4 ms·

One could also argue that the detour through other hues is necessary in this case to avoid going through grey.

layer8 1y ago
Gray is arguably just another color, it’s not clear why you’d want to avoid it. How is going via red and yellow better than going via gray? Varying hue is often perceived as a larger change than varying saturation or lightness. A path going through several distinct hues is visually less uniform than one going through gray once.
- the_af 1y ago
  Is gray perceived as "just another color" or where all colors go when desaturated? I assumed the latter, which would explain why to avoid it if one isn't playing with saturation.
  - layer8 1y ago
    Think of fashion, of smartphone colors, pen and pencil colors and the like. Gray, white, black, are just color choices among all the available colors. A gray T-shirt isn’t a desaturated colored T-shirt. It’s its own color.
    - the_af 1y ago
      Oh, I understand what you say. But in color spaces, isn't gray the "sink" towards which desaturated colors shift? This would make it a location to avoid (unless you're purposefully desaturating).
      - deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
    - cruffle_duffle 1y ago
      Color is weird like. Gray is “all the visible spectrum in equal proportions”, which is white… just less white than the whitest thing visible but more white than the darkest (blackest) thing visible. It’s a “color” because it’s useful to describe such a thing. If you had monitor entirely filled with 50% white you’d call it white. Only by comparing it to something brighter do you call it gray. Brown is the same thing. In a dark room if you looked at a monitor filled with red and green pixels you’d call it orange. Only when you start adding in clues like whites and brighter colors would you call it brown. Anyway, yes grey is a color. But it is not quite the same as other colors. Other colors occupy only parts of the visible electromagnetic spectrum. Whites are the whole thing. There is actually several very good technology connections videos about this stuff. Color is very cool!
      - seba_dos1 1y ago
        > Whites are the whole thing. ...with varying definitions of "whole". D65 white is almost blue when compared to A white. It stops being either “all the visible spectrum" or "in equal proportions” pretty quickly once you look closer at it.
    - itishappy 1y ago
      A grey shirt is a desaturated shirt. You cannot resaturate grey. I think if you buy a tie-dye shirt or phone case and it comes out half grey, despite it being a valid color, most folks will be disappointed.
      - Dylan16807 1y ago
        > A grey shirt is a desaturated shirt. You cannot resaturate grey. Aren't these in direct conflict? If you can't resaturate it, that implies it's not desaturated. > I think if you buy a tie-dye shirt or phone case and it comes out half grey, despite it being a valid color, most folks will be disappointed. And if you buy a forest motif, people will be upset if it's pink. That's just doing a tie-dye wrong, not a rebuke of whether it's a color at all.
        itishappy 1y ago
        > Aren't these in direct conflict? If you can't resaturate it, that implies it's not desaturated. Kinda. There's a singularity in the math. The problem is that hue is defined as an angle and saturation is defined as distance from the center, but there's no consistent way to define a direction for the origin. Black and white have the same problem because they're also desaturated. > And if you buy a forest motif, people will be upset if it's pink. That's just doing a tie-dye wrong, not a rebuke of whether it's a color at all. I'm not arguing that it's not a color, just that it doesn't belong in all gradients!
        Dylan16807 1y ago
        Of course it doesn't belong in all gradients. It would only be in gradients that go from near-opposite colors. Or if you mean pure gray it would only be in gradients between exact opposite colors, and there are no good options for such a gradient.
        itishappy 1y ago
        I mention tie-dye because it feels like a quintessential example of a color gradient. I think it's perfectly reasonable to ask for a blue and orange tie-dye shirt and perfectly reasonable to not want grey colors simply because they're on opposite sides. I could see white in between, I could even see black, or I could see purple and red or cyan and yellow. I don't think there's a universally right answer here!
- brulard 1y ago
  Let's say you continuously change wavelength of a laser from blue (~480nm) to red (~630nm), you are going through green, not through gray. If in your use case going through gray makes sense, that's ok, there may be many paths from one color to another.
  - Sharlin 1y ago
    In general people don't really think of color in terms of the spectral progression (or the hue wheel), and I don't think that most people intuitively expect a gradient between two colors to pass through another "unrelated" primary or secondary color. The point is somewhat moot though, given that such gradients (like yellow to blue or red to green) are very unnatural anyway.
