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Interesting article "So, purple is more reddish and saturated, while violet is more bluish and less saturated." I'm slightly colorblind and this sentence made

by dreen 8y ago

Interesting article "So, purple is more reddish and saturated, while violet is more bluish and less saturated." I'm slightly colorblind and this sentence made me WTF out loud. Purple in that picture looks way more bluish than violet. "If you take a look at the distance between violet and blue in the picture of the spectrum above, it is about the same as the distance between green and orange." Since I can easily mistake the colours in any of such pairs I assume that colorblindness works by "muddying the lines" of spectral representation of colour? Would that make it a neurological problem rather than an optical one?

wycy 8y ago
My understanding of color blindness has always been that it's typically a problem with the actual eye cones for color sensing--at least for non-pathological cases of color blindness.
OscarCunningham 8y ago
I used GIMP to maximally saturate the colours: https://i.imgur.com/wfyEWcP.png https://i.imgur.com/wfyEWcP.png Does the purple still look more blue than the violet?
- dreen 8y ago
  Hmmm, no I guess not. If I didn't know I'd just label both as blue.
  - jerf 8y ago
    As others are pointing out, it's worth remembering our monitors aren't necessarily even capable of producing true violet. And I'd add that monitors vary widely in quality themselves. This one I'm typing on doesn't yell to me "piece of crap", because I mostly do coding-type activities on it and it's plenty fine to do syntax highlighting, but sometimes when the rotating desktop background shows the same one on this monitor and the built-in Macbook monitor, it's like, huh, there's a lot of difference there. It really wouldn't be a great monitor to watch media on routinely. We aren't even all looking at the same colors in the first place.
    - dreen 8y ago
      Yeah I get the same impression, it's just that I don't think I could recognise those as Purple and Violet even in non-oversaturated form, to me it's all just different nameless hues of blue.
      - qubitcoder 8y ago
        I'm not so sure about that. The left side appears _overwhelmingly_ purple, and the right side looks _very_ blue. Have you tried something like the Farnsworth-Munsell 100 hue test?
        dreen 7y ago
        Thanks, that was an interesting test. I guess my feeling of "I'm slightly colourblind" is correct. I don't seem to have that many problems with blue though. My results: https://imgur.com/a/0AvU4hX https://imgur.com/a/0AvU4hX
mcv 8y ago
Does anyone know what colourblindness really is? My guess would be that it's one (or more) of the cones either not working properly, or working differently, creating a very different colour experience. For example, looking at the graph in the article, I'd expect that if your green cones don't work, you'd see no real difference between green and red. If your blue cones don't work, blue would look slightly red. If red cones don't work, again red and green are roughly the same, but violet would look blue. But that's entirely my uneducated guess as a complete layman on the subject. As for the purple and violet in the picture, that violet can never be true violet because it mixed by your computer screen from RGB colours, so it's really created by mixing more blue with red, and probably a bit more green, since it's a lighter colour (adding more of the least represented colour moves it closer to white I think). So if that looks more red to you than the equally mixed purple, the only explanation I can think of is that it might come from the added green, which your eyes might register as potentially red if it's your red cones that don't work properly. But again, pure guesswork on my part.
- frosted-flakes 8y ago
  We know exactly how colour blindness works. Usually, the cones all work, but the range of wavelengths they can detect is slightly shifted from normal. Red-green/green-red colour blindness is the most common, and in that case the range of wavelengths that the red and green cones can detect overlaps more than they usually do. That's how I understand it anyway.
  - jobigoud 8y ago
    And that's how we are all colorblind compared to tetrachromats. They have four cone types that don't overlap. I wish in the future there will be a procedure where you can have cone cells injected to unlock these new colors.
    - mcv 8y ago
      Would we be able to interpret those colours? How will our brain handle and interpret them? It might be like having to learn to see all over again. It's certainly a cool idea, though. And you don't have to stop at four. Don't butterflies have 6 different cones or something?
hawski 8y ago
Violet in the article is not a real violet. A computer screen shows violet as a mix of red, green and blue as all colors. So the violet in the article is really a blueish purple. Also many file formats encode them as such. That's only an approximation.
waynecochran 8y ago
Color blind / dichromat here: They're pretty much all shades of blue to me.

by dreen 8y ago

wycy 8y ago

My understanding of color blindness has always been that it's typically a problem with the actual eye cones for color sensing--at least for non-pathological cases of color blindness.

