HN Theater @HNTheaterMonth

Here’s a related video explaining the challenge of creating a digital brown color. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=wh4aWZRtTwU

Brown is actually orange

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wh4aWZRtTwU

Brown is just dark orange

https://youtu.be/wh4aWZRtTwU

I love how well that channel is doing. It's an endless rabbit hole of fascination. I will never look at the color brown the same way again: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wh4aWZRtTwU

⬐ dmix

Oh god. Why did you do this to me.

⬐ benbristow

Love that channel also. Great videos on mundane topics.

TechMoan is a great British YouTuber who does videos about old tech & media formats too - https://www.youtube.com/c/Techmoan

A great video demonstrating the strangeness of representing colours is this video on the colour brown:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wh4aWZRtTwU

Colour theory can get pretty complicated, the video is however very understandable as well as interesting :)

Brown is weird [1]. It's basically dark orange. Flesh tones fall into that same category - people are orange-hued [2]. Oranges/reds are mostly produced by various unsaturated molecules, such as carotenes, lignins, phenols, and tars, and browns are just dark collections of many kinds red-orange pigments. It does not map well to any of the common color spaces because its inherently heterogeneous.

The solution would probably be pallettes that let you pick arbitrary axes to move through color space.

1 - https://youtu.be/wh4aWZRtTwU

2 - According to Neil Harbisson, the guy with the color-sensing antenna, in-person conversation, but you can also verify with photoshop.

⬐ chrisseaton

I don’t understand that video. Can’t all colours be described differentially to another colour? And don’t we have lots of names for different shades? Why does this make brown unusual?

⬐ ThatCaio

In English, pink and brown are very specific colors which the brains of native speakers might not associate with their true hue values.

That's why the original commenter was having difficulty finding brown, because we do not necessarily associate it with a dark orange or flesh color with de-saturated red or orange.

But if we were trying to paint something like dark teal water. The brain would immediately go straight to blues/greens.

These "color categories" that we form in our brains can be different in every culture or language. That is issue with what was suggested.

⬐ chrisseaton

> That's why you were having difficulty finding brown

Not sure if you’re replying to the right person? I didn’t say anything about finding brown being difficult.

I don't even know what that would mean for it to be difficult to find a colour?

> because you do not necessarily associate it with a dark orange

That’s what brown is - a dark orange. The same way navy is a dark blue. But nobody makes videos claiming that navy is a weird colour because it’s actually dark blue.

⬐ dard12

This seems like a simple case of different people finding different things unintuitive.

My theory is that many people have a mental model of colors that maps roughly to the hue and value in HSV, so for example terms like "dark orange" is a value followed by a hue. Now suppose you understand brown as a "dark beige", that's suddenly confusing because beige introduces saturation and you cannot map beige back to orange without thinking about saturation.

⬐ chrisseaton

> Now suppose you understand brown as a "dark beige"

I think my point is brown is dark beige, and beige is light brown. Neither is canonical. Is orange canonical? Maybe it's high frequency red? Or low frequency yellow? That's what Newton thought! It's all relative.

⬐ retsibsi

It sounds like the brown-orange link is intuitively obvious to you. But I think the claim being made is that for most native English-speakers, the link between orange and brown is significantly less obvious than that between X and dark X, for most colours X. FWIW that is true in my case.

(Not that I deny the link exists; but when I look at e.g. an orange next to a dark brown tree branch, I don't see them as versions of the same colour in the way I do with, say, a lime and a dark green leaf. That's not a great example but hopefully you see what I'm getting at.)

⬐ kortex

I think what makes brown unique in this regard is its ubiquity in nature, partial desaturation, and lack of obvious mapping to a saturated color.

Emergence of names of colors in languages usually goes black, white, red, yellow, grue, then blue forks from blue, brown, orange, then "specialty" colors like pink, purple, indigo, teal. It's the only partially saturated shade that gets a name before its saturated variant (orange). Being able to name things brown is more important than orange, so that mental link is weaker. Hence why we have "dark blue" but brown is not "dark orange." (though I think some languages call it "dark red"? I'm a bit hazy on that detail)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_term

⬐ chrisseaton

> lack of obvious mapping to a saturated color

30 degrees hue, 50% value, 100% saturated, looks exactly brown to me?

