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Brown is weird [1]. It's basically dark orange. Flesh tones fall into that same category - people are orange-hued [2]. Oranges/reds are mostly produced by vario

by kortex 5y ago

Brown is weird [1]. It's basically dark orange. Flesh tones fall into that same category - people are orange-hued [2]. Oranges/reds are mostly produced by various unsaturated molecules, such as carotenes, lignins, phenols, and tars, and browns are just dark collections of many kinds red-orange pigments. It does not map well to any of the common color spaces because its inherently heterogeneous. The solution would probably be pallettes that let you pick arbitrary axes to move through color space. 1 - https://youtu.be/wh4aWZRtTwU https://youtu.be/wh4aWZRtTwU 2 - According to Neil Harbisson, the guy with the color-sensing antenna, in-person conversation, but you can also verify with photoshop.

chrisseaton 5y ago
I don’t understand that video. Can’t all colours be described differentially to another colour? And don’t we have lots of names for different shades? Why does this make brown unusual?
- ThatCaio 5y ago
  In English, pink and brown are very specific colors which the brains of native speakers might not associate with their true hue values. That's why the original commenter was having difficulty finding brown, because we do not necessarily associate it with a dark orange or flesh color with de-saturated red or orange. But if we were trying to paint something like dark teal water. The brain would immediately go straight to blues/greens. These "color categories" that we form in our brains can be different in every culture or language. That is issue with what was suggested.
  - chrisseaton 5y ago
    > That's why you were having difficulty finding brown Not sure if you’re replying to the right person? I didn’t say anything about finding brown being difficult. I don't even know what that would mean for it to be difficult to find a colour? > because you do not necessarily associate it with a dark orange That’s what brown is - a dark orange. The same way navy is a dark blue. But nobody makes videos claiming that navy is a weird colour because it’s actually dark blue.
    - retsibsi 5y ago
      It sounds like the brown-orange link is intuitively obvious to you. But I think the claim being made is that for most native English-speakers, the link between orange and brown is significantly less obvious than that between X and dark X, for most colours X. FWIW that is true in my case. (Not that I deny the link exists; but when I look at e.g. an orange next to a dark brown tree branch, I don't see them as versions of the same colour in the way I do with, say, a lime and a dark green leaf. That's not a great example but hopefully you see what I'm getting at.)
    - dard12 5y ago
      This seems like a simple case of different people finding different things unintuitive. My theory is that many people have a mental model of colors that maps roughly to the hue and value in HSV, so for example terms like "dark orange" is a value followed by a hue. Now suppose you understand brown as a "dark beige", that's suddenly confusing because beige introduces saturation and you cannot map beige back to orange without thinking about saturation.
      - chrisseaton 5y ago
        > Now suppose you understand brown as a "dark beige" I think my point is brown is dark beige, and beige is light brown. Neither is canonical. Is orange canonical? Maybe it's high frequency red? Or low frequency yellow? That's what Newton thought! It's all relative.
- kortex 5y ago
  I think what makes brown unique in this regard is its ubiquity in nature, partial desaturation, and lack of obvious mapping to a saturated color. Emergence of names of colors in languages usually goes black, white, red, yellow, grue, then blue forks from blue, brown, orange, then "specialty" colors like pink, purple, indigo, teal. It's the only partially saturated shade that gets a name before its saturated variant (orange). Being able to name things brown is more important than orange, so that mental link is weaker. Hence why we have "dark blue" but brown is not "dark orange." (though I think some languages call it "dark red"? I'm a bit hazy on that detail) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_term https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_term
  - chrisseaton 5y ago
    > lack of obvious mapping to a saturated color 30 degrees hue, 50% value, 100% saturated, looks exactly brown to me? > brown is not "dark orange." I think it is. In fact, take my 30 degrees hue, 50% value, 100% saturated, then gradually increase the value and see where you get to!
    - retsibsi 5y ago
      I don't think the other commenter is disagreeing with you on those things -- they're talking about human perceptions, and saying that although brown is in fact dark orange, that's not how we name it or how we tend to see it.
    - retsibsi 5y ago
      Just out of curiosity, what if you go to a significantly darker brown, say 30/100/20 h/s/v. Unfortunately these subjective tests will vary from monitor to monitor, but assuming that's still clearly brown rather than black to you (to me it's a more archetypal brown than the brighter version you initially named, which I might call orange-brown) -- what do you perceive when you keep the saturation and value fixed, and vary the hue? Would you agree that many or most of the other hues give you a colour more obviously 'dark X', where X is the 100%-value counterpart, than hue 30 does? For me it's much more obvious at the green-blue-purple segment of the spectrum than the red-orange-yellow segment. This isn't meant as a trick question or anything -- if I'm getting at anything specific, it's that maybe part of the reason the orange-brown link seems more obvious to you than to me is that when you think of a central example of brown, you think of something brighter (and thus more obviously orange) than I do.

by kortex 5y ago

chrisseaton 5y ago

I don’t understand that video. Can’t all colours be described differentially to another colour? And don’t we have lots of names for different shades? Why does this make brown unusual?