OscarCunningham 8y ago

I used GIMP to maximally saturate the colours: https://i.imgur.com/wfyEWcP.png https://i.imgur.com/wfyEWcP.png Does the purple still look more blue than the violet?

dreen 8y ago
Hmmm, no I guess not. If I didn't know I'd just label both as blue.
- jerf 8y ago
  As others are pointing out, it's worth remembering our monitors aren't necessarily even capable of producing true violet. And I'd add that monitors vary widely in quality themselves. This one I'm typing on doesn't yell to me "piece of crap", because I mostly do coding-type activities on it and it's plenty fine to do syntax highlighting, but sometimes when the rotating desktop background shows the same one on this monitor and the built-in Macbook monitor, it's like, huh, there's a lot of difference there. It really wouldn't be a great monitor to watch media on routinely. We aren't even all looking at the same colors in the first place.
  - dreen 8y ago
    Yeah I get the same impression, it's just that I don't think I could recognise those as Purple and Violet even in non-oversaturated form, to me it's all just different nameless hues of blue.
    - qubitcoder 8y ago
      I'm not so sure about that. The left side appears _overwhelmingly_ purple, and the right side looks _very_ blue. Have you tried something like the Farnsworth-Munsell 100 hue test?
      - dreen 7y ago
        Thanks, that was an interesting test. I guess my feeling of "I'm slightly colourblind" is correct. I don't seem to have that many problems with blue though. My results: https://imgur.com/a/0AvU4hX https://imgur.com/a/0AvU4hX

mcv 8y ago

Does anyone know what colourblindness really is? My guess would be that it's one (or more) of the cones either not working properly, or working differently, creating a very different colour experience. For example, looking at the graph in the article, I'd expect that if your green cones don't work, you'd see no real difference between green and red. If your blue cones don't work, blue would look slightly red. If red cones don't work, again red and green are roughly the same, but violet would look blue. But that's entirely my uneducated guess as a complete layman on the subject. As for the purple and violet in the picture, that violet can never be true violet because it mixed by your computer screen from RGB colours, so it's really created by mixing more blue with red, and probably a bit more green, since it's a lighter colour (adding more of the least represented colour moves it closer to white I think). So if that looks more red to you than the equally mixed purple, the only explanation I can think of is that it might come from the added green, which your eyes might register as potentially red if it's your red cones that don't work properly. But again, pure guesswork on my part.

frosted-flakes 8y ago
We know exactly how colour blindness works. Usually, the cones all work, but the range of wavelengths they can detect is slightly shifted from normal. Red-green/green-red colour blindness is the most common, and in that case the range of wavelengths that the red and green cones can detect overlaps more than they usually do. That's how I understand it anyway.
- jobigoud 8y ago
  And that's how we are all colorblind compared to tetrachromats. They have four cone types that don't overlap. I wish in the future there will be a procedure where you can have cone cells injected to unlock these new colors.
  - mcv 8y ago
    Would we be able to interpret those colours? How will our brain handle and interpret them? It might be like having to learn to see all over again. It's certainly a cool idea, though. And you don't have to stop at four. Don't butterflies have 6 different cones or something?

hawski 8y ago

Violet in the article is not a real violet. A computer screen shows violet as a mix of red, green and blue as all colors. So the violet in the article is really a blueish purple. Also many file formats encode them as such. That's only an approximation.

waynecochran 8y ago

Color blind / dichromat here: They're pretty much all shades of blue to me.