent physics of stimulus. We can't rectify contentions of color ideology with appeals to a narrow physics of any artistic medium. The science of the CIE avoids color names except as a sort of adjunct mapping just to be helpful for correlating conventions of vernacular with the spectrum locus. To the CIE, the primaries are idealizations of long, medium, short wavelengths that excite a normalized model for human retinal cone photoreceptors. It's the Munsell color system that truly bridges the gap from the CIE's science to aesthetics via a rigorous system of correlation of effects.
The takesway here is that arguments over the objective correctness of any color wheel are pointless.
But such arguments do strongly indicate (or illuminate, so to speak) that we regard color as profoundly real. This realization is interesting as it deeply troubles epistemology: any example of a profound reality of qualia disrupts the prospect that we can truly understand anything but ourselves. We are trapped in Plato's cave with no way out but a sort of divine resurrection (in the Christian sense) of thought. A large rock must be moved from the cave entrance by God to free the soul to fully manifest itself.
[+] [-] rothron|1 year ago|reply
The classical artists color wheel is based on pigments. Printers use dyes. Screens use light. That's the whole reason why the primaries are different. The wheels are just tools.
[+] [-] beardyw|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] wirrbel|1 year ago|reply
Traditional artists think in terms of palettes and of mixtures of colors on the palette. They also think about colors in relation to each other. They think of layering, and about the perception of the eye.
The point is, when you discuss colors as a multi-dimensional coordinate space, you already lost (from the perspective of the painter).
Painters will explore the medium they are working in for its capabilities. Is "dark on bright" (watercolors) or "bright on dark" (soft pastel) the way to go? Can I dilute and perform washes (watercolor), or will the medium break down (acrylic).
I can only recommend James Guerney's "Color and Light" book to get impressions.
Then again, if you do digital art to scren, or if you are printing things from a computer, you need to anticipate how the devices render your colors. This is where color spaces and coordinate systems for colors and how to translate between them becomes relevant.
[+] [-] Daub|1 year ago|reply
Slightly disagree. I find that knowing the location of the pigments on the rtyb wheel is a very useful skill. A color too saturated or too light? add its opposite!
[+] [-] Aardwolf|1 year ago|reply
In Europe as a kid I was taught in art class the following opposite pairs instead:
red-green
blue-orange
yellow-purple
And these pairs were each said to make brown when mixed (I know, it's very different compared to RGB or CMY where the neutral color is gray)
[+] [-] itishappy|1 year ago|reply
The article begins to touch on color spaces, which is where I'd suggest curious folks to begin if they're interested in color.[0] The article fails to note the fact that MANY other color spaces have been invented in attempts to address the problems it mentions![1] OKLab is a modern one that may be familiar to folks here. Scroll down to some comparisons vs other spaces, it's a nice uniform circle again![2] (OK, maybe not entirely uniform. Color is hard.)
Tangent: Why the heck are there alpha-blended images in an article about color!?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIE_1931_color_space
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_color_spaces_and_their...
[2] https://bottosson.github.io/posts/oklab/#munsell-data
[+] [-] quietbritishjim|1 year ago|reply
The problem is: to me, that perceptual colour wheel at the end does not appear to be perceptually uniform at all. The left hand side (yellow->green->blue) appears to vary far less than the right hand side (yellow->red->blue).
To me, the artist's one at the top looks most perceptually uniform, despite not being quite right from a physics perspective. The physics based one, with red/green/blue and yellow/cyan/magenta equally spaced is somewhere in between for me. This probably explains the myth of yellow/red/blue being the primary colours – they appear most perceptually different.
So why is that so if, by the sensible reasoning of the article, the wheel at the end should look most uniform? I don't know the answer to that. Maybe it's due to one of those later layers of processing mentioned? Maybe the non-uniformity is just baked into our brains for some evolutionary reason, to do with colours commonly encountered in the wild?
