Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by oraknabo 2191 days ago
This has to be a joke. If not, the writer seems to be confused by the difference between additive & subtractive color systems.

I admit to not really having any idea what they are getting at in their proposed replacement system and don't see any way it could be helpful in predicting how colors mix in either paint or monitors.

2 comments

Right, you say additive and subtractive, I think of it as emmissive colors vs reflective colors. That point seems to get ignored.

Some of this is interesting-- like every color is a frequency. But human vision systems are probably not innately tuned to perceive every frequency along a chunk of spectrum with an equal weight. Training and cognition probably influence our acuity in certain parts of the range.

> like every color is a frequency

Hot pink isn't a frequency. It does not appear in the visible light spectrum. You can only produce it by combining multiple "impure" frequencies. You generally produce it by combining a spike of low-frequency red with a spike of high-frequency violet.

Human eyes try to "triangulate" a complex spectral analysis into an absolute position in a colour space, that colour space is the surface of a sphere or torus or something, and hot pink is "between" red and violet. Three-coordinate colour space is very much an artifact of humans, and how human eyes/brains work.

A sub-manifold of the Real Projective Plane RP2
It's not just cognition but physical limitations of our eye.

Through the effect of cognition and training are wastly underestimated in my experience, like look into what the color brown is.

Precisely. That’s also why our screens use RGB emittors: that’s the frequencies our eyes have sensors for.

Pictures shown on a human screen must look really weird for a species with different color vision than us...

It's clearly satire.
I agree, and very good satire it is. They had me going for a minute.