[bhouston]

I think that if there is voting, one should sort of do some type of spreading algorithm where the color you vote on, is sort of a much weaker vote for the surrounding colors.

There is just too many colours, especially in this color space, and it is sort of hard for humans to really differentiate them. Thus spread out the vote based on average human visual perception differentiability capabilities.

Also this color space (R x B x G box color space) spends too many bits on low intensity and high intensity colors. When a color is near white or black, we can not easily tell the hues apart.

A much better color space to vote on would be something akin to the Pantone color list or paint swatches. Way less colors but still roughly covering the whole color space.

[bestouff]

Also this depends on the color calibration of your computer and monitor chain, so merging adjacent colors would effectively be a good idea.

[radlad]

I think there is probably a bias (to your brain) based on the last two colors shown as well.

Similar to those "these boxes/squares are the same color" illusions.

[bhouston]

I believe that illusion is based on our visual processor's reliance on local contrast in order to adjust the perceived true color to the inferred lighting conditions. So local adjacency information here is what is being used, rather than just temporal recently.

[brudgers]

Picking a color from a pallet of similar colors is explicitly rejecting the nearby colors on the swatch.

It is exactly the opposite of a weak vote for nearby colors.

Of course, "nearby colors" depends on which axis (or axes) of the color space is/are changing, the rates of change, and what is the criterion for ordering the aspects of color.

Historically, voting on colors is a strong tradition in color science.

Because color is a property of human perception not a property of the external world...turn out the lights and the apple isn't red any more.

[tshaddox]

> Picking a color from a pallet of similar colors is explicitly rejecting the nearby colors on the swatch.

> It is exactly the opposite of a weak vote for nearby colors.

Surely that is demonstrably false in cases where you could experimentally prove that two adjacent colors are below the voter's threshold of color discrimination.

[brudgers]

To riff on Hume, all colors are indistinguishable in total darkness.

Or to be Wittgensteinian, that’s not how “of different colors” is used in ordinary language.

In terms of additive color science, different combinations of RGB (or XYZ) light can produce the same color perception.

In part because the human visual system (green cones) has a negative response to a particular frequency band and additive light can’t have negative green values.

At the edge of current color science is accounting for tetra-chromatic perception…not to be confused with tetra-chromatic response which occurs in about 1% of humans.

Which is all to say that there’s a lot of baggage to a logical argument based on voting.

[tshaddox]

I'm not sure how any of that contradicts what I said, which is simply that when someone selects one option from among multiple options that they themselves cannot distinguish from one another, that does not constitute explicit rejection of the options which were not selected.

[brudgers]

The premises of your position contradict themselves.

The premises that several colors can be different despite humans believing the colors are the same color requires that color is an independent property of external objects.

The premise that voting is a way of studying color requires that color is a property of human perception.

The discipline of color science operates on the second premise because the discipline of color science is scientific.

The first premise has been the road to philosophical skepticism in Western philosophy for more than two millennia.

Although it appears in physics courses everywhere, there is nothing special about the visible spectrum except that it happens to be what we see...which is to say that partitioning the universe into infrared, visible, and ultraviolet is not based on properties independent of humans in the way that mass, force, and frequency are.

Because color only exists in the context of the human visual system from a scientific perspective. Or to put it another way, color is derived from human physiology. And that's why it is scientific to vote on it.

Of course for the same reasons we talk about the sun rising and setting, the tides flowing in and out, and the ancients distinguished between Hesperus and Phospherus, ordinary non-scientific language treats color as a property of things similar to mass because tedious pedants aren't much fun at parties.

In ordinary language it is also the case that choosing a color involves explicit rejection of closely related colors that are a little too warm, I-think-it-will-be-too-dark, or something-a-bit-more-red.

Choosing a color involves high discernment. When you find the right shade of blue, you have condemned all other shades as wrong.

Fortunately, nobody cares.

[spookthesunset]

> Also this color space (R x B x G box color space) spends too many bits on low intensity and high intensity colors.

Isn’t that what the gamma is for?

[bhouston]

Yes! sRGB includes a gamma transform already. You can go much further though.

[elil17]

They’re already about 1/500th of the way through the color space.