[+] [-] itishappy|1 year ago|reply
My favorite is OKLab:
https://bottosson.github.io/posts/oklab/
[+] [-] viridian|1 year ago|reply
Your eye is most receptive to green, in both the narrow and broad sense. The absolute peak is a green, and of any reasonable, well defined broad grouping of spectra, the greenest one is the one your eye will be most receptive to.
Also interestingly, the two colors that dovetail into colors we cannot see on either end, red and violet, we are the least receptive to.
You can see this play out in real survey results from XKCD: https://blog.xkcd.com/2010/05/03/color-survey-results/
[+] [-] red_admiral|1 year ago|reply
I would have liked to hear more about how the artists' color wheel came to be. It's a model, after all, and models don't have to be true as long as they're useful. The RYB color wheel is definitely not useful for setting colors in CSS, but as far as I know, the story goes something like this:
Before today's industrial processes, the colors of paint you could make or buy were those one could make from natural ingredients, for example cobalt for blue if I remember correctly. Artists and their suppliers noticed that if you had red, yellow and blue paint, all of which one could make from the materials available, then you could mix them to make any color you wanted (possibly with some white or black added to lighten/darken, or tint/shade if you're being pedantic). Further, you could make a lot of colors by mixing at most two of these colors, and it was purely the proportions of the mix that mattered, not the raw amounts.
So these got called "primary" colors, and it was natural to represent them in some way - to the engineer, a triangle seems like an obvious choice where the mix with 25% red and 75% blue lies 0.25 along the line from red to blue. Artists chose a circle instead, which is really the same model (mathematicians would say it's a topologically continous deformation from one to the other). At the time, the color wheel model turned out to be useful, and so it stuck around and got taught in art schools.
Magenta, Cyan and Yellow would have done just as well as starting points, but were harder if not impossible to get from the natural materials used at the time.
On the other hand, orange or brown as a starting color would not have got you the same mixing abilities as far as I'm aware. Brown is an interesting data point on its own because you can make it by taking orange and shading with a small amount of black, but you can also make it by taking orange and adding some blue (among many other ways), so now you're using all three primaries and fall off the color wheel. And that's before we talk about perceptual brightness and gamma correction and all that.
Red, Green and Blue on the other hand is a useful starting point for things that emit rather than absorb light (with similar but different caveats).
[+] [-] mncharity|1 year ago|reply
The author isn't wrong about current color instruction having dreadful content and outcomes. Ask first-tier non-astronomy physical-sciences graduate students what color the Sun is, and you commonly hear answers like "it doesn't have a color" and "it's rainbow color". Kids attempting to apply the models taught to their paints and pens and programs get... mixed results.
[1] https://imgur.com/a/zOtxQwe
[+] [-] itishappy|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] Timpy|1 year ago|reply
I don't think the author asked _any_ artists how color works before writing this line.
[+] [-] _wire_|1 year ago|reply
//(Diagram) Josef Albers, Folder IV-1 Actually, the squares are exactly the same color! The surrounding context dictates the perceived color, on top of all that wavelength-physiology we just did.//
There's a difference between a color and a perceived color?
To add to the absurdity, I don't think you can argue that the example presents the same stimulus!
Maybe the author regards the term "color" as having a meaning in the sense of common-sense, except in this sense the common-sense sense of the sense has no common sense.
[+] [-] fallinghawks|1 year ago|reply
I found the whole article a bit rigid and huffy. The standard color wheel and CMYK are just different ways of reducing color to basics from which other colors can be made. The watercolor set we used in elementary school is another, just less economical.
[+] [-] Unbefleckt|1 year ago|reply
Anyone else see an apple with that colour in their mind?
[+] [-] spankalee|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] maxwell|1 year ago|reply
Looks like they're actually both #434343...
[+] [-] robobro|1 year ago|reply
Wittgenstein also wrote some interesting notes on color. Both are more interesting than this blog post.
[+] [-] ChrisMarshallNY|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] iamnotsure|1 year ago|reply