Applies to many other colors as well. I “understand” why that is but it hurts my brain to think about.
There was a push back when HD was kinda new for 4-color TVs. I guess it would just reprocess 3-color data inputs into 4-color output or something. It seemed to die down when 4k caught on as the “next thing”
Sharp Quarttron displays use yellow pixels.
Your head is really gonna hurt when you read about printer ink and printing presses.
CMYK ftw!
It was definitely strange to learn that mixing all colors of light together makes white light while mixing all paint colors together makes black paint.
Magenta isn’t even a real color. Your brain made it up.
Your brain made it up.
Well, yeah, but our brains make up every color. Our experiences of color are nothing more than a facet of our brains’ interpretations of light information. It’s all in our heads.
Magenta is a primary color (not red). You can’t mix non-magenta red paint with blue paint to get purple.
Technically it doesn’t display yellow at all. In fact, yellow never exists during the entire process. It displays red and green and that activates the red and green cells in your eyes and makes your brain think it saw yellow.
It’s exactly analogous to an audio three-band graphic equalizer: if you were deaf and could only detect sound by looking at the equalizer display, you couldn’t distinguish between someone playing through the full scale and someone playing a single three-note chord while adjusting the volumes of the low, mid, and high notes.
Maybe if the EQ display had only three bands.
three-band graphic equalizer
Reading. It truly is fundamental.
IMO saying that yellow doesn’t exist during the entire process is going a bit far. It exists as a combination of the other values. Or no colors exist during the process, as it’s all just ones and zeroes and then wavelengths, which only get turn into colors in your brain. Depending on how you want to look at it
Humans assign certain names to certain wavelength of the em spectrum
In this case red is often defined as wavelenths between 625 to 700nm, greens are 500 to 565nm, while yellow is defined as 565 to 590nm.
If a human saw em light at 580nm, wed call that yellow
But for an rgb screen, it never produces light at 580nm, only red green and blue lights, but, as a quark of our biology, if humans see red and green light at certain amplitude ratios, most humans will interpret that light in the same way as it does light at 580nm
This to say, yellow light does exist, but screens do not make it, but it does make light that the human can interpret as the color of yellow regardless
(Didnt see the other comment before writting this one, sorry for the duplicate)
No, that is incorrect. Modern displays have subpixels of red, green, and blue and they are only ever producing various brightness levels of those exact colours. In the case of an OLED or LED displays, they would be perfectly monochromatic colours. The colours do not combine as coloured paint would to produce a new colour. That isn’t how they work nor how you view them. We are looking directly at the subpixels and they are activating your rods and cones directly.
Yellow does not exist when a monitor displays a yellow colour. Your brain thinks it does because its red and green cells are being activated. This is also how you can see the colour magenta despite your monitor display red and blue, colours which are on the opposite ends of the visible spectrum. Magenta never exists during the process of displaying magenta on a screen, it only does in your brain.
What I meant is that if you have a photo of a yellow flower, I’d would say that the file contains “yellow color”, even though it only uses RGB values. The display is “transmitting yellow into your brain” by emitting a combination of wavelengths. Wavelength that normally represents color yellow is not emitted, but the “color yellow” is sent, in a way
Sigh…if you are going to lecture people about what is incorrect, at least try and educate yourself.
A 16 year old niche display tech that has seen next to no use is not the epic zinger gotcha you think it is.
If I were to cover every single niche display tech that wasn’t strictly RGB then I’d be writing a damn novel. Nearly every device that people interact with will be RGB. That is the common standard.
Exen paint mixing does not result in a new color; it’s the same effect.
A few nitpicks
Subpixels would not be perfectly monochromatic unless they were laser displays. Quantum dot can get kinda close though.
if mixing light additively didn’t create new colors then mixing paints subtractively wouldn’t either. the results of those processes still result in light that can activate our cones with combinations of wavelengths in the exact same way.
