The color brown?

Question

What i want to know deals with light, NOT how to mix paint to get brown or about making chocolate icing. every half intelligent scientist knows that colors are really what light wavelengths an object does not absorb. Black absorbs all, and white none. but what about brown??

Answer 1

Brown is closer to a "dark yellow" in terms of light, so it's a mixture of red and green light. In terms of RGB values, a typical brown would contain about twice as much red as green, often with a little bit of a blue component.

Answer 2

When you see most objects, you are seeing light with many different wavelengths from the visible spectrum. The combination of wavelengths determines how you perceive it as color.

The eye has simple color receptors, and it's very easy to fool it. You can create the perception of nearly any color simply by combining red, green, and blue in various proportions, as in an RGB color video monitor. The standard RGB value for 'brown' is 150, 75, 0. You can vary those quite a bit and still get a color people would call brown.

In theory, you could take three monochromatic light sources from anywhere in the visible spectrum and create the perception of all colors. Two might even be enough.

Answer 3

You've answered your own question. If a white surface is reflecting all wavelengths of light in the visible spectrum, and a black surface is reflecting none (or, absorbing all), then a surface of any other color must be a limited combination of wavelengths within the visible spectrum. This would be true for Brown as well.

Why not do an experiment. Get a prism. In a dark room shine a bright light onto Brown construction paper. Get a large piece of black construction paper and make a cut-out for the prism. On the other side of the black paper (not where the bright light and brown paper is) shine the prism light on a piece of white construction paper.

Answer 4

Every half intellegant scientist would know that grammar plays an important part in modern communication!
In the most simplistic terms, brown does not absorb red, but absorbs approximatly 50% of blue and green light.

Answer 5

The color brown is one of the most difficult colors to render by additive light.

That is to say a television screen.

Because brown is so subjective, the exact RGB value can appear as dark red yellowish red gold, etc.

I tried to get the art director's "Brown" in about the same area as flesh, then take out luminance. Human melanin is probably the closest to a reference brown color.

The best job of a brown on TV (IMHO) is the UPS commercials. Adding the gold (another impossible color) pushes your brain into reading the trucks as brown.