> brown is not "dark orange."

I think it is. In fact, take my 30 degrees hue, 50% value, 100% saturated, then gradually increase the value and see where you get to!

⬐ retsibsi

Just out of curiosity, what if you go to a significantly darker brown, say 30/100/20 h/s/v. Unfortunately these subjective tests will vary from monitor to monitor, but assuming that's still clearly brown rather than black to you (to me it's a more archetypal brown than the brighter version you initially named, which I might call orange-brown) -- what do you perceive when you keep the saturation and value fixed, and vary the hue? Would you agree that many or most of the other hues give you a colour more obviously 'dark X', where X is the 100%-value counterpart, than hue 30 does? For me it's much more obvious at the green-blue-purple segment of the spectrum than the red-orange-yellow segment.

This isn't meant as a trick question or anything -- if I'm getting at anything specific, it's that maybe part of the reason the orange-brown link seems more obvious to you than to me is that when you think of a central example of brown, you think of something brighter (and thus more obviously orange) than I do.

⬐ chrisseaton

> Would you agree that many or most of the other hues give you a colour more obviously 'dark X'

Hmm not really. But we're not going to resolve what seems like a subjective question!

⬐ retsibsi

Oh don't worry, I wasn't planning on trying to argue the point! Just genuinely curious about the extent to which our difference is perceptual/conceptual/other. If we disagree on the 'dark X' thing, it makes me think there's a real perceptual difference and/or a pretty deep conceptual one (in terms of how we divide up the colour spectrum), though of course it doesn't prove anything.

⬐ retsibsi

I don't think the other commenter is disagreeing with you on those things -- they're talking about human perceptions, and saying that although brown is in fact dark orange, that's not how we name it or how we tend to see it.

Fun Fact: Brown is orange with context!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wh4aWZRtTwU

⬐ yesenadam

This is an excellent video, many thanks!

⬐ NoahKAndrews

The whole channel is gold

Worth watching the Technology Connection video on the colour Brown [1]. It's a strange colour that only really exists when placed in the context of other colours, not something that can really be produced by a pure RGB light source, which explains why the CSS Brown colour looks red.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wh4aWZRtTwU

Worth watching the Technology Connection video on the colour Brown [1]. It's a strange colour that only really exists when placed in the context of other colours, not something that can really be produced by a pure RGB light source, which explains why the CSS Brown colour looks red.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wh4aWZRtTwU

Turns out brown is a really interesting color: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wh4aWZRtTwU

light brown?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wh4aWZRtTwU

I am reminded of this by some of the seemingly bad results: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wh4aWZRtTwU

Fyi on a semi-related topic I learned from a fascinating Youtube video... the color "brown" is a psychological construct[0]. But from an RGB perspective ... there's no such color as "brown"; it's actually just "orange" in a particular context: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wh4aWZRtTwU

[0] pedantic alert: yes "every color" is ultimately a mental construct of the brain but hopefully you know what I mean

⬐ Tokkemon

Ah yes. Hacker News' daily reference to Alec from Technology Connections. I enjoy his orange with context.

⬐ formerly_proven

This is based on the simplistic view that hue equals color. Modern perceptual color models like CIECAM02 define "color" through a much larger number of influences.

It's not the same color, no. Brown doesn't exist.

Check out https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wh4aWZRtTwU

We also had (the antecedents of) "brown". (-:

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wh4aWZRtTwU (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22324298)

⬐ cheschire

Every “but wait!” Argument I tried to come up with, he answered seconds later. Very well paced and about as full of bad dad-scientist jokes you could make it.

⬐ marcan_42

Yeah, he catches every single one of those and does it in style. Easily my favorite educational (often retro) tech channel. He gets you hooked even on stuff you already know about.

Funny thing: some people have joked that he's my alter ego (I guess we look slightly similar?), but I could never deliver stuff like he does.

