Colour Mixing: The Mystery of Magenta
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- Опубликовано: 31 май 2024
- Why doesn't magenta appear in the rainbow? The answer lies not in physics but in biology.
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Science presenter Steve Mould demonstrates the strange phenomenon of colour mixing, in which not everything is as it seems. The cone cells within our eyes are responsible for the colours we see, but are only sensitive to Red, Green and Blue light. So how are we able to see so many colours when we can only directly detect three and how do our brains see the colour magenta which doesn't have a wavelength?
Steve explains all with the help of his coloured torches and explores how everyday technology fools our brains into seeing more.
Find out more about Steve Mould on his nerdy blog stevemould.com or @MouldS
More about Magenta: ekrelliott.wordpress.com/2009/...
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We don't know what to say. With the addition of Greek, this video is now officially our most translated one ever! We now have subtitles in Arabic, Chinese, Dutch, Danish, French, German, Greek, Indonesian, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Serbian, Spanish, Swedish, and Turkish. We can't thank you enough! We appreciate each and every one of you who has donated their time and skills.
And Korean has joined the fold! 고맙습니다 !
Uh? oh I didn't know that
I know it's a bit Weird, but I love this man's voice!
So then what's going on with my cones when I see true indigo/violet wavelength? My eye and brain clearly know that something is happening that is different than seeing blue, but how if only the blue cone is responding?
@@jbtechcon7434 i'd assume that indigo is what you get when only your blue come is active and blue is what you get when your blue cone is active and your green cone is also slightly active
Violet is in the rainbow. Violet is purple.
Magenta is not in the rainbow. Magenta is pink.
Matt McConaha They are both purple. Pink is light red -> also uses a bit of green and blue. Purple only uses red and blue.
Matt McConaha you were taught wrong sry bro
Matt McConaha thank you for saying this. I don't know what monochromatic rainbow this dude fell off of, but mangeta and purple and wildly different colors
Matt McConaha magenta is also purple, pink is a mix of green and blue lol.
SoosUnknown Do an image search for "magenta" and show us a screenshot of the majority of purple images that come up.
Am i the only one who thinks purple and magenta are different colours?
+Jacquobite They are. Magenta is not on the visible light spectrum but Violet is.
@@benanderson89 What?? They're all on the visible, or course. In physics colors have no name. What you're differentiating is not just hues, but colors with names given by civilization. Some of these colors are usually thought off in the subtractive mode (starting with white paper and adding pigment to reach black). None of those concepts exist in phisics. in physics we just have hue, luminosity and saturation. The rest are just social constructs.
50 years ago my 64 box of crayolas agree. I've always felt Magenta was a petty dark pink, but not really pink. Kinda violet, but not purple. I have full vision, no colored blindness. It's not purple or red but a mix of both. Maybe we can see what others can't. Can you stand to eat a refrigerated banana? To me they taste like a bar of ivory soap smells. But only 1% of the population can taste the enzyme a banana produces once it goes below 40 degrees Fahrenheit.
Naw, though 'purple' is really called 'violet' in the visible spectrum ('purple' doesn't exist); _magenta_ though, should really be beyond red and violet, thus "invisible". At least that is what I tell myself. And isn't it cool to think that a visible color can be... _INVISIBLE_!?! 😎
@La Serpenta Canta -I completely agree. And maybe it's just where I was educated, but we were taught that purple is created by mixing red and blue. If you add more red than blue, you get violet...when you mix more blue than red, you get lavender. No real mystery here and this guy needs to get his facts straight and his eyes checked because violet has always been in the rainbows around my neck of the woods. And in a rainbow the purple hue is always next to the red..on one side and blue on the other, so it comes across more violet. I hope that clears up the confusion he is creating.
Color names are really important in this discussion. ---- In fact, the concept being discussed here might be better phrased as, "The violet-colored light at the end of the rainbow is a completely different color from the other purple named colors we think we see." That's because the color of emitted light called "violet" in the rainbow is actually its own spectral color falling within approximately 380-420 nm. The red cones in our eyes are activated by that color's wavelength, and the blue cones don't need to be activated for a red cone response to true violet light - we'll see it faintly anyway. Meanwhile any other shade of "purple" (a.k.a. "magenta" and lots of other names) that falls outside of the wavelength range for "violet" needs both blue AND red activation to be seen as a shade of purple. It's important to remember that the color names given to our cones in our eyes are deceptive. The cones don't see one point of color. Each one sees a range, and the "red" cone has more than one range it responds to.
what a wise post
The 'red' (more accurately, 'L') cones are *not* activated by light in the 380-420 nm range, no. At least, not enough to matter in any meaningful way - at 420nm, the 'green' (or 'M') cones are triggered slightly more than the red ones are, but both are insignificant compared to the activation of the 'blue' (really 'S') cones.
Here's the actual raw data for how sensitive to each wavelength of light the 3 types of cones are:
www.cvrl.org/database/data/cones/linss2_10e_fine_8dp.htm
Edit: And here's the data plotted:
www.cvrl.org/pngimages/linss2_10e_fine_8dp.png
@Chris McNeil Because of how color is interpreted by the brain. The signals from the cones get remixed into opposites, so the brain requires there to be an opposite to green (the 'middle' of the visible spectrum). This is the color 'magenta', which is used by the brain when it sees the two opposite ends being mixed (blue/violet and red).
