Color Spaces:
It has been known for some time that colors can be described by three numbers. If I show you light of a certain color and ask you to match it by combining lights of three other colors and varying their intensities, you'll typically be able to find a combination that looks indistinguishable. But the wavelengths you combine might be very different from the wavelengths I showed you. Light of the wavelength corresponding to yellow and light of the right combination of red and green wavelengths will look the same, even though they are physically quite different.
[more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns
on Mar 31, 2013 -
26 comments
The best description I can give
Would be that if you looked at new spring snow
Which has a fine grain size
About an hour after dawn or an hour before sunset
You'd see the same spectrum of light
That an alien astronomer in another galaxy would see
Looking at the Milky Way [more inside]
posted by thirteenkiller
on Jan 13, 2012 -
10 comments
Solarized is the mother of all colour schemes. "Solarized is a sixteen color palette (eight monotones, eight accent colors) designed for use with terminal and gui applications. It has several unique properties. I designed this colorscheme with both precise CIELAB lightness relationships and a refined set of hues based on fixed color wheel relationships. It has been tested extensively in real world use on color calibrated displays (as well as uncalibrated/intentionally miscalibrated displays) and in a variety of lighting conditions."
posted by chunking express
on Apr 13, 2011 -
95 comments
Amazing World of Insect-Wing Color Discovered "A closer look at seemingly drab, transparent insect wings has revealed realms of previously unappreciated color, visible to the naked eye yet overlooked for centuries. Until now, the wing colors of many flies and wasps were dismissed as random iridescence. But they may be as distinctive and marvelous as the much-studied, much-celebrated wings of butterflies and beetles." The
paper (pdf) was published in PNAS.
posted by dhruva
on Jan 5, 2011 -
10 comments
Early 1900s in COLOUR (a sampling). "In the early part of the 20th century French-Jewish capitalist Albert Kahn set about to collect a photographic record of the world, the images were held in an 'Archive of the Planet'. Before the 1929 stock market crash he was able to amass a collection of 180,000 metres of b/w film and more than 72,000 autochrome plates, the first industrial process for true colour photography." The
whole enchilada.
posted by spock
on Jun 3, 2010 -
35 comments
Thursday flash fun:
Hue Shift -
an addictive endless action platformer. You are controlling a pixel that can shift its color to red, green and blue. Climb as high as you can by matching your hue to the color of the platforms. Beware, only platforms with your color are solid! (
via Rock, Paper, Shotgun)
posted by slimepuppy
on May 6, 2010 -
17 comments
Those who have watched a lot of Hollywood movies over the past few years may have noticed a trend: many of these films
sport a uniform palette of teal and orange, a result of the availability of digital colour-grading. Originally derived from applying complementary colour theory to human skin tones to make them stand out more, the teal-and-orange rule has spread, and is now being lazily applied across the board, whether appropriate or not.
posted by acb
on Mar 19, 2010 -
125 comments
Colorful AllusionsThough printed in black and white, great literature is bursting with vibrant colour. In these rebus-style puzzles, color words and parts of words have been replaced with colored boxes.
posted by carsonb
on Jun 11, 2008 -
8 comments
If you've ever wanted to peel back the corners of your browser window again and again to reveal different colors, then
colorflip is for you.
posted by hydrophonic
on May 19, 2008 -
29 comments
A splash of urban colour! A dilapidated tower block in Glasgow was the setting for a riotous splash of colour this week as Sony followed up their previous Bravia tv campaign of the bouncing balls down the streets of San Francisco with a new advert using a disused towerblock in Glasgow. Some beautiful urban explosion pics
here,
here,
here,
here and
here.
posted by ClanvidHorse
on Jul 26, 2006 -
20 comments
In the year 2525 if man is still alive, future generations will be able to consult
this book or type a request into their DIY UNIT™ and reproduce the effect of
wood or marble.
posted by tellurian
on Feb 2, 2006 -
18 comments
A picture of English nouns is a map of 33,000 English nouns. Each tiny rectangle corresponds to a noun. The color of the rectangle has been assigned a color, based on an internet image search for that noun. The words are clustered so that similar words are near each other.
Gallery. (Java required)
posted by jikel_morten
on Aug 14, 2005 -
30 comments
The Virtual Colour Museum presents Colour Order Systems in Art and Science: "a complete cultural history of colour", including illustrated explanations of 59 colour theories from antiquity to modern time, plus the significance of colours in various cultural systems (click the small images to enlarge), and a "virtual colour-space" dedicated to illustrating the spherical colour system construction of early 19th century painter Philipp Otto Runge.
Walk this way >>
posted by taz
on Nov 9, 2003 -
4 comments
exploring color ... online utility to help room designers (and maybe even web designers) choose the right color for their project.
posted by crunchland
on Oct 24, 2003 -
13 comments
Are you seeing the world differently? You may be suffering from synesthesia, a rare condition that allows an individual to perceive symbols in color. Someone who has synesthesia will read a newspaper in multitudinous colors, often perceiving a color change within particular syllables. In one case reported in this article, a man overhead a conversation in Korean, only to have his mind inundated with colors, despite being unable to understand the words. Rare condition or a state of sensory cognition to come?
posted by ed
on Mar 19, 2002 -
48 comments
"Beige. I think I'll paint the universe beige." Remember those
arguments we had about the exact shade of turquoise the universe was supposed to be? Umm, computer glitch, sorry. "Fairchild realized the software Glazebrook was using actually took a slightly pinky looking colour as white. 'There was a huge green shift due to the erroneous white point,' he says."
posted by maudlin
on Mar 7, 2002 -
8 comments
Adopt a color let's you name a colour for $25. Would be great to have MeFi Blue, Zeldman Orange, Kottke Yellow as standard colour names. Would make a good last minute christmas gift for a friend who's got a site.
[via Fairvue]
posted by riffola
on Dec 22, 2000 -
13 comments
