color is relative

August 29, 2008 12:58 AM

Color Is Relative, pretty and interesting eye candy created by Gabriel Mott, is a website dedicated to showing luminosity achieved through simple color combinations. On the site, the image is interactive. By moving the mouse over a single swatch the background color of the page will change to the same color.

Seeing Things: Color is Relative on Facebook.

Gabe's blog, FunkyEnough."In visual perception a color is almost never seen as it really is - as it physically is. This fact makes color the most relative medium in art."-Josef Albers

Video that explains halation and how color is relative.

posted by nickyskye (13 comments total)

On 2 panadeine forte, this is visually addictive.
posted by strawberryviagra at 1:42 AM on August 29, 2008

This is why it is important to rough in and develop your painting as a whole, and not to zero in on one part for detailing. If you do that, you may be in for a color surprise when you fill in what's around it.
posted by jfrancis at 2:44 AM on August 29, 2008

When painting in Photoshop I find I have to set the little swatch to what looks like a darker color than I need. Large areas of the same color look lighter.
posted by jfrancis at 2:50 AM on August 29, 2008

thank you!
posted by infini at 3:36 AM on August 29, 2008

I've always found a metaphorical lesson in color relatively, that we can not ignore or divorce ourselves from the people around us. They shape and, um, color, our perceptions of the world, by default.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 4:37 AM on August 29, 2008 [1 favorite]

It's not just neighboring colour or patch size, either. Room illumination and its spectral components plays a huge part in perception.
posted by seanmpuckett at 6:16 AM on August 29, 2008

Very nicely done - thank you!
posted by speug at 6:58 AM on August 29, 2008

Here's my favorite illustration of the relative perception of color. If you take the graphic into Photoshop and put the A or B square on a different layer and move it around, you can literally see the square change color depending on its position on the board. Mind boggling.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 7:16 AM on August 29, 2008 [3 favorites]

In philosophy, particularly with concern to the mind body problem, there is discussion of "qualia" - sometimes described as "raw feels". The question is whether qualia exist, whether the subjective gut feelings of the taste of chocolate, the color red, the feel of your favorite sweater - have some intrinsic existence or only have meaning relative to other perceptions.

If qualia do exist, this seems to be a problem monism and/or physicalism - where would those intrinsic properties enter the picture?

So it's interesting that our subjective perceptions of physically constant hues are influenced so much by immediate context. Some comparison is clearly involved... but is it all comparison?
posted by phrontist at 8:09 AM on August 29, 2008 [1 favorite]

(oh, and in a previous discussion somewhere on MeFi, someone mentioned tetrachromats, which I'd never heard of before).
posted by phrontist at 8:12 AM on August 29, 2008 [1 favorite]

This is great.
Thank you, nicky.

I have been annoyed by something around this phenomenon for quite a while.

It is more visible with works that radiate light, like Flavin's.
For example, the Metropolitan displays its Flavin, as if it were only a graphic proposition (by the way, the Moma does the same with its red Flavin).
But if you look at the sticker, you can see that it's bathed in the light of the work. It means that we are also bathing in it.
So the work doesn't exist independently outside ourselves: we don't really see "the thing on the wall" but an interaction between the work and our mind.

I thought that this was specific to works radiating light, but Mott makes me realize that it applies to everything, everywhere. We only see a mediation, a construct, of all light sources and reflections around us. Love it.

Exactly what cogneuro wrote yesterday: "... a person might wonder what's really out there in the world." Cool.

On preview: thanks phrontist, I'll check these links.
posted by bru at 8:28 AM on August 29, 2008 [2 favorites]

This is so cool! Thanks, nickyskye!
posted by Lynsey at 9:10 AM on August 29, 2008

An absolutely beautiful distraction. Thanks.
posted by heyho at 1:24 PM on August 29, 2008