You might not notice it in most cases, but there's also a faint hint of blue added to very super deep and pure reds, near infrared. This, and the red seen in violet, is because the brain starts to interpret these wavelengths as far enough away from green to be approaching the 'opposite of green', AKA magenta.
For more information about how the color mixing occurs, refer to these diagrams:
www.cvrl.org/gallery/Boynton-model.htm
www.cvrl.org/gallery/Zone-diagram.htm
www.cvrl.org/gallery/Rod-pathways.htm
Man I love that website.
@@Tynach
Red (L) cones are activated with red, orange, yellow, and all the colors until green. It's also activated with all the colors 'after' blue.
@@user4241 That is incorrect. Look at the curves on the Color Vision Research Laboratory's website. The L and M cones almost entirely overlap in terms of wavelength sensitivity, with only one bell curve shape for each. The L cones do NOT have a second 'bump' in the violet section - what you're thinking of is the 'X' color matching function for defining the CIE XYZ colorspace.
"Brown" is another color that isn't really a color in its own light. It is actually a very dark shade of orange or yellow.
What is a color.
Not the same as purple
Yeah, a "brown" light physically cannot exist. You will never see a brown light, ever, because all brown is is dark orange. And so when you try and make a brown light, you end up with an orange light because you need absence of light to create brown, and a light is the opposite of absence of light
@@danielc.freteval5685 visable light
Correction: a very dark shade of orange. Dark yellow is also called olive green.
"I've always had a problem with colour mixing"....sounds worse than it is
+All My Best Friends Wear Turtlenecks You watch too much TV. ;)
All My Best Friends Wear Turtlenecks A real 1st world problem
I see what you did there, even if nobody else did...
worse, in the end you get WHITE
All My Best Friends Wear Turtlenecks well, you know, some people still live in the dark.
As a physicist this intrigued me so much that I looked up pictures of real rainbows to check if magenta was there; indeed magenta IS present in natural rainbows, but not for obvious reasons! It's because the red from the inner supernumeraries overlap slightly with the blue of the primary bow.
In the comment section, I notice a lot of confusion about additive vs. subtractive color mixture, differences in color naming, and an awful lot of misunderstandings about human color perception.
And this is Paradise compared to the usual RUclips rot.
@@LardGreystoke truly
In the color printing process, the colors used are Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black (Key). CMYK. These 4 colors generate all the colors you perceive in most printed matter. This demonstration explains the CMYK relationship to the additive RGB colors in a way I never saw presented. Very interesting.
C?YK
This sounds mind blowing, but remember that white light is the exact same. It has no wavelength, so our brain invents a color for when all three eye cones are activated.
Ancurio dayum son
Ancurio Does not
Not true... Light has a wave length. Its between 400 nm and 700 nm in the electrmagnetic spectrum. Look it up .
Emilioh888 does not
Emilioh888 Emilio, that is the point. White does not have a single wavelength number somewhere between 400 and 700. It is what one perceives when you get photons of all, or a broad sampling of wavelengths in that range.
I have had an interesting problem with painting the sky when the sun is relatively low over the horizon. The main part of the sky is in a crisp blue, while the area around the sun is clearly yellow. There is never an obvious split between the yellow and the blue area, like a visible green line or area, or even a white line or white area.
Pretty hard to get that painted in acryl colours, without a tree or something interposing between the blue and the yellow.
I've always let one color dry a bit and then came back to it going back and forth until I am happy with the result.
what about blending/shadowing with colors
Stefan B I get around this (at least with water colors) by going from the yellow to orange to purple slowly to blue. Kinda like going around the wrong way on the spectrum as if the ends met up like this video is about. As for acrylics it would probably be harder.
That's because paints are pigments (subtractive colors that added together = near black) while a sunset is an expression of light (additive colors that mixed together = white). There are a lot of instructional videos that can help you to mimic the blend, but the easiest way is to use an airbrush and reduce your application of color where the colors mix. If using watercolor, thin the stronger color and blend into wet - once dry use pre-thinned color of the lighter shade on top - re-wet as you go!
As hakobo mentioned, I find the best way to recreate the transition is through the introduction of oranges and purples. When the sun is still somewhat high in the sky and the sunset not so intense, a yellow-white/grey-blue transition works well; when the sun is lower in the sky and the sunset more intense, you can achieve a smooth transition from yellow-orange-red-magenta-purple-blue.
I've got an understanding of how this works but it still never ceases to amaze me that mixing red, green, blue together makes white.
That's a backwards way of thinking about it. Most light being emitted in the universe is by stars, which emit radiation in all wavelength bands (from radio to gamma). That light can be "split" or diffracted into its constituent wavelengths. In other words, its much more common for light to split apart than to come together.
The coolest thing for me is yellow. It just comes out of nowhere. Like how tf does that even work? The "magenta" looked more like a sort of pink and is obvious that it's just kinda a lighter red. the cyan is obviously just blue, not a new color. But yellow? tf? Intuitively I'd have figured I'd see something like a lime green.
Breathe in with more force please
Max Power This is particularly problematic. I got half way and had to stop. I think a speech therapist would be useful as he is interesting to learn from, but not so good with speech style.
Max Power *Gasp* Interesting video though
Kristian Akseth I didn't even make it halfway.
