English Deutsch Français Italiano Español Português 繁體中文 Bahasa Indonesia Tiếng Việt ภาษาไทย
All categories

And, are you really sure, we only have 3 primer colour?

2006-10-17 18:29:47 · 5 answers · asked by Anonymous in Science & Mathematics Physics

5 answers

Colour perception is a somewhat complex area. The first part of your question is actually pretty meaningless - there is in principle no colour that cannot exist on Earth (forgetting for a minute what we actually mean by colour).

It is common to think that the colour an object looks depends on the frequency of light coming from it. This is, in fact, false. It is easy to see this by looking at a piece of paper. Take it outdoors - sunlight peaks in the green - but the paper looks white. Take it into an artificially lit room - lightbulbs give out virtually no light outside the red end of the specturm - but the paper looks white. The eye is actually very, very clever at compensating for changes in illumination - if it were not then vision would be much less useful.

Visible colours can be produced by mixing three colours of light (assuming each colour is a distribution of frequencies of light around a peak that defines its colour, and is not actually strictly monochromatic). This has nothing to do with the fact that we have three types of receptor in our eyes - instead it is because you need three reference points to define a position in the three dimensional colour space. You can think of this 3D space of visible colour as red, green and blue but this is possibly the worst interpretation. In part this is because you could make another choice of primary colours. The range of colurs you could then produce by mixing (called the gamut) would then be different but you could sure produce a range of colours.

The simplest way to think of the colour space is as hue (the tint), saturation (the shade) and intensity (the brightness). However, colour scientists will use LAB values, because these are device independent.

You can, of course, choose to use more than three primary colours - this may (or may not) increase the gamut but is not strictly necessary.

Finally, the receptors in the human eyes are not, in fact, sensitive to red, green and blue. The red and green receptors peak very close together in sensitivity at 535 and 575 nm respectively - in other words in greeny yellow and orangey yellow.

2006-10-17 22:16:43 · answer #1 · answered by Anonymous · 0 0

The source of "colour" is your brain interpreting signals from cells in your eye, called cones. There are three types of cones that are sensitive to the light frequencies that we call red, green, and blue. Every colour that you see is based on your brain interpreting signals from these three types of "cones."

That is why there are only three primary colours.

2006-10-17 20:37:57 · answer #2 · answered by Kevin R 2 · 2 0

Octarine (Apologies to Terry Pratchett}

2006-10-18 11:58:35 · answer #3 · answered by bo nidle 4 · 0 0

yellow

2006-10-17 18:51:05 · answer #4 · answered by Anonymous · 0 0

unknown.
yaAa,.THER ARE 3!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

2006-10-17 19:07:17 · answer #5 · answered by Naddi S 1 · 0 0

fedest.com, questions and answers