    - runarberg 1y ago
      Honestly I suspect this is largely a non issue. I have never made a gradient that goes through more than 2 different color (by some vague measure of different) without adding an additional stop. If I wanted to go through yellow and green to get to blue, I would add a stop at yellow and another at green, and I suspect most developers would do the same.
    - gowld 1y ago
      It's funny and a bit sad because we just went througha decades-long effort to migrate away from jet/rainbow gradients to vik/batlow/bi-hue gradients, and now rainbow is forcing its way back. https://theconversation.com/how-rainbow-colour-maps-can-distort-data-and-be-misleading-167159 https://theconversation.com/how-rainbow-colour-maps-can-dist... https://www.poynter.org/archive/2013/why-rainbow-colors-arent-always-the-best-options-for-data-visualizations https://www.poynter.org/archive/2013/why-rainbow-colors-aren...
    - itishappy 1y ago
      I disagree somewhat. Color mixing just isn't particularly intuitive. It's not the most intuitive to get a third hue, but that doesn't justify grey (which has an undefined hue). I do think most people are quite comfortable with the fact that between blue and yellow exists green, but is it a saturated green or a desaturated green? Additive and subtractive color mixing behave very differently here.
- AnimalMuppet 1y ago
  It depends on how you think about your spread. If, as someone else said, you're trying to represent a tunable laser going from red to blue, going through gray is completely wrong. That is not what a laser will do, ever. It will always be a fully saturated color. So, depending on what you're doing, you want different things. You may want to view your color space as an RGB cube, and go through gray. Or you may want to view your color space as something more like HLS or OKLCH, and not go through gray.
- ghurtado 1y ago
  > Gray is arguably just another color Only if you're working with additive color. With substractive, grey is just a darker (or dimmer) white.
- itishappy 1y ago
  It's an ugly color. Saturation makes stuff pop; this is often desirable. This is why I think it's important to have both polar (OKLCH) and rectilinear (Oklab) gradients.
- cubefox 1y ago
  Let's say neither going through gray nor through two different hues looks particularly great. It's pick your poison.
- DemocracyFTW2 1y ago
  Gray is arguably not just another color; I don't know about English but in German you have 'bunte' and 'unbunte' colors; 'unbunte' colors are white, black, and the grays in between

Gray is arguably just another color, it’s not clear why you’d want to avoid it. How is going via red and yellow better than going via gray? Varying hue is often perceived as a larger change than varying saturation or lightness. A path going through several distinct hues is visually less uniform than one going through gray once.

the_af 1y ago
Is gray perceived as "just another color" or where all colors go when desaturated? I assumed the latter, which would explain why to avoid it if one isn't playing with saturation.
- layer8 1y ago
  Think of fashion, of smartphone colors, pen and pencil colors and the like. Gray, white, black, are just color choices among all the available colors. A gray T-shirt isn’t a desaturated colored T-shirt. It’s its own color.
  - the_af 1y ago
    Oh, I understand what you say. But in color spaces, isn't gray the "sink" towards which desaturated colors shift? This would make it a location to avoid (unless you're purposefully desaturating).
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
  - cruffle_duffle 1y ago
    Color is weird like. Gray is “all the visible spectrum in equal proportions”, which is white… just less white than the whitest thing visible but more white than the darkest (blackest) thing visible. It’s a “color” because it’s useful to describe such a thing. If you had monitor entirely filled with 50% white you’d call it white. Only by comparing it to something brighter do you call it gray. Brown is the same thing. In a dark room if you looked at a monitor filled with red and green pixels you’d call it orange. Only when you start adding in clues like whites and brighter colors would you call it brown. Anyway, yes grey is a color. But it is not quite the same as other colors. Other colors occupy only parts of the visible electromagnetic spectrum. Whites are the whole thing. There is actually several very good technology connections videos about this stuff. Color is very cool!
    - seba_dos1 1y ago
      > Whites are the whole thing. ...with varying definitions of "whole". D65 white is almost blue when compared to A white. It stops being either “all the visible spectrum" or "in equal proportions” pretty quickly once you look closer at it.
  - itishappy 1y ago
    A grey shirt is a desaturated shirt. You cannot resaturate grey. I think if you buy a tie-dye shirt or phone case and it comes out half grey, despite it being a valid color, most folks will be disappointed.