I thought that was just his British accent.
I didn't even notice this until I read the comment. It's really not that bad.
Finally someone explains it in a comprehensive way!
A million thank yous for this video. Sharp. To the point. Casual yet hands-on informative.
I had to sub :)) you always have a very clear and simple way of explaining these concepts of physics
Great introduction to "Additive Color" ! Please do a followup on "Subtractive" color and why cheap dyes produce brown instead of true black.
What artists call 'purple' is actually created by mixing magenta with a lesser quantity of ultramarine blue if pigments are used. Purple color, sometimes called violet, can also be achieved with light at about 450 nanometers wave length or slightly longer wavelengths up to about 480 nanometers; stimulating cones in the eye's retina with a fraction of intensity in red, and a much smaller fraction of green when both are compared with the intensity on blue-sensitive cones; in the featured demo, this would mean that his magenta mix would require more intense blue light to get purple. What's commonly referred to as 'pink' is *not* magenta, but is a pale red ranging to a pale magenta; a mix of those two colors as artist's pigments with an addition of white, or a mix of colored light that's closer to a reddish balance that achieves some neutrality closer to the white mix shown at the end of this video. Note that my RUclips thumbnail icon has magenta in it!
Nope. Violet is a blue color. Hence the famous poem "roses are red, violets are blue". There is no purple wavelength of light
@@Monochromicornicopia There is no such colour as daylight,but we cant live without it
@Rex drabble
What
I found this video to be incredibly insightful and simply put. Thank you for sharing!
You just blew my mind. The best explanation on color and perception of light I have ever stumbled across. It might not be the most accurate in detail, but it is easy to understand. In the end color is light of a certain wavelength and the cones in our eyes are tuned mainly to the red, green and blue wavelengths. So it makes sense that our brain interpolates the "in between" wavelengths in regard to how the spectrum works. Then as the brain tries to wrap the spectrum around itself to make that interpolation algorithm work, it freaks out and produces magenta. You gotta love the brain! :)
I guess it's possible there are other colours out there that the human eye is just not equipped to see. The colour fange, and municia, and pliff.
kevnar infrared, ultraviolet
kevnar Human eye has 3 cones (red, green, blue). Butterflies have around 5 cones. Mantis shrimp has around 16 cones. If 3 cones are enough to produce millions of discernible colors, imagine how many colors you'd see if you had 16!
czarchasm2 the oatmeal has taught you well.
kevnar Don't forget octarine.
Ancurio How could I forget Octarine!?
Really nice explanation
Best brief explanation I've seen. Excellent.
Amaizing explanation, well done!! I am looking for the answer for my daughter Sciences proyect and after several research, here I found the correct and easy explanation!!! Thank you very very much
A huge thanks to the translator who provided Portuguese subtitles to this video! If anyone out there can speak another language and wants to help us share the science love and knowledge further, please jump in and write some more subtitles: ruclips.net/user/timedtext_video?v=iPPYGJjKVco
+The Royal Institution Grazie! We now have Italian subtitles too! Keep them coming, and thankyou so much!
+The Royal Institution Danke! German, too. You guys are the best!
Indonesian and Swedish subtitles now available thanks to our amazing friends. Terima kasih! Tack!
So, it we had a hypothetical eye with an ultraviolet cone, would they not be able to see the color purple? What would they see?
@Tyneras If some people had substantially different eyes to them the word purple would have no meaning. Those hypothetical people might see the colors "plish", "vergile", and "snude". They could no more imagine red or purple than you can, at this moment, imagine plish.
If I am reading between the lines correctly, you are thinking about the "violet" that lies beyond the "blue" in a rainbow. (The scare-quotes are to remind us that color is _not_ an attribute of light. When I speak of "blue light", that is shorthand for light of a particular wavelength band. ) Violet is a whole different kettle of squishy, wet, eye/brain-biology. We see purple when our R-cones and B-cones are stimulated and the G-cones not so much. The fact that most people see a purplish color violet at the shortest wavelengths visible to them is an artifact of how their R-cones respond. For most people, the R-cones respond not only to relatively long wave light ("red"), but also just a tiny little bit to the shortest wavelengths they can detect ("blue"). Graphically, their R-cone response curve (transfer function) has two humps, a great tall one at the longest visible wavelengths and a squat one at the shortest. So when their eyes are stimulated by those relatively short wavelengths, both their R and B cones get stimulated. The experience of that - by definition - is purple. Purple is something that happens in their eyes and brains. (So is red. So is pink. So is gray,) Personally, I do not see violet on that side of a rainbow. I guess my R-cones are not "bumpy".
oh man I could go for some cones right about now
Never thought about it in this way. This is useful for understanding remote sensing image too! Thanks for making this video
Absolutely wonderful and simple explanation.I have never come across something like this before.Tons of thanks.
Hi there, Im a painter, I recently worked on the film Loving Vincent which required me to be obsessed with colour mixing. But I am a little confused about mixing light, and I have a question about RGB. Ok so Im just taking R and G as an example. You mix them to make yellow. I can do the same with paint, but only if either the red or the green tilts towards the yellow side of the colour wheel. If my red and green are exact opposites Ill get a grey (a neutral just like your white) and if one of my colours tilts towards the violet (I use violet to identify purples and magenta) then I can mix a weak version of magenta.