I think the semantics of what color light is doesn’t matter which wavelengths are used to produce it, but what it looks like. We don’t say something is yellow because it has wavelengths of light that look yellow on their own, we say something is yellow because it looks yellow. Likewise people use the term white light all the time when there’s no single wavelength that produces white.
Absolutely. There is no single wavelength of light being produced that would look yellow on its own, but yellow is the word we have for when our long and medium cones both get activated, and a display does produce light that does that. Yellow exists in our brains, so I think it’s pretty reasonable to say that either yellow exists somewhere in this process or no colors do.
Well, there is a wavelength that by itself activates both of these cones such that we interpret it as yellow. But a combination of wavelengths also does that
As a kid messing around with MSPaint or similar programs, I always wondered why there were never any good yellows. They always seemed to offer a yellowish Brown or a light orange, but never a nice bright yellow like you would find in crayons or paint.
On the topic of messing around in Paint, there’s something really cool you can do assuming you have a display with normal pixels.
Make a new paint document and color the left half perfectly red and the right half perfectly blue (#FF0000 and #0000FF). Make sure the colors are touching in the middle. If you look really close at the place the colors touch, there will be a tiny little black gap. If you do the opposite, with red on the right and blue on the left, the gap will not appear.This is, of course, because of the physical layout of the pixels with R on the left and B on the right. By putting red on the left and blue on the right, we make the biggest possible subpixel dark zone.
I have no idea if this is related, or why it happens, but I’ve noticed if you draw red and blue lines on a black background, it will create a 3D-like depth. I can’t remember which is which but one of the two colors looks like it’s further away than the other.
That was just your poorly calibrated display.
I always thought it was crazy to wonder what the qualia of colors we can’t see but other animals can is. It’s sort of like being a cat or some other animal with limited color vision and trying to imagine what humans see. How would you prove to a cat that those colors exist?
I’ve wondered the same about dogs’ sensitive sense of smell. What’s that like?
Colors don’t actually exist physically. They are a creation of the mind.
Colors are physical wavelengths of light within a spectrum between UV and IR. WTF are you talking about.
There’s a great old Vsauce video that goes over something like this but even crazier to think about: “is your red the same as my red?”. How can you know if your red is the same color as what someone else calls red? We could both be looking at different colors, but we both call it red. Even crazier, how do you explain colors to someone born blind?
How would you prove to a cat that those colors exist?
A spectrum test.
Show a human red fading to infrared, or purple fading to ultraviolet, next to cameras that can detect them in false color. Those are colors we can’t see, yet you can see they’re there.
Theoretically, it’d be the same for a cat or dog.
Maybe that’s why animals don’t seem very interested in TV. They don’t have the same cones as us
Colors aren’t physical. There is no way to measure color. We can measure frequency, wavelength, or energy. So there isn’t any light that is yellow at all. There is light, or combinations of light, that we perceive to be yellow but that is simply a construction of the mind.
There’s no strictly defined set of wavelengths for yellow. But you could pick a random wavelength and as long as most people say it’s yellow, that’s a yellow wavelength.
Yellow is between 590 and 610nm.
You can call it whatever you want but color isn’t a physical property of light. It is a construction of the mind. You claim a certain wavelength is yellow. A computer display can show a combination of red and green pixels that we perceive to be the same shade of yellow even though the original yellow wavelength isn’t present at all. Color isn’t from the light itself but from our mind.
Correct. You can’t measure yellow, you can only classify yellow.
In the same way we classify all sorts of things. Types of planets. Types of animals. Races of people.
But that doesn’t mean you can say there’s no such thing as yellow light. That’s like saying there’s no such thing as dogs because there’s no Internet dog property to measure.
Semi-Subjective classification exists within science and within our language. It is a real thing. And so there IS such a thing as yellow light.
The color yellow subjectively exists. Like I said at the beginning, color is a product of the mind. Objectively, as in is it directly measurable, light has no color. Physics deals with objective measurements.
Objectively yellow is between 590 and 610nm.
More bad news, there are displays that are RYGB, made by Sharp.
