4 ms·

It's the color of incandescent bulbs, fire, and other popular sources of light, reflected off of a large variety of surfaces.

• Rangi42 12y ago
  That's what I thought of too. It could be tested by averaging a pool of images lit by fluorescent bulbs, LEDs, or LCD monitor glow.
• anon4 12y ago
  Also the colour of a human, the most photographed animal on the planet.
  • Stwerp 12y ago
    The article addresses that and intentionally chooses non-human subjects such as walls of graffiti. These still show his `emergent orange' effect. At first I assumed it was his averaging technique, but I'm more apt to believe it has to do with the spectrum of light which is being `sampled' by the selection of photos.
• derrasterpunkt 12y ago
  So the color could change in the next years with the emergence of fluorescent lamps, LEDs and cold cathode lighting.
  • baddox 12y ago
    Don't most of those newer lighting technologies usually try to imitate the color temperature of traditional lighting?
    • sp332 12y ago
      Compact fluorescent bulbs (cheap ones anyway) are quite "warm" and LEDs are cool, almost blue. I ended up combining them in my kitchen to get a color I liked.
• egypturnash 12y ago
  This is pretty much what I was coming here to say. Don't forget that we live under a yellow sun, too. There is a hell of a lot of warm light in our world, natural and artificial.
  • MrRage 12y ago
    Sun is actually white... which is why you see a all the colors in a rainbow. I know Superman lied to you. :)
    • trhway 12y ago
      Sun's radiation peak energy at sea level is around 500-600nm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunlight#mediaviewer/File:Solar_Spectrum.png http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunlight#mediaviewer/File:Solar... which is green http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light#mediaviewer/File:Linear_visible_spectrum.svg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light#mediaviewer/File:Linear_v... That is why grass/trees are green - they consume only the edges of the spectrum (about 10-15% of the total sunlight coming through) bouncing the rest back. With respect to the original point about orange being average color of Internet photos - keep in mind that most photos are produced by digital CCD cameras which are more sensitive to orange/red than green/blue. http://www.gitthailand.com/image/ccd-spectrum.jpg http://www.gitthailand.com/image/ccd-spectrum.jpg
      • MrRage 12y ago
        Interesting. I guess it actually emits all sorts of frequencies of light visible or not, but Superman is still wrong. :)
      • tgb 12y ago
        Why does that explain why plants are generally green? If you had told me that the energy peak was at X wavelength, I would have guessed that plants absorbed most of that wavelength in order to not be wasteful rather than preferentially reflecting that wavelength.
        • 12y ago
• hazz 12y ago
  This wouldn't explain why the same effect was seen from photos of graffiti (which presumably were outside, in the day.) "When someone told him that it was probably due to the colors of flesh in photographs, he tried it with a pool of graffiti. Still orange. "
  • wlesieutre 12y ago
    I'm curious how much exposed wall was included in those pictures. Graffiti is vastly more common on brick and concrete surfaces, which 99% of the tie are red, yellow, cream, or gray. Regardless of what color the graffiti is, if there's a lot of backdrop behind it I'm not at all surprised that it'd average to orange. Pick something else like "pictures of forests" instead of "pictures of graffiti" and suddenly your average stops being orange because you're not taking photos of buildings anymore.
• krazydad 12y ago
  It is perhaps worth pointing out that I observed the same effect in collections of purely synthetic art (such as Fractals). https://www.flickr.com/photos/krazydad/3794489938/in/set-72157621965748238 https://www.flickr.com/photos/krazydad/3794489938/in/set-721... While I don't think this rules out light as a possible culprit, it perhaps implies that humans are mimicking the natural world when they are making color choices.