So my question is, with coloured lights, could you skip the blue and use a green and red which are exact opposites to go straight to white? and if you wanted could you choose a green and red that would produce a weak magenta instead of a weak yellow? I want to try this myself, but I have no way of knowing if Im using pure or mixed coloured lights, where as Im in complete control with paint.
Seamas
Seamas Olabhradha it’s because light and paint are different in how we perceive them with light by mixing every color in the spectrum you get white due to it being the color that pure light take while in paint you see black the absence of light because the colors negate each other’s reflection so with paint you instead need to use cyan magenta and yellow
What about Violet? thats part of the rainbow.
+Syed Asif Ali Someone please answer this.
+Syed Asif Ali The video defines magenta as being in the violet/purple range. I personally consider magenta a red pastel.
No it isnt. As blue and red are at opposite ends of the spectrum its impossible to make purple. he just explained that.
Any purple put in a representation of a "rainbow" is purely an invention of man and incorrect. So all those pride banners are technically wrong!
75IFFY Then we really need to stop teaching elementary and junior high school students the ROY G BIV mnemonic when learning about the visual spectrum. As far as I know, all American children have been learning it like this.
Violet used to be a shade of blue, somewhere between police blue and navy. Roses are red, etc. Purple has never been considered part of the rainbow. The blue in the rainbow is a robin's egg blue, or deep sky blue, or light turqoise, which we call "cyan" now.
Thank you for this video. Very informative and clearly explained.
Love topics about our senses ands how our brain perceives the signals it gets. I poetically would have been lost a bit here if I hadn't had my primers in high school. Thank you for the vid. Very eloquent.
I want those light pens for when I do theatre lighting design workshops.
Currently, I use actual theatre lights.
Those look like flashlights that happen to have a very nice even light pool.
Not sure what you mean by "different."
Daylight has a higher color temperature than a flashlight if that's your comparison point. And it has 'different' in that it contains the full spectrum. Is that what you mean?
I want those light pens generally :D
It's red, green, and blue for light mixing, but magenta, cyan, and yellow for pigment mixing… the ink in colour pictures in newspapers, for instance. Funny how that works.
Yeah. Ink mixing is subtractive, rather than additive. So the secondary colours are used.
Magenta ink is just a material that subtracts/absorbs green light. And cyan is just a material that absorbs red. Hence you are left with the secondary colour, comprised of the 2 remaining. And hence mixing magenta (subtract the green) and cyan (subtract the red) gives you blue (the only primary left).
Add primary colours on top of black (an absence of colour) and you can make any colour, and subtract from white (a fullness of colour) with secondaries and you can make any colour.
ProPuke Thank you for the explanation!
I have studied colors, pigments, but this Magenta formation was new to me.
thanks for sharing.
Very interesting. I had never thought to wonder about the wavelength of purple light but this explained why it doesn't have one very clearly.
this man breathes in very aggressively .. calm down ..
*It's certainly a sign of passive-aggressive drooling. :D*
can't stand it either
Yessss
Man. This is like finding out your best friend from childhood doesn't exist suddenly. God damn give me my magenta back.
It is amazing to me how smart people are after the fact. Post your U tube to refute. All information an all ideas are accepted in my brain. Thank you sir.
Love this Thankyou.. I did notice that photons of light “mixed “ become lighter but colours of matter like paint pigments become darker..
Magenta is not purple.
Purple encompasses violet and magenta and all the shades in between; i.e., magenta is a subset of purple.
Magenta is not purple.
Naw, magenta is clearly pink.
I call shenanigans on this, because there were very clear and well-defined Sumptuary Laws in most of Europe starting in the Medieval period, forbidding people not of Royal lineage from wearing clothing made of “purple” materials.
If purple was the same as magenta to most non-Americans, then why are the closes described in those laws--and depicted in every medieval and Renaissance painting closer to violet, and not dark pink (Magenta)?
Because Purple is NOT Magenta. It’s much closer to violet than magenta. Royal Purple was made mostly with dyes derived from sea snails of the family Muricidae, and was commonly known as Tyrian Purple. And it a LOT closer to Violet than pink.
The idea that "magenta" is the same as 'purple" is not just silly--it is easily provable as historically, perceptionally, and spectrally incorrect.
Looks purple to me. Pink is just washed out red
Good video, except that purple photons do exist. 380nm to 430nm is called "violet" (aka purple) for a reason! The color Magenta is basically "pink."
Stuart Heinrich So how is it a good video if he is wrong?
Hugh Janus "Good" doesn't mean "correct."
Mark Hibbard en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magenta Violet as a single wavelength exists. Magenta is more of a pink or red-purple. Magenta and other pinks are a mix of 2 light wavelengths instead of a single wavelength.
This illustration is correct and well done, except he made the mistake of saying purple since that includes Violet which can be shown as a single wavelength. The pink/red-purple region cannot be shown as a single wavelength EVER. That is it's classification.
Mark Hibbard en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbow Notice that pink is not seen in the rainbow, along with magenta. Violet is seen on the opposite side of red.
Goblin Honey That didn't answer my question.
Really good, it explains a lot so easily. And I would always have thought that the 3 colour cones in the eye would be blue red and yellow, as they are the primary colours and green is a mixture of blue and yellow anyway. You never stop learning
A late reply but there are two distinct sets of primary colors!
