Color Is Weird

September 22, 2021 4:50 PM

Brown Does Not Exist (SLYT)
posted by peanut_mcgillicuty (33 comments total)

I would amend that to be brown light does not exist. Alec helped me understand that purple and magenta aren't real, either; about fifteen minutes into the Weird World of RGB.
posted by Rash at 4:57 PM on September 22, 2021 [3 favorites]

This dude helped keep me sane during lockdown. I'm a fan of his dry, vaguely irritated humor. Make sure you have captions turned on for his videos, or sometimes you miss something.
posted by tllaya at 5:06 PM on September 22, 2021 [14 favorites]

The key term imo is non-spectral colors.

Also greyscales, metallic colors, the line of purples, etc.

You also get fun stuff where if you look at a yellow thing you have no idea if you're seeing spectral yellow light, or just the right mix of other colors that maps to the same qualia of yellow in our internal scheme. But the spectrometer will always tell you, if you want to check!
posted by SaltySalticid at 5:26 PM on September 22, 2021 [8 favorites]

You don't need a spectrometer you just need a thing with some green and some red on it. Pure wavelength yellow light you won't see different hues no matter what you shine it on, but a mix of red and green will give you a different blend depending on what you shine it on.
posted by aubilenon at 5:33 PM on September 22, 2021 [1 favorite]

Heh, I immediately knew this was going to be the Technology Connections youtube channel.

Previously, previously, previously, and previously. All really good.
posted by AlSweigart at 5:43 PM on September 22, 2021 [2 favorites]

Since watching this particular Technology Connections video when it first dropped is how I was introduced to him, the weird guy who pops in to say "brown" is Robert Dunn, and he his own YouTube channels: Aging Wheels, a channel devoted to fixing and maintaining horribly weird automobiles, and Under Dunn a woodworking and chicken rearing channel. Both are also worth checking out.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 6:13 PM on September 22, 2021 [2 favorites]

There are so many brown things. From now on, I'm calling those fruits "light browns" because orange doesn't exist.
posted by otherchaz at 6:44 PM on September 22, 2021 [4 favorites]

And so many more secret ephemeral colors that can only be seen by the illuminati Tetrachromats.
posted by sammyo at 6:46 PM on September 22, 2021 [2 favorites]

This instantly reminded me of an xmas decoration from my childhood. It was a home crafted card holder made from yarn wrapped around a coffee can. The top and bottom were removed and the yarn passed through so that it created vertical stripes - inch wide bands of alternating green and red yarn. I would roll it across the livingroom floor and watch it turn brown. I did this many times, so I'm pretty certain it was brown.
posted by brachiopod at 7:13 PM on September 22, 2021 [1 favorite]

Make sure you have captions turned on for his videos, or sometimes you miss something.

♫ Thematically Smooth Jazz ♫
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 7:35 PM on September 22, 2021 [2 favorites]

I do love Technology Connections. Though I haven't been able to get into watching his 48 minute and 25 second video on laundry detergent yet.
posted by cirhosis at 8:44 PM on September 22, 2021 [1 favorite]

If anyone knows where I can score his Betamax cassette t-shirt, I’m all ears.
posted by hwyengr at 8:47 PM on September 22, 2021

Sure, and neither does pink. Go figure.
posted by jwest at 8:59 PM on September 22, 2021 [1 favorite]

I've usually seen the formulation "This isn't a real color, it's just a thing that our brains convince us we're seeing in response to some particular combination of wavelengths plus contextual clues" applied to magenta (which the video talks about a little), and I've always found it irritating. ALL colors are things that our brains convince us we're seeing in response to some particular combination of wavelengths plus contextual cues. Brown and magenta are not special in this regard. Even the "it's not on the rainbow" part isn't special; most colors you see in real life aren't on the rainbow. There's no dark green on the rainbow. Heck, there's no white on the rainbow -- does that mean white light isn't real? Is there any sensible criterion by which white is a real color but brown or magenta isn't? If "brown is a color" conflicts with people's notions about the relationship between colors and wavelengths of light, why do so many people find it easier to reject the former than examine the latter?
posted by baf at 9:15 PM on September 22, 2021 [16 favorites]

(That said, this video *is* a good examination of color perception, and my little rant there is more to the text of the link to the video than to the video itself.)
posted by baf at 10:01 PM on September 22, 2021

Is there any sensible criterion by which white is a real color but brown or magenta isn't?