    - Dylan16807 1y ago
      > A grey shirt is a desaturated shirt. You cannot resaturate grey. Aren't these in direct conflict? If you can't resaturate it, that implies it's not desaturated. > I think if you buy a tie-dye shirt or phone case and it comes out half grey, despite it being a valid color, most folks will be disappointed. And if you buy a forest motif, people will be upset if it's pink. That's just doing a tie-dye wrong, not a rebuke of whether it's a color at all.
      - itishappy 1y ago
        > Aren't these in direct conflict? If you can't resaturate it, that implies it's not desaturated. Kinda. There's a singularity in the math. The problem is that hue is defined as an angle and saturation is defined as distance from the center, but there's no consistent way to define a direction for the origin. Black and white have the same problem because they're also desaturated. > And if you buy a forest motif, people will be upset if it's pink. That's just doing a tie-dye wrong, not a rebuke of whether it's a color at all. I'm not arguing that it's not a color, just that it doesn't belong in all gradients!
        Dylan16807 1y ago
        Of course it doesn't belong in all gradients. It would only be in gradients that go from near-opposite colors. Or if you mean pure gray it would only be in gradients between exact opposite colors, and there are no good options for such a gradient.
        itishappy 1y ago
        I mention tie-dye because it feels like a quintessential example of a color gradient. I think it's perfectly reasonable to ask for a blue and orange tie-dye shirt and perfectly reasonable to not want grey colors simply because they're on opposite sides. I could see white in between, I could even see black, or I could see purple and red or cyan and yellow. I don't think there's a universally right answer here!
brulard 1y ago
Let's say you continuously change wavelength of a laser from blue (~480nm) to red (~630nm), you are going through green, not through gray. If in your use case going through gray makes sense, that's ok, there may be many paths from one color to another.
- Sharlin 1y ago
  In general people don't really think of color in terms of the spectral progression (or the hue wheel), and I don't think that most people intuitively expect a gradient between two colors to pass through another "unrelated" primary or secondary color. The point is somewhat moot though, given that such gradients (like yellow to blue or red to green) are very unnatural anyway.
  - runarberg 1y ago
    Honestly I suspect this is largely a non issue. I have never made a gradient that goes through more than 2 different color (by some vague measure of different) without adding an additional stop. If I wanted to go through yellow and green to get to blue, I would add a stop at yellow and another at green, and I suspect most developers would do the same.
  - gowld 1y ago
    It's funny and a bit sad because we just went througha decades-long effort to migrate away from jet/rainbow gradients to vik/batlow/bi-hue gradients, and now rainbow is forcing its way back. https://theconversation.com/how-rainbow-colour-maps-can-distort-data-and-be-misleading-167159 https://theconversation.com/how-rainbow-colour-maps-can-dist... https://www.poynter.org/archive/2013/why-rainbow-colors-arent-always-the-best-options-for-data-visualizations https://www.poynter.org/archive/2013/why-rainbow-colors-aren...
  - itishappy 1y ago
    I disagree somewhat. Color mixing just isn't particularly intuitive. It's not the most intuitive to get a third hue, but that doesn't justify grey (which has an undefined hue). I do think most people are quite comfortable with the fact that between blue and yellow exists green, but is it a saturated green or a desaturated green? Additive and subtractive color mixing behave very differently here.
AnimalMuppet 1y ago
It depends on how you think about your spread. If, as someone else said, you're trying to represent a tunable laser going from red to blue, going through gray is completely wrong. That is not what a laser will do, ever. It will always be a fully saturated color. So, depending on what you're doing, you want different things. You may want to view your color space as an RGB cube, and go through gray. Or you may want to view your color space as something more like HLS or OKLCH, and not go through gray.
ghurtado 1y ago
> Gray is arguably just another color Only if you're working with additive color. With substractive, grey is just a darker (or dimmer) white.
itishappy 1y ago
It's an ugly color. Saturation makes stuff pop; this is often desirable. This is why I think it's important to have both polar (OKLCH) and rectilinear (Oklab) gradients.
cubefox 1y ago
Let's say neither going through gray nor through two different hues looks particularly great. It's pick your poison.
DemocracyFTW2 1y ago
Gray is arguably not just another color; I don't know about English but in German you have 'bunte' and 'unbunte' colors; 'unbunte' colors are white, black, and the grays in between