RGB are the primary colors of additive light, where each source adds photons
CMY (cyan, magenta, yellow; quite close to blue, red, and yellow) are the primary colors of subtractive light, where each source takes away photons. Paint is subtractive so it uses these.
(Printers use CMYK, with the extra blacK because its cheaper on ink and makes for a darker result)
Best explanation of color mixing I've ever seen. Thank you.
This is really dumbed down to the point it's inventing concepts that don't really exist. This is less easy to understand than if he just said what happens directly.
Since when are magenta and purple the same colour though...?
Since this guy Mouldy says so. He is God, by the way.
You mean Indigo.
Purple is dark magenta. They share the same hue (300°) but have different lightness. So they are the same color in some sense (hue) but different colors in a different sense (lightness, also known as value).
Ikr it looks more “pink” to me
I see the color violet in real rainbows all the time (the rainbows in the sky, or the rainbows that come out of prisms). It sits there just on the edge of dark blue. And, no, I'm not lying. This is science, and needs to be discussed.
Here's the thing: When you arrive just past the blue area of the spectrum, you end up with frequencies that are almost double that of red. A color "octave", if you will. Because the frequency is double that of red, it ever so slightly activates our red cones. Not a whole lot, but just enough for that end of the spectrum to create violet. For this same reason, UV-A lights activate mostly our blue and red receptors (and a little bit of green because of frequency harmonics, but that's another topic) and thus we see magenta.
So to those of you who say you've seen violet in rainbows, you are correct, however, it is an illusion because the red cone that is activating is being tricked into thinking that the frequency activating it is an "octave" down.
Where's my double green and double blue?
edit: holy hell, I found it!
supercooper92 - If you're talking about a double rainbow, the cause of that is very different and is actually just the regular colors. For the double green and double blue, their wavelength is too short to heavily trigger our cones even though they are multiples. They're there, but just as violet is super faded and not very bright, the next red green and blue are even more so.
Ah, no I actually put "real rainbow" into google images and can see it faintly right next to the main rainbow.
Wasn't sure if that's just an illusion created because it was taken on a camera.
Violet is just violet.
Best explanation I have heard for a very long time.
There must be something wrong with my eyes, because to me, magenta and purple are not the same.
It's just words, words, words, to quote Hamlet.
Magenta is The Same color of pink a powerfull version of pink.
Purple is really diferent.
@@apolloreysol5294 its pink. its basically what you get if you mix blue and red but more red and add white.
Purple is dark magenta. They share the same hue (300°) but have different lightness. So they are the same color in some sense (hue) but different colors in a different sense (lightness, also known as value).
But red is on the left of the spectrum, and blue on the right, if you connect both ends, purple is between red and blue? Or no?
+Nathan Kramer The spectrum is linear, it doesn't go in a circle. The colour directly between red and blue is green.
+Nathan Kramer In art class, they show the colours as going in a circle or wheel, but it actually doesn't work that way.
*****
He was talking about the light spectrum, and that is not a wheel.
Psychologically it's a wheel. Physically it's a line.
There may be a bit of confusion for those that are associating Purple with Violet. Purple and Violet are not the same, although they may look similar. Their hues are different.
Violet is an actual True Color and part of the visible light spectrum (380nm -450nm).
Purple is a composite color made from the mixing of Red and Blue.
The videos from The Royal Institution are quite interesting! Kudos!
I've seen purple in a rainbow.
Violet.
Illusion. Rainbows can repeat in bands. So you see the start of a second rainbow with the red at the top of this second rainbow and blue at the bottom of the first rainbow. where these colors collide you see magenta.
HOLY CRAP
MandJTV Pokevids Speaking of cr*p, where's your brown cone? That's not in a rainbow either. And I definitely see in on TV, for example whenever I (accidentally) see Faux News.
Ross Parlette brown is a primarily combination of red and green, but some blue. i believe the percentage is about 40% red, 40% green, and 20% blue, but i could be wrong there.
***** Okay but hear me out, what if you take away 1% from each of those and add in 3% Salmon color, what THEN do you have??
MandJTV Pokevids Is it such a big coincidence that I wanted to study how colour works and found you here? 0_o
+LOLFlyingPotatoes No. RUclips sorts comments partly based on your history and common interests ;-)
thank you Steve Mould for this video. Great presentation 👏
Shining the flashlights in pitch black would've given more prismatic colors during the demo, because white desaturates colors. This was an amazing demo, helped me understand the colors rly well.
what if our brain did not invent magenta but combined the end of the spectrum
if you pretend the spectrum is on a strip and connect the ends.. u know?
Fede Aragon I thought of this too. Who's to say that instead of a "line" like a rainbow...it was a circle. Then magenta WOULD be between those 2. However, I am assuming he is referring to wavelengths and maybe blue is as wide of a wavelength as you can go and red is narrow. Anyway, I am not physicist, and I was just using those for examples. But I had the same thought as you :)
Fede Aragon well if you look at the wavelength sprectrum, youll see that magenta cant appear because if we connect them at each end youll end up having infered and ultraviolet light inbetween the red and blue
and dont say ultraviolet light is purple cause its actually black ;)
No. It's a coincidence. Yellow, cyan etc. are invented colors, as well and they have nothing to do with ends of the spectrum.
