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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.
by Daub 2y ago
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.
- adastra22 2y agoDid you read to the end? He givers a physiology-based argument for a color wheel with four primary colors.
- blueflow 2y agoThis is like watching some preschoolers argue whether the rainbow has 4 or 5 or 7 colors. The arguments do not make sense at all because they are actually some form of opinion.
- Daub 2y agoWell... I would say that you are half right. The whole notion of primary/secondary is very dependent on application, so your primary set would depend on your intended use. Psychology recognizes six primaries: red, green, blue, yellow, white and black. The author presents a four-color primary set. It clearly has its roots in Helmholtz's color physiology, but I confess I don't quite understand how it would be used. For me, I would miss the important blue/orange pairing.
- zarzavat 2y agoThe problem is that yellow is much lighter than blue. If you look at a perceptual pseudo-cylindrical color space such as CIECAM02 or (OK)LCh, yellow and blue are not on the same wheel because they exist at different lightness levels. So the author is correct that there are four opponent colors, but not correct that they can all be arranged on a wheel so easily. Color spaces are three dimensional geometries, attempts to reduce them to two dimensions are always wrong just like every 2D map projection creates distortions.
- Daub 2y agoThis is, at core, a demonstration of the complex dimensionality of color. Yellow is not lighter than blue, though I can understand why you say this. In the hue, saturation and lightness (hsl) understanding of color, hue terms such as Blue/yellow and lightness terms such as light/dark are separate entities. It is perfectly possible to have a blue and yellow of the same lightness value, but the yellow would be more dull. More dull = less pure = less saturated. The peak saturation to lightness of different hues is not consistent. Yellow is most yellow (ie most saturate/pure) when it is quite light. Conversly the peak saturationn of green or blue is in the dark range. As you rightfully state, One key issue with the color wheel is that it is two dimensional. There does not exist a remotely complete color model that does not recognize at least three dimensions. I am not dissing the utility of the color wheel, but it has application only to the ordering of hues.
- chrisweekly 2y agogreen as a "primary", when it is a combination of blue + yellow, seems strange to me
- card_zero 2y agoThat makes sense, since it separates out green from yellow, which is where we have two cones close together in the spectrum (nominally green and red cones) and the most response and discrimination (humans are good at seeing greens). This part is surely an error, though: > So there’s no such thing as “red with a little green”—there’s just a less intense red. This would mean that a monitor can't display orange (red with a little green).
- gilleain 2y agoHeh, meanwhile over here in paint world, I've been mixing red and green to make grey (specifically Royal Talens (362 Deep Rose) + (602 Deep Green)). I think of orange as yellow + small amount of red, but hey.
- peterashford 2y agoYeah, additive (light, monitors) and subtractive (paint) color systems work differently
- adastra22 2y agoI think you’re missing the point on orange. When I see aquamarine, I see blue and green at the same time. It feels like blue-green. Orange on the other hand looks and feels like a unique color, not red + green (although I know why that is). TFA is using physiology to explain why these color mixes are perceived differently.
- card_zero 2y agoYes, but at that point in the article, it's clearly talking about the amount of red, green, or blue signal being picked up by cone cells, and thus the wavelength or mix of wavelengths, which is additive mixing. It's claiming that red plus some green (in terms of stimulation of cone cells) equals dimmed red, which is factually incorrect. This part about "three filters" is overstated, I think, if based in fact at all. Presumably it's based on something the retina is known to do, but I hadn't heard before of red and green being preprocessed separately from blue, and given that we can see orange when presented with red and some green pixels, it's not exactly as stated.
- interludead 2y agoI think CMYK can be seen as a practical adaptation of RYB for printing purposes