Nope, the "sensible criteria" is whether colors appear on a spectrum or can be produced by generating a specific wavelength of light or not, and by that criteria white isn't a color either. It's a non-spectral color, meaning we only see it when the right quantities of light of other wavelengths are combined.

Anyway, you're right. "Brown Does Not Exist" is the YouTube clickbait way of saying "Brown, along with magenta, white, black, pink, and most other colors, is perceived by your eyes and your brain in a different fashion than the colors I can make with this prism."
posted by mmoncur at 10:13 PM on September 22, 2021 [5 favorites]

Though I haven't been able to get into watching his 48 minute and 25 second video on laundry detergent yet.

I used that one to fall asleep last night. He might be irritated to know that I had some vaguely pleasant dreams about handwashing dishes.
posted by loquacious at 10:26 PM on September 22, 2021 [2 favorites]

Brown and orange are something beyond a demonstration that non-spectral colors exist (which btw Newton knew and used to create the color wheel). Brown can be made with pure spectral yellow-orange light -- just less illuminance of it, relative to the rest of the scene.

This is weird! Dim the green light, it makes a darker green, not what we identify as a different color. Orange is special.

(I saw a plausible explanation of this in terms of cones' response spectra but cannot find, halp.)
posted by away for regrooving at 10:56 PM on September 22, 2021 [3 favorites]

The technical term for this is "related color". Colors that can only be viewed in relation to others are "related".
Colors that can be viewed isolated from all others are called "unrelated". Most colors are related.

Like brown, gray is another related color: you can't have a single isolated "gray" light, but if you put multiple white lights of different intensities together you will perceive "gray". In fact most colors we see are "related" and will be perceived only in context. It's possible to have a "brown light" but you need the context to perceive it as such as he shows in the video.

Funnily, it's not possible either to see a "brown object" in isolation. So you could also say that no surface is really brown. But why would an isolated perception "exist" more or be more real than a relative one?

Unrelated, but related (ha ha), I have been thinking about how the computer graphics community and beyond sees "white skin" as the only "human skin". There's context for it, but it's jarring that in this folksy sciency video, brown was singled out as a color that does not really exist and that somehow is better known for being the color of poop.
posted by haemanu at 11:17 PM on September 22, 2021 [6 favorites]

Are orange/brown really any different from something like cyan/teal (any color where we have a different name for a darker color of the same hue)?
posted by straight at 11:34 PM on September 22, 2021 [1 favorite]

The starting point of the video is that most people consider brown and orange to be separate colours, whereas most people would already consider cyan and teal to be mild variations on the same colour. The video is demonstrating that this is entirely arbitrary. If you already thought this then well done you.

Mr TC likes to produce long elaborate videos around this kind of very small mildly interesting fact - things he calls "neat". Which is both a blessing and a curse depending on whether you enjoy his schtick.
posted by grahamparks at 3:54 AM on September 23, 2021 [1 favorite]

Post title is apt though: color is weird. My first "digital" job back in the early 2000s involved color correcting photos and I think I got pretty good at understanding RGB color relationships (duplicating 35 mm and medium format slides, ooh boy that is a beast) and also the CMYK translation onto photo paper.

Working with color becomes intuitive over time, a form of muscle memory develops except the muscle is your...brain? I guess? Anyhoo, this makes trying to explain your process to another human slightly tricky.

For example, I've been painting with watercolors for over a year, which has been loads of fun. Just last month I made this note in my sketchbook after putting down a layer of Ultramarine Blue and then an overlay of Azo Yellow.