*****
It's exactly as stated in the video. All the colors we see are actually made up from our brain, they don't physically exist. They are a helper we got from evolution probably to distinguish fruits from leaves. It's absolutely logical that we have a different color for magenta than for green because of how the cones work. Brilliant video btw.
What about violet?
Username0123456789 Good question, violet is the mixture of red and blue but only your paint colours, just like your primary paint colours are instead red, blue and yellow. Light colours however don't work like that, in fact, true paint red is more orangeish while true light red is pink/magentaish, it's weird, but let's just sum it up by saying colours don't follow all rules all the time, in light, they have a different order than they do in paint. Or it's just our eyes, if our brain registered what we see as "green" instead as a more "yellow" colour, we'd see a spectrum a lot like our paint palette, however, the reason why it's red-blue-green as our prime colours for light is because that's what our eyes pick up. The reason why red-blue-yellow is our prime colours for paint is because it's near impossible to mix other colours to make those colours.
She's at my place giving me head.
Pit Kid Icarus Red, blue and yellow aren't primary for anything. Where did you get that from?
LOLFlyingPotatoes They are in paint, ever taken art, it's because back in the day you could use plant's chemicals to make any colour out of other colours except for blue, red and yellow, while in light yellow is replaced by green.
Pit Kid Icarus In paint, the primaries are cyan, magenta and yellow. Aren't they?
Great and simple explanation!
This video is brilliant!
I have wanted to know how this works for the longest time!!
I feel like there has to be more going on then "Our brain invents a color." Why does everyone's brain invent the same color?
Alexander White
Different people could actually perceive colors
differently. We agree on the colors of the rainbow, meaning we agree to
call a specific range of wavelengths a certain color (e.g. yellow). It
is completely possible that my brain perceives yellow to look like some
sort of "green" in my mind, and you see yellow as some sort of other
"color", but we agree that yellow is yellow since true color is a
physical property of the light (wavelength).
To answer your question, when we both see a color like blue and red mixing to make magenta, we are simply agreeing that there are a few light particles with "blue wavelengths" (450-495 nm) and a few light particles with "red wavelengths"(620-750 nm) reaching our eye. Our brain interprets this signal differently than if just red or blue light were hitting your eye, so it "invents" a color like magenta so your eye isn't switching/flashing back and forth between red and blue every time you simultaneously see both wavelengths. This constant perceived "strobing" between colors when both are present would be extremely annoying in my opinion. Having a color in place of this constant switching is easier on the brain it seems.
Keep in mind though that violet is a part of the spectrum (video doesn't address this), so there are wavelengths that are naturally purple but this video is specifically talking about magenta.
sam .the man winning answer.
Alexander White Not necessarily. An individual's brain just have to keep creating purple constantly. If a man showed you a new color, and he calls it purple, then you know that color as purple. Even if you and the man perceive that color differently, it is still purple to both of you.
Alexander White "We" invented the color millions of years ago. Some primates saw pink at some point and some didn't. Over the years the primates that saw pink must have bred more and the trait was eventually passed to humans.
Dogs, cats, etc. see with a mix of 2 colors not 3. This allows more rods so they can see at dark better than us. We are day hunters so naturally color identification was the trait we went for. Some day hunting birds have a broader view of color to help them hunt.
Clay Norrbin Note: even though we know everyone without colorblindness interprets wavelengths the same. The resulting "color" is still unknown. Also it really doesn't matter. We are taught to like a color or not. So technically, we teach our kids to like the wavelength not the resulting "color" for their shirt.
Cool.
What's the "Royal Institution". Is that like the Royal Society from the 1680s???
Good question! We're an independent charity based in London. We were established in 1799 with the aim of 'diffusing science for the common purposes of life', and 200 years later we're still at it, through videos like this, public lectures, a museum, loads of education initiatives for young people, and the CHRISTMAS LECTURES, which were founded my Michael Faraday. Our history includes the discovery of several elements, a couple of Nobel Prizes, and some of history's greatest scientists. Loads more info on our website, if you're interested: www.rigb.org/
Cool.
I've never seen the word diffusing used in that context before (maybe because I'm American).
It's mental hospital for people who don't understand optics and neurophysiology lol.
I'm a colorist I understand color theory very well and u are right on about the eye not being able to detect certain tones,but your talking strictly about light not actual pigments. It's pretty simple if you understand the basic color wheel it explains what colors make another color and why opposite colors cancel each other out
I have a Science test tomorrow and this very useful... I've understood both the additive and subtractive models now. :D
my whole life has been a lie
lulz
+SHACA LACA
Fun fact - a lot of the things that you experience in reality are illusions.
For example, colours, sounds and the sense of hotness and coldness are just ways that your body register waves and enthropy in a meaningful way - those things don't actually exist "out there".
+Laurelindo Do you exist or you're a illusion too?
Anmol
Yes, I exist, because I consist of physical matter and I interact with a physical environment.
My presence and my actions have real effects on other people - if I open a door, then other people can pass go through it, and if I stand somewhere then nobody else can take up that space.
However, things like colours, sounds and temperatures don't exist in the outside world, because they are just they way that your brain interprets wavelengths and energies.
