Primary Colors part 1

Note

Additive color mixing involves light entering our eyes and stimulating different cone cells, while subtractive color mixing occurs when light strikes an object and is absorbed or reflected. The primary colors in the additive system are red, green, and blue, while in the subtractive system, cyan, magenta, and yellow are considered primary colors. The history of color theory includes Aristotle’s species of colors, Newton’s Optics, and the split between physicists, psychologists, and colorists in defining primary colors.

Highlights

• 2024-11-01 07:23 So when we’re mixing paint or ink or colored pencils or dyes, pastels, any kind of pretty much any medium that’s put onto a flat surface is working in the subtractive way.

• 2024-11-01 07:22 Now, in the subtractive system, there’s interesting history, like what the primaries are and how we’ve come to understand them. I found that there’s two different ways of looking at it. One, that red, yellow, and blue are the primary colors. And another that yellow, cyan, and magenta are the primary colors based on CMYK printing method. CMYK and K in that system stands for key, which means black. But how we got to that CMYK leading up to that is kind of interesting to me to think about in terms of the similarities between the additive and subtractive systems and to try not to see them.

• 2024-11-01 07:22 That term is similar to what we use is the word hue. So like a color family, a hue. So all the different reds are part of a hue. That’s what we call them, a hue, a red. And so Aristotle referred to them as species.

• 2024-11-01 07:22 So in 350 BCE Aristotle, there was a book published by him, or somebody wrote it. I don’t know if he wrote his own stuff, Sense and Sensibility, where he identifies these species of colors as white, yellow, red, purple, green, blue, and black in that specific order. He speculated that the way we perceive color was that there were, like, these invisible particles of white and black that entered our eye, and they stimulated something in our eye. And the more black particles that were present, doing the stimulating, you would perceive blues and greens, and the more whites particles, white particles, you would perceive yellow, yellows, reds, purples. So all his perceived colors were mixtures of ratios of white and black. So he associated the colors that were kind of naturally more dark, like greens and blues are generally kind of dark. They can be at least as black. And then as you’re getting into the reds and purples, which are still kind of maybe medium, he saw them as. And then yellows can be very light and bright and then white.

• 2024-11-01 07:21 So the whites he was responding to. Plato had written this piece in 10 years earlier, in 360 BCE called the Timaeus, if I’m saying that correctly. And Timaeus in the Timaeus, Plato speculated he had this theory called eye extramission theory, which is to say that he thought that the eye, our eyes, emitted a light source and projected light as fire does. And that’s how we perceived colors.

• 2024-11-01 07:29 what’s happening is that the light from the flash of the camera is hitting the retina and there’s actually blood vessels in the retina that are in front of the cone cells and they go around the cone cells. So there’s. Imagine there’s like this layer of arteries, right? And when blood is oxygenated, it’s bright red. And so that red eye effect is literally a reflection of the blood vessels in the person’s eye going back out into the camera. So a lot of cameras will have like a double flash real quick. So that first flash is to cause the pupils to shrink like really quick as quickly as possible because of this bright light, to minimize the red eye effect, to minimize the amount of reflected light coming off the retina and back into the camera.

• 2024-11-01 07:30 And Aristotle came around a little while later and he said, no, I think it’s eye intromission. Like, there’s something going into the eyes. Because if we were projecting light, why is it that we couldn’t. We can’t see during the nighttime. And so, like, with one sentence, he basically destroyed Plato’s vision theory anyway. And Aristotle’s book is called On Sense and the Sensible.

• 2024-11-01 07:30 But this tracking of color organization held for 2000 years until Newton in 1703 published Optics. We have characters along the way, like, well, I don’t know if I’ll get into that, but there’s. Let’s just say that there’s a history to this. Just to point out that this idea that colors weren’t always thought of as complementary or in a color wheel, they were just seen as individual colors that would mix together to do different things.

• 2024-11-01 07:31 The first known example of a print of, like, a color wheel is in 1629. A guy named Robert Flood, who was a physician who, following in Aristotle’s tradition of thinking about color, made a color circle, arrangement of colors in a circle so that he could compare the various colors of urine during his medical examinations.

• 2024-11-01 07:33 And then we come to Newton. He, in 1703, publishing Optics, he arranged his colors in a circle as well. He established the spectral band of Roy G. Biv, red, orange, yellow, blue, indigo, and violet. And he arranged his colors in a circle. But rather than giving making a circle with seven different wedges that were all the same size, he attributed, or he came up with these ratios for how big those wedges of the circle should be for each hue.