Blue + Yellow = Green right? But what type of green? Specifically what name would you attach to it? Watercolors make this particularly confusing because you're dealing with transparency and so the white of the paper factors in, as well as possible granulation of pigment.

So yeah, color is weird and fucking cool.
posted by jeremias at 4:22 AM on September 23, 2021 [2 favorites]

No color exists. Energy is emitted by things, and reflects off of things. Some cells in our eyes react to four tiny, overlapping subsets of this energy. "Color" is a thing that happens in our minds.

We give names to smaller subsets of the sensations these cells create.

"Brown" is what we call it when all four of these sets of cells are registering a moderate level of activity relative to the general surroundings, with a slightly higher amount of activity in the set of cells that whose response peaks in the zone we call "red", and possibly in the zone we call "green", as well. You can get a lot more detailed in giving names to this subset of sensations; open up a big box of crayons, colored pencils, or paints and you'll find a whole bunch of colors with names like "burnt sienna" or "coffee" or "walnut", all of which you could also call "brown".

"Purple" and "magenta", the other colors people like to say "does not exist", is what we call it when the sets of cells that sense the lowest subset of the energy bouncing through the world, and the sets of cells that sense the highest subset of the energy bouncing through the world, are both registering a high level of activity relative to the general surroundings. It so happens that the zones where these cells register activity don't overlap, leading to people saying this color "does not exist".

The colors that "exist"? They're ones that correspond to a *very* small segment of the vast ocean of energy that flows through the universe. We can point to a tiny, tiny segment of the already tiny segment of that energy that our eyes react to and say "we call this range of wavelengths yellow." Or red, or orange, or green, or blue.

If we follow the logic that the only colors that "exist" are ones that are a tiny, tiny segment of the already tiny segment of energy our eyes react to, then it is arguable whether or not "white" exists - that's all four of the sets of light-detecting cells saying "hey there's a lot of energy bouncing off of me" - and "black" certainly does not exist, because that's all four of them saying "nothing happening".

And if we follow this logic further, to other classes of energy we can detect? Chords do not exist. Polyphony does not exist. Only single notes that excite a tiny percentage of the cells in our ears that sense the vibration of the air around us exist. Perhaps even most notes played by musical instruments do not exist, because anything but a pure tone generated by a machine is going to have a lot of other tones that are generated by various resonances of the instrument. Speech certainly doesn't exist for similar reasons.

And yet these are all sensations we experience, with a rich vocabulary of names for them.
posted by egypturnash at 6:46 AM on September 23, 2021 [5 favorites]

I would amend that to be brown light does not exist.

Where I grew up was so boring (a lot of the time) that sunsets were occasionally brown. Not due to windstorms or fire, but just due to boringness.

Brown light does exist, and it's pretty depressing.
posted by The_Vegetables at 8:10 AM on September 23, 2021 [1 favorite]

Are orange/brown really any different from something like cyan/teal (any color where we have a different name for a darker color of the same hue)?

Adding white to a color:

tint (pink is a tint of red)

Adding black to a color:

shade (teal is a shade of cyan? Not sure I agree)

Adding gray to a color:

In art class a long time ago, I learned this was a hue but nowadays tone seems to be the preferred term, according to Wikipedia

posted by Rash at 8:32 AM on September 23, 2021 [2 favorites]

The Colour Brown Is All Around

Brown is the colour of dead grass
It’s also the colour of brass
Brown is the colour of my bed
It’s also the colour of the shed
Brown is the colour of my hair
It’s also the colour of a damaged pear
Brown is the colour of my eyes
It’s also the colour of meat in pies

Karen (Age 12) Formby
Liverpool Echo - Oct 1973
posted by gnuhavenpier at 10:52 AM on September 23, 2021 [4 favorites]

Hello I would like to offer the extent noun "brownth" as a companion to words "depth", "length", and "breadth". Thank you.
posted by Chef Flamboyardee at 1:42 PM on September 23, 2021

For many years color was a big part of my job. Talking about colors, matching colors, using colors, putting the right colors next to each other.