⬐ willis936

Well he did miss one tiny little thing in his toslink video. I pointed it out (and I’m sure others did) and he filled in the gap in a follow-up video. He sets a very high bar.

I wish he did have a more technical discussion on CRT vs raster displays. There is a real meat there that is typically unexplored. What is the spatial frequency response of CRT vs raster? What resolution raster do you need to be “good enough” and what kind of interpolation/LPF should be used?

⬐ derefr

> What is the spatial frequency response of CRT vs raster? What resolution raster do you need to be “good enough” and what kind of interpolation/LPF should be used?

You know, "Building a CRT from Scratch" would be a great standalone educational series. It could hit on everything from making glass, to how to pump air out of something, to coil winding/transformers, to phosphor chemistry, as well as the RF electronics stuff.

⬐ MarioMan

Not the same thing, but you reminded me of this since it's in a similar vein. Ben Eater went through the entire process of building a VGA "video card." Anyone with a basic understanding of logic circuits has enough background to understand it. Worth a watch. Part 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7rce6IQDWs Part 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqY3FMuMuRo

⬐ CWuestefeld

Or, how to make a pencil.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IYO3tOqDISE

(not the same guy at all, but your comment reminded me of this. It's really about specialization and the interdependency of everything in the economy)

⬐ hombre_fatal

Half a year ago he came out of nowhere for me and now I encounter his videos all the time. He deserves it. Whenever a vid pops up it's always on a topic I've been wondering about.

⬐ scrollaway

He's one of my favourite YouTube channels and I found out about him a mere weeks ago. Binged all his content. He has wonderful playlists on VHS and the format wars, color TV, analog everything etc. I recommend you look at his other videos and click on whatever titillates your interest.

⬐ gibolt

I recommend you look at his Patreon page. His quality, depth of research, and overall uniqueness made supporting a no brainer for me.

⬐ scrollaway

Unfortunately, Patreon messed up my account years ago and I haven't been able to support anyone since.

⬐ ainar-g

If you've liked this video, you may also enjoy Alec's series on LaserDisc[1] (no, it's not about CD) and RCA's Capacitance Electronic Disc or CED[2].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLv0jwu7G_DFUoByWSHHoS...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLv0jwu7G_DFVP0SGNlBiB...

⬐ ajot

The CED saga reminds me of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, as in a "trilogy in five parts". Nevertheless, I love this guy and really enjoyed listening to the story of the CED.

⬐ mbreese

CEDs were great. We had two generations of those players growing up. The best part was that you eventually got to know exactly where the cut points were in movies. Because that was when you had to go up to the TV to flip the disc.

I’ll have to listen to his story on them. Probably a very different view from me as a kid just using them to watch movies pre-VCR.

⬐ nwallin

There are a lot of HN appropriate lessons in his CED series. Especially the one about being on time to market: if the CED hit the market before the VCR or laserdisc did, it might have survived, or even possibly kept RCA alive. Or the stuff about using tried and true methods instead of the fancy new tech of the day.

My parents recently moved into a smaller home, and ... deacquired a bunch of their furniture by way of my house. In the shuffle I ended up with a bunch of my parents' old records. Being susceptible to impulse buys, I bought a record player. I actually really enjoy the experience of playing records. There's something about the physicality of it. I can't just press a button on my phone and ignore it. I have to choose what to listen to next. I have to physically flip the record twenty minutes in. It's not purely a background thing, it's a physical process and experience. Music has gone from something I ignore to something I participate in.

I'm not actually sure that's in any way relevant to the conversation at hand, but when I started ranting, I felt it was.

⬐ ainar-g

Focus is a commodity. Sometimes, people just need rituals. I think, people are slowly starting to realise this.

⬐ maxnoe

Also watch this please if you ever do plots using colormaps: https://youtu.be/xAoljeRJ3lU

About the perceptual uniform, colorblind friendly colormaps in matplotlib since 1.5. Now also adapted by most other plotting tools.

⬐ anderspitman

ColorBrewer[0] is a great research-backed resource for dataviz colors.