ThatCaio 5y ago
In English, pink and brown are very specific colors which the brains of native speakers might not associate with their true hue values. That's why the original commenter was having difficulty finding brown, because we do not necessarily associate it with a dark orange or flesh color with de-saturated red or orange. But if we were trying to paint something like dark teal water. The brain would immediately go straight to blues/greens. These "color categories" that we form in our brains can be different in every culture or language. That is issue with what was suggested.
- chrisseaton 5y ago
  > That's why you were having difficulty finding brown Not sure if you’re replying to the right person? I didn’t say anything about finding brown being difficult. I don't even know what that would mean for it to be difficult to find a colour? > because you do not necessarily associate it with a dark orange That’s what brown is - a dark orange. The same way navy is a dark blue. But nobody makes videos claiming that navy is a weird colour because it’s actually dark blue.
  - retsibsi 5y ago
    It sounds like the brown-orange link is intuitively obvious to you. But I think the claim being made is that for most native English-speakers, the link between orange and brown is significantly less obvious than that between X and dark X, for most colours X. FWIW that is true in my case. (Not that I deny the link exists; but when I look at e.g. an orange next to a dark brown tree branch, I don't see them as versions of the same colour in the way I do with, say, a lime and a dark green leaf. That's not a great example but hopefully you see what I'm getting at.)
  - dard12 5y ago
    This seems like a simple case of different people finding different things unintuitive. My theory is that many people have a mental model of colors that maps roughly to the hue and value in HSV, so for example terms like "dark orange" is a value followed by a hue. Now suppose you understand brown as a "dark beige", that's suddenly confusing because beige introduces saturation and you cannot map beige back to orange without thinking about saturation.
    - chrisseaton 5y ago
      > Now suppose you understand brown as a "dark beige" I think my point is brown is dark beige, and beige is light brown. Neither is canonical. Is orange canonical? Maybe it's high frequency red? Or low frequency yellow? That's what Newton thought! It's all relative.
kortex 5y ago
I think what makes brown unique in this regard is its ubiquity in nature, partial desaturation, and lack of obvious mapping to a saturated color. Emergence of names of colors in languages usually goes black, white, red, yellow, grue, then blue forks from blue, brown, orange, then "specialty" colors like pink, purple, indigo, teal. It's the only partially saturated shade that gets a name before its saturated variant (orange). Being able to name things brown is more important than orange, so that mental link is weaker. Hence why we have "dark blue" but brown is not "dark orange." (though I think some languages call it "dark red"? I'm a bit hazy on that detail) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_term https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_term
- chrisseaton 5y ago
  > lack of obvious mapping to a saturated color 30 degrees hue, 50% value, 100% saturated, looks exactly brown to me? > brown is not "dark orange." I think it is. In fact, take my 30 degrees hue, 50% value, 100% saturated, then gradually increase the value and see where you get to!
  - retsibsi 5y ago
    I don't think the other commenter is disagreeing with you on those things -- they're talking about human perceptions, and saying that although brown is in fact dark orange, that's not how we name it or how we tend to see it.
  - retsibsi 5y ago
    Just out of curiosity, what if you go to a significantly darker brown, say 30/100/20 h/s/v. Unfortunately these subjective tests will vary from monitor to monitor, but assuming that's still clearly brown rather than black to you (to me it's a more archetypal brown than the brighter version you initially named, which I might call orange-brown) -- what do you perceive when you keep the saturation and value fixed, and vary the hue? Would you agree that many or most of the other hues give you a colour more obviously 'dark X', where X is the 100%-value counterpart, than hue 30 does? For me it's much more obvious at the green-blue-purple segment of the spectrum than the red-orange-yellow segment. This isn't meant as a trick question or anything -- if I'm getting at anything specific, it's that maybe part of the reason the orange-brown link seems more obvious to you than to me is that when you think of a central example of brown, you think of something brighter (and thus more obviously orange) than I do.