Colours are electromagnetic waves, and only exist "out there" as wavelengths, and similarly, sounds are pressure differences that travel through a medium, and temperatures are different levels of entropies and kinetic energies.
THOSE things certainly exist "for real", because x-rays (which is a form of light at a very low frequency) can damage your body, sound waves can cause pressure changes in other objects, and temperatures exist as kinetic energies in molecules - the reason why a hot and cold object that are put into physical contact always aim for their average common temperature is because their atoms collide with each other until all atoms have reached the same speed.
This is the pure physical meaning of colours, sounds and temperatures.
4:22 anyone else just see two overlapping colors? I see no magenta
troll.
readyrepairs I'm dead serious
timma100 work harder on that please, I dont think youre actually dead yet.
readyrepairs :| Touche, I am very serious, its just blue over red. Probably just shitty youtube videos. Although when you google search magenta, I just get pink as a result..... idk if thats right
timma100 LOL , your monitor is probably not calibrated. try looking at it on your phone which should be you a bright purple.
Wow... really easy and well explained! thanks
this video was fun, I always hate when people try to be poetic and say "can you imagine a new colour" or philosophical saying "what if we don't if every individual sees the same colour the same way" not realizing we do both all the time
You breathe in very audibly a great deal. (shhhhhu) After noticing this (shhhhhu) it became very annoying, (shhhhhu) but two of us independently thought up (shhhhhu) a drinking game upon watching this (shhhhhu) informative video.
(shhhhhu)
I'm just realizing... There's no white light either!
There's a lot of it. It just isn't white. Or is it?
This makes so much sense. None of my art or science classes ever made this concept clear.
Very helpful, thank you, Sir.
so yellow really is in the color spectrum, since we don't have yellow cones, then would not yellow light be invisible to us? what about those fancy TV's with a 4th yellow led ?
***** actually, later i find out yellow is detected by red and green cones, both at same time detect a tiny bit of yellow and when that happens, our brain just figure out it should be yellow.
"4th yellow led" - really? Wow, that's a sleek marketing campaign. Might be even better than 4k video playback on a mobile phone. Both of them absolutely useless.
I'm curious whether somebody could support with arguments the 4th subpixel color TV. I just can't see its advantage no mater how I'd put it.
***** marketing, money. It works. Look at the QHD smartphone displays, with 2560x1440 resolution on a 5.7" display. The DPI is over the roof. Our eyes can't really see the difference between FHD and QHD on these phones. So why spend money developing a new matrix, and producing it for the people? Because people will upgrade to the newer device because it has QHD.
People look at the numbers and announced features. I see it all the time. Even in the AMD vs Intel debate, I saw one nutcase that was using general CPU scores to argue that the performance of one particular AMD CPU is higher than a particular Intel CPU, when all real world applications work faster with the Intel CPU. But he did not care. The numbers were there. AMD has more cores and more GHz. It must be better. In other views, an advantage was pointed out that you could "Play a game, encode a video, listen to music, all at the same time". Who does that? It's like Jon Stewart said "That thing could sure tow the boat I don't have up the mountain I don't leave near".
Same with "organic" food. People use it as a marketing trick. Consumers believe it tastes better and that is full of flavor. I've seen a double blind experiment that showed the opposite.
So about the 4th subpixel. Here's the marketing: "Regular TVs have 3 subpixels, and are fooling your eyes, but what you're seeing is not a clean yellow, it's ugly, bad, whatever. But we present only the TRUE, REAL colors, in the most color-accurate display on the planet, for just $9999.99". Aaand people will believe that, and actually buy it, thinking it is superior.
Donnieman, I almost reported this as spam!I had to read further to see your point. I thought it was some kind of ad or smth XDYes, you are right and I wonder what makes me/us look so retards, so alienated that those ridiculous teleshopping ads perform that systematic bizzare-grotesque circus chinese water torture postures and incantations.
Magenta is not the same as purple. And purple, as violet, certainly does show up in rainbows. Your premises are false.
That's like saying red, as green, shows up in traffic lights, so I don't have to stop.
"That's like saying red, as green, shows up in traffic lights, so I don't have to stop."
It's not the same argument at all.
The video is using a definition of purple as meaning any non-spectral light with a hue between violet and red.
But if we go by common usage of purple (and usage found in many dictionaries), it can also mean any color with a hue between blue and red.
Well explained, thank you.
your explanation was great...thank you =]
Explain why green and red photons give us yellow whereas blue and yellow paint give us green. What is this fuckery?
Elinia Tollea in light the photons are going into your eye. With paint, the color you see is what the paint doesn't absorb. A green light source shoots out green photons. Green paint absorbs light and rejects the green photons.
Kevin Nguyen did i just learn something from a youtube comment?? haha :)
Steven Countryman That didn't actually answer Elinia's question. At all.
Kevin Nguyen Thank you very much for your explanation. I still have to look that up and learn more, thanks again.
***** I never heard of those terms before haha. Thanks for explaining.
Nnoooooo!!!
I've been lied to all my liffeee.. I thought *purple* is the color of Love.
But purple doesn't exist.. As well as my lovelife.