[0] http://colorbrewer2.org/#type=sequential&scheme=BuGn&n=3

⬐ donatj

Interesting - I have a tool using CIEDE2000 to calculate color differences - I learned from this that I should probably be using CIECAM02? I'll need to investigate further, but this was a very interesting watch regardless.

⬐ quietbritishjim

If we're on the "watch this YouTube video if you work with colours" train, here's a great explanation of why gradients usually have a dark band in the middle, on the MinutePhysics channel:

https://youtu.be/LKnqECcg6Gw

In short: the RBG values in an image are not actually the intensity of light, but some nonlinear function of intensity. To do a weighted average of two colours you need to first undo that nonlinearity, then do the averaging, then reapply the function. Most software doesn't do that so the colours end up wrong. This also applies to resizing images.

⬐ mrob

Resizing in sRGB has the advantage of obscuring ringing artifacts when enlarging images, because the nonlinearity puts more of them in the highlights than the shadows, where they're less obvious to human vision. You can get perceptually even better results when enlarging by using a sigmoidized colorspace. See:

https://www.imagemagick.org/Usage/filter/nicolas/

For another clear example of the problems of resizing in linear colorspace, see "Catch #3" here:

https://entropymine.com/imageworsener/gamma/

⬐ mantap

Pretty much the first thing you learn in game development (OK not the first thing), is the difference between linear-RGB and sRGB and the need to do lighting calculations in linear space in your shaders. It's crazy that professional graphics software doesn't get this right.

⬐ martin_a

> It's crazy that professional graphics software doesn't get this right.

"Professional graphics software" does what it's supposed to be and sRGB is an inferior standard in most use-cases of that software. Its gamut is simply not large enough, but it's a nice smallest-possible commond ground.

⬐ marcan_42

This isn't a gamut problem, it's a bad coding problem.

"Professional graphics software" (i.e. Photoshop) absolutely does the wrong thing for color blending with the default settings. It's not a problem of being limited to the sRGB color space, it's about the math in use being outright wrong for use on that color space. You need to go into the settings and tick some checkbox to have some hope of it doing the right thing ("Blend RGB colors using gamma"), and even then I bet it only applies to some operations like blending itself, not scaling and other filters.

This is because all non-linear image encoding modes, like sRGB or straight gamma, should be viewed as compression. You don't perform mathematical operations on compressed data. It's like trying to mix together two MP3 files by literally taking the bytes and averaging them out. That's madness and does not work. You need to go into a linear format, like raw PCM, to be able to do that (with the right word size). Same with images: you need to convert from sRGB to linear light to be able to do math on them. But 95% of software, including "pro" software, doesn't do this, it just blindly does math on compressed (gamma encoded) data, and the result is ugly (we're just used to it).

Of couse, with Photoshop you can set your image mode to linear light and then things work fine... but that's not because linear light is required to make this stuff work, it's because Photoshop is broken when not using linear light and doesn't compensate for the encoding.

Meanwhile GIMP, a few versions ago, fixed this whole mess and actually applies blending and filtering in linear light (regardless of what mode your image is using in memory), making its blending and filtering much more pleasant and correct than Photoshop's. So yeah, it may not support CMYK or other "pro" features... but for a good chunk of basic editing in RGB space, you're actually going to get more correct and visually appealing results if you use GIMP than Photoshop.

⬐ marcan_42

It irks me to no end that in 2020 we are still using outright incorrect math for image processing, practically everywhere, with visible consequences (another one: this can also be blamed for a good chunk of the moiré artifacts when resizing images containing patterns, it's not just about subpar filters).

Ironically, Photoshop does this wrong by default, but the open source GIMP does it correctly (in current versions).

⬐ seanalltogether

One thing he missed in the video is the fact that red and green cone cells make up 95% of the cones in human eyes, hence our extreme sensitivity to colors that fall between the two. Dark orange looks brown because we have so much resolution in that space to work with, whereas dark green is just dark green, or dark blue is just dark blue.

