[corysama]

I do know a little about human color perception. Although the author's example is flawed, his argument does stand. Human eyes are much less sensitive to details in blue compared to green and red. Here's the best illustration I can find in a minute's googling: http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/rbf/CVonline/LOCAL_COPIES/OWEN... from http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/rbf/CVonline/LOCAL_COPIES/OWEN...

This shows up in the Red-vs-Blue battle analytics in both Halo and Team Fortress 2 --Blue wins measurably more often because they are harder to focus on. Red-vs-Green would be more fair, but that would screw over the large male population with Red-Green colorblindness.

This is why the standard conversion of linear RGB to greyscale is 30%red + 59%green + 11%blue. 33% each would make the blue seem to have too much influence after conversion. This is why BluBlocker glasses make the world seem more sharp. It's why I try to minimize blue in my IDE color schemes.

If you are designing a purely pragmatic UX that requires seeing fine details, I'd recommend a yellow-on-black color scheme with some green and little blue. The classic green/amber terminal screens of yore were ugly, but effective.

[sliverstorm]

> Human eyes are much less sensitive to details in blue compared to green and red

IIRC our strength with green is why many night-vision systems use only green. It has other benefits such as not killing your night vision, but when you take the darkness of the night and remove the red and blue components, you can see better. Once again, IIRC.

[evilduck]

Furthering this, I've also read (but can't cite off hand) that it's evolutionary.

A good chunk of the world is green, ripeness of fruits and vegetables can be determined at a distance by detecting green, and moonlight reflecting off of stuff will likely be green more than other colors, enabling the cones to do some of the night vision work besides the rods. Conversely, the only major blue things in nature tend to be the sky and flowers, neither of which provide a significant survival advantage. Interestingly, some women may actually be tetrachromats, giving them incredible ability to differentiate reds.

Also...I can't recall the exact reason, but we have trouble focusing on blues as well (wavelengths maybe?). If you have one nearby, one night go park near the middle of the lot of a Petsmart, which has a bright red/blue sign. Look at the sign while moving your head left and right, the blue letters will appear to move while the red remain stationary.

[corysama]

While looking for the illustration above, I also found this page http://starizona.com/acb/ccd/advtheorycolor.aspx with this illustration of "Spectral response of the dark-adapted human eye. Note the lack of red sensitivity." http://starizona.com/acb/ccd/advimages/eyeqenight.jpg

Compared to the daylight-adapted eye: http://starizona.com/acb/ccd/advimages/eyeqe.jpg

This is interesting news to me.

[sliverstorm]

This caught up with me once as a young teenager; I was driving home on Halloween (totally sober) and I completely didn't see a stoplight. The red just blended in with the darkness.