I work at a hospital. I very much love my organization. Many of the staff have bachelor of higher degrees or education. I'm a veteran. So, I began using science, physics, and various thought problems as a personal coping tool. All of that is purely for me to make quiet intrusive thoughts and memories. I hold no degree in anything. I think very highly of the people that I work with; they are amazing humans. Flooring them with ideas and concepts never conceived in their worlds is gratifying. Watching their faces drop when a color their eyes perceive is revealed to be a construct entirely created within their brain is like tasting chocolate and peanut butter together for the first time. Then, I get to show them the rods and cones of the Mantis Shrimp.
When I was a child I read about rods and cones in “The Book of Knowledge” in my grandparent’s library. It was an old set of books. The concept seemed bizarre and a little bit hokey to me. I’d never been taught about it in school and my parents never mentioned it. So I was amazed a few years later when it was taught in science class and I discovered it really was true! (But it’s still remarkable to me.)
Generally people who smack-smack while talking can't be trusted to inform correctly...
If this dude sucks air through his teeth ONE MORE TIME!!! GODDAMN!!
Excellent video all round.
Does anyone know where you can buy the small torches that Steve uses in this demo? I would like to demonstrate this to my students but I can only find rather expensive models.
An alternative title to this video is "Purple doesn't exist".
+LucisFerre1 "Purple" and "Magenta" are two different colour
Hakingdoesgames
Try watching the video for a change...sheesh.
+HakingMC Maybe it's a British thing. Where I'm from, purple and magenta are not the same.
gastronomist Same here
+HakingMC Purple is a lower intensity Mixture of red and blue. On a 0-255 RGB light scale Purple is 50% intensity on Red (128), and 50% intensity on Blue (128). Or in terms of Complementary colors (CMYK) used in dye/printing/pigments its 2 parts Magenta to 1 part Black (0,100,0,50).
Magenta light is 100% intensity Red (255) plus 100% intensity Blue (255). Or CMYK (0,100,0,0).
Violet. Which appears like a mix of Blue and Red is actually 380-450nm wavelength. Now the Cones don't just see one color, its a range. So violet triggers the Blue cone a bit and the brain goes "I see something more blue then blue here". Oddly however we have a strange bit of wiring in our brains that fools us into thinking Blue with a bit of Red is the same thing as Violet. RGB (127,0,255) or CMYK (50,100,0,0)
hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/vision/colcon.html
pikachu is real is what im getting.
awesome
Omg I finally understand that concept. I always thought the sky should be purple but people said to me that our eyes just didn't see it in the darkest wavelength which is blue (but there's was "purple" next to it in my class). I had been wondering if animals see the sky differently. This has been bothering me for years now.
Superb explanation. You should have gone into subtractive color mixing and why mixing colored pigments gives you different colors than when you mix light.
So it was White and Gold....
Please breath in through your nose.
Sssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss.
Beautifully explained
Where would I be able to buy the kind of torches used in this video?
color *breathing sound* something else about color *breathing sound* something something *breathing sound*
*LONG BREATHING SOUND*
Eric Ihnen You're intellect, or lack thereof, is showing. Unless you have a legitimate condition that causes sounds to bother you in an abnormal way, you're just being a whiny person.
@@Arycke you must be fun at parties
@@Arycke TaKe A jOkE!1!1
This video isn't color blind friendly.
I'm colorblind and I don't know what the hell he was talking about LOL! XD
Hi, I'm not affiliated with RI or Steve Mould, but I'm trained in and have taught design, so I know a bit about color theory. Here's some help for anyone confused by the video above. I'll also answer a few questions below, but this should help out with the basic color theory stuff. ----- There are two main types of color, "additive" and "subtractive". What Steve is discussing in the video is "additive color" (AC). The primary colors of AC are red, green, and blue (a.k.a. RGB like your monitor). AC comes from an emitted light source (colored LED's, sodium lights, the sun, etc.), and it's called "AC" because the primary colors, when mixed together, add up to white light. ------ The other type of color is "subtractive color" (SC). You may be more familiar with SC, because that's the color wheel everyone learns in grade school. SC is the type of color used in pigments (paints, dyes, inks, etc.). The SC primary colors are red, yellow, and blue. When mixed all together they approach black which is a total absence of light - Get it? "subtractive=no light". SC isn't emitted color. It doesn't come from a light source. SC is reflected color, and what we actually see when we view it is the mix of color that's less absorbed. So, a "green" leaf has more yellow and blue than red reflecting off of it.
P.S. Whether talking about light or pigment, "magenta" is a very specific color of purple. In printing, 4 colors are typically used for full-color "process" printing. They're called cyan, yellow, magenta, and black (CMYK). In subtractive color (pigment), C+M=primary blue. Meanwhile, in additive color (light), "magenta" is the color you get when you mix red and blue in equal parts with no green added.
Just to add to this, purple.
Great video. Does any one know what the precise frequency/wavelength of the three primary colors of light are that when combined together generate "pure" white light?
I've been sharing this video for some time now and I find it all so fascinating; however, I'm staring at a rainbow right now and it's clearly red, orange, yellow, green, blue and purple.
Violet does not equal purple. Violet is at the end. Purple is not. Think, whatever color you saw at the end of that rainbow, except with more red added to it. That the "purple" referred to in the video.
True dat. Violet always bluish, purple always reddish. Not radish.
the only way to see other colors is to lower one of the color brightness like for example, lower the red brightness against blue and you will see a purple color, same as to green you will get a orange color against red.
Very pedagogical and interesting. ☺
nicely explained