⬐ martin-adams

In the video he said that we recognise it as brown because we learned the name for it and thus recognise it independently. Is that idea compatible with us having more red and green cone cells than blue - i.e. having more resolution to recognise brown?

⬐ MarioMan

There is certainly a cultural aspect to it. Tom Scott's video on the matter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2TtnD4jmCDQ

⬐ haydenchambers

There was a study done on groups of people from landlocked tribes that had more language for ‘earth tones’ vs those that lived near sea with more language for blues and their ability to actually notice different hues. Chicken and egg?

⬐ marci

Also a matter of context. Brown is orange and grey can be red.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJBfn07gZ30

Here's a part of a documentary talking about the cultural aspect of how we perceive colours and the power of naming a color (with the Himba people)

https://www.dailymotion.com/video/xl7eh1

⬐ amyjess

You could also say similar things about the secondary colors.

Dark cyan = teal.

Dark magenta = purple.

Dark yellow = olive.

And maybe some of the other tertiary colors too, but yeah orange/brown is the more prominent one.

⬐ andrewxdiamond

He actually covers that in a previous video, the one he linked below.

https://youtu.be/uYbdx4I7STg

⬐ willis936

I watched this with my SO last night. We have a very small cross section of shared media interests (notable ones being star trek and grand designs). One of the few youtube videos I’ve put on that she got excited about was Tech Connections video on rice cookers. I mean, I know I really like his stuff. Even though I’m deep in the weeds with most of his topics and already know it, I still find pleasure in hearing advanced topics explained from base concepts with such clarity. He knows his business and it shows.

⬐ boffinism

Am I the only one who already thought brown just _was_ dark orange? Like, if you google 'dark orange', you get shown a bunch of brown swatches as the top results. Isn't that... just what brown has always been?

⬐ peteretep

Yes, that’s exactly his point. Brown is dark orange, and you can’t make a light that’s the dark version of any colour, you can just have less of that colour. We only think of brown as a colour because we decided to give dark orange a name.

⬐ jessriedel

Maroon is dark red/purple. Indigo is dark blue/purple. Olive is dark green.

⬐ peteretep

Yes, and you also can’t get an olive-coloured light, which is the whole point of the video.

⬐ jessriedel

My point was that we gave names to these other colors, so that doesn't seem to be the reason people think brown is a "real" color more than maroon and olive.

⬐ yreg

Yet I bet brown has dramatically more hits in the English corpus than maroon, indigo or olive (colour).

⬐ jessriedel

Yes, but if you're trying to rebut me then you're mixing up the causality. "Brown" has more hits because people think about it differently (e.g., it's very frequently in their environment). The existence/prevalence of the name "brown" didn't cause people to think about it differently.

⬐ scotty79

fur-poo-bark color was probably more useful to name.

⬐ DonHopkins

Q: What's brown and sticky?

A: A stick!

⬐ boffinism

I guess I'm just confused as to why this video needed making. I didn't think the brown/dark orange equivalence was surprising, or a revelation. In the same way that I'd be confused if someone made a video saying, "Guys! Guess what! Pink is just light red!"

⬐ jxdxbx

Well, among other things, English had a word for "brown" long before it had a word for "orange," which as the video described was previously seen just as a shade of red or yellow. Brown is just a more prominent color in nature.

⬐ ants_a

The important insight was that dark orange/brown only exists in a context. There has to be something lighter visible for it to be perceived as dark. Whereas pink is a different mix of light than red. You can't make a red light bulb pink no matter how bright you make it. And you can't make an orange light bulb brown without putting a different brighter light alongside it.

⬐ laszlokorte

Well pink actually is not just light red but mixed with blue, as mentioned in the OP video as well, a mix of two ends of the visible spectrum.

⬐ FoeNyx

> a mix of two ends of the visible spectrum

Wasn't that about magenta/fuchsia? ( #FF00FF )

⬐ squeaky-clean

You can make a pink light though, but not a brown one.

⬐ TheRealPomax

For one, because you can make pink by mixing light, but you cannnot make brown by mixing light. The fact that brown only exists when you get