John Carlos Baez on Nostr: Ever think about how weird it is that purple, a mix of red and blue, looks like ...
Ever think about how weird it is that purple, a mix of red and blue, looks like violet? Red and violet are at the opposite ends of the visible spectrum!
This diagram of colors sheds some light on this. It's boundary consists of two parts: a curve and a straight line:
• The curve, called the 𝘀𝗽𝗲𝗰𝘁𝗿𝗮𝗹 𝗹𝗼𝗰𝘂𝘀, consists of pure frequencies in the spectrum, from red at left to violet at right.
• But the line, called the 𝗽𝘂𝗿𝗽𝗹𝗲 𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗲, goes from violet to red!
Your computer screen probably uses a red-green-blue system, so it can only make colors inside the triangle here, or some nearby triangle. The colors in the triangle are called the 𝗴𝗮𝗺𝘂𝘁.
In the gamut, colors close to the purple line are made as mixtures of red and blue.
There's a huge amount more to say about this, and I don't know most of it yet. I'm afraid this post will launch an attack of color experts. Please be nice!
This diagram is called the 'CIE xy chromaticity diagram', and it's explained here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIE_1931_color_space
It was invented in 1931. A better standard came out in 1976:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIELAB_color_space
For a readable discussion of the difference, check out this post by Jeff Yurek:
https://dot-color.com/2012/08/14/color-space-confusion/
That's where I got the picture!
This diagram of colors sheds some light on this. It's boundary consists of two parts: a curve and a straight line:
• The curve, called the 𝘀𝗽𝗲𝗰𝘁𝗿𝗮𝗹 𝗹𝗼𝗰𝘂𝘀, consists of pure frequencies in the spectrum, from red at left to violet at right.
• But the line, called the 𝗽𝘂𝗿𝗽𝗹𝗲 𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗲, goes from violet to red!
Your computer screen probably uses a red-green-blue system, so it can only make colors inside the triangle here, or some nearby triangle. The colors in the triangle are called the 𝗴𝗮𝗺𝘂𝘁.
In the gamut, colors close to the purple line are made as mixtures of red and blue.
There's a huge amount more to say about this, and I don't know most of it yet. I'm afraid this post will launch an attack of color experts. Please be nice!
This diagram is called the 'CIE xy chromaticity diagram', and it's explained here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIE_1931_color_space
It was invented in 1931. A better standard came out in 1976:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIELAB_color_space
For a readable discussion of the difference, check out this post by Jeff Yurek:
https://dot-color.com/2012/08/14/color-space-confusion/
That's where I got the picture!