It is very hard to talk about color because everyone uses the same words to mean different things, and everyone believes that everyone else is using the same words in the same way. Like some kind of corrupted common knowledge.

I like to keep in mind that, as has been said before in this thread, color happens in the brain. The retina is part of the brain (really, look up how it forms in the embryo). Photons hit the brain and this start a cascade of chemical reactions and electrical impulses that after a lot of processing bubble up to awareness, where we see brown or orange or whatever.

Keeping it simple with single wavelength (spectral) colors, we see orange when something reflects or emits a lot of light, compared to objects surrounding it, in wavelengths between 585 to 620 nanometers, brown when they reflect less light in that range. For some reason we see them as very different colors. Try the same with wavelengths around 450 nm and we see light blue or dark blue, very similar colors.

I also believe that the brain is the product of evolution, and evolution results in all kinds of amazing shortcuts. Maybe being able to quickly tell apart bright 600 nm objects from dim 600 nm objects is more conductive to evolutionary success than telling apart bright and dim 450 nm objects.

I vaguely remember reading something about tetrachromat monkeys, not sure if a serious paper or some clickbait article, showing that they were better able to tell how ripe a fruit is. The more ripe the fruit the more calories, the more calories the more babies. This could be one of those stupid just so stories in evolutionary psychology, but I know that many fruits I like have some orange color in them, and I stop liking them when they start showing brown.

I think it is amazing that we can predict how much sugar a fruit has because we have tiny molecules that act as harmonic oscillators in a small part of the brain that we expose to the world in order to capture photons from the sun that reflected off the fruit.
posted by Dr. Curare at 2:29 PM on September 23, 2021 [3 favorites]

I should have used descriptions instead of tendentious terms.

Is there any difference between [brown is a darker version of orange] and [dark green is a darker version of green] other than us happening to have lots of names for various versions of dark orange?

Isn't it just as true that you can't make some kinds of dark greens (or dark blues or dark reds) with straight RGB lighting?
posted by straight at 2:58 PM on September 23, 2021 [1 favorite]

Various sites for HTML color names give the label "brown" to #A52A2A RGB (165, 42, 42), which seems to define brown as dark red rather than dark orange.

(It wouldn't have occurred to me to call that color "brown" because it looks to red to me.)
posted by straight at 3:10 PM on September 23, 2021 [1 favorite]

RGB (128, 64, 0) #804000 seems like a better candidate for "brown" being half-way between red and yellow and half-way between black and white.
posted by straight at 3:24 PM on September 23, 2021 [1 favorite]

Several other places define "brown" as #964B00 RGB (150, 75, 0), which is the same idea just a little brighter.
posted by straight at 3:35 PM on September 23, 2021

I love this.
Light blue, medium blue, dark blue.
Light green, medium green, dark green.
Light purple/violet, medium purple/violet, dark purple/violet.
Pink, medium red, dark red. Light red gets its own name in English, which is delightful. It also assists the cosmetic industry with the multiple ways to rebrand the next "red" or "pink" shade of lipstick.

And things get weird with orange and yellow as described in English.
Light orange, medium orange, brown (also light and medium shades of dull orange brown).
Light green yellow, medium olive green, dark olive green.
Light orange yellow, gold/topaz/honey, brown (also light and medium shades of dull yellow brown).

And there is a lovely rabbit hole for blue, blue, and more blue.
Katy Kelleher in the Paris Review has her Hue's Hue series, with a deep dive in Marian Blue. I will also add periwinkle, which has always looked a bit blue to me, but Kelleher defines as follows: "A subset of violet, which is a subset of purple, periwinkle denotes a precise shade that appears somewhat brighter than lavender, bluer than lilac, clearer than mauve, and dimmer than amethyst."
posted by TrishaU at 12:34 AM on September 26, 2021 [1 favorite]