• 2024-11-01 07:33 idea of complementary colors or colors that would be across from each other on the color wheel in the subtractive method that would mix together to make either black or a very dark gray. 1742-1743, a French naturalist by the name of Comte de Buffon described what we now know are afterimages, or what Michel Eugene Chevrolet described as his second law of successive contrast in 1839. So 100 years later.

• 2024-11-01 07:39 These cones, they’re actually like a cone shape, and they vibrate. And as the cones vibrate, they get tired and when certain cones tire, the perception generated by the other remaining cones that are strong become more dominant in vision. So you can experiment with this yourself by taking, like. Take any object that you want, something colorful, and stare at it for as long as you can without blinking. So, like, over a minute. And then very quickly turn your gaze to, like, a blank wall or a white wall or a white piece of paper or something, and you’ll see this kind of, like, floating shape that is the complementary color of the local color of the colors you were just looking at.

• 2024-11-01 07:39 if you’re staring at a red object, you’ll see this green floating, as in what’s called an afterimage, because the red cone cells in your eyes are getting on your retinas are getting tired and exhausted while staring at this red tomato or whatever.

• 2024-11-01 07:41 That identification was first made in 1794 by an American physicist named Benjamin Thomas, also known as Count Rumford, which I kind of want to know the story.

• 2024-11-01 07:42 Young Helmholtz theory of trichromatic vision. So, like, they put it together that there’s three cones within the retina, generally speaking, in many people, and that Young actually identified complementary colors as being directly across from each other on the color wheel.

• 2024-11-01 07:42 In the additive system, red, green, and blue primaries, they are the secondary colors in the subtractive system established as magenta, yellow, and cyan, or commonly more like cyan, magenta and yellow, cmy and then K for black. But the cyan, magenta and yellow are the secondaries of the additive system.

• 2024-11-01 07:55 So this is different than the way I learned it when I was taught that red, yellow and blue were the primaries. And I think that the story of where those primaries came into play begins with Goethe and a German painter by the name of Philipp Otto Runes. They were friends. Goethe will have an episode on Goethe, but he wrote an instrumental book called Der Farbenleh or what’s translated into English as a Doctrine of Colors or a Theory of Colors. And that was published in 1840.

• 2024-11-01 07:58 there seems to be a split that emerged between the psychology of color and the physics of color. And somewhere in there, Goethe and runes, yellow and red and blue became their primary colors. And those colors were picked up by like the de style artists of the time later in the late 1800s, early 1900s. And those ideas made their way into the Bauhaus thinking in Germany, where instructors such as Paul Klee and Johannes Itten both identified red, yellow and blue as their primary colors. And so does Albers.

• 2024-11-01 08:00 basically different approaches to color based different interests of the physicist, the psychologist and the colorist to indicate that only a single difference. Whereas the primary colors for the colorists in parentheses, painters and designers in parentheses, are as we know, yellow, red and blue. The physicist has three other primaries, not including yellow. And the psychologist counts four primaries, the fourth being green, plus two neutrals, white and black.

• 2024-11-01 08:02 And then there’s a third pairing of black and white or light dark. And so the reason it’s called opponent color theory is that those pairs red and green and then as a pair and then blue and yellow as a pair, are seen as opponent colors to each other. So in other words, this notion that we perceive red by virtue of there being no green or very little green, and we perceive yellow by virtue of there being no blue. And so that there the opponent process is thought to take place after the cone cells are vibrating.

• 2024-11-01 08:05 One set of these cells are called ganglion cells. And these ganglion cells are receptive to these opponent colors. So there’s groups of ganglion cells that are. They are sensitive to yellow and blue. And then there’s others that are sensitive to red and green and others that are sensitive to light and dark or white and black, because you have to think of like, black is a color, of course, but black is also like the absence of light.

• 2024-11-01 08:09 The information gained taken from the cone cells funnels through the energy funnels through ganglion cells, and it turns. They convert that energy into electric firings of on and off to our minds.

• 2024-11-01 08:10 There are these impossible colors where evidently there is a color that is red and green, and it’s not. It’s. Well, whatever. That’ll be another podcast. Red, green, that’s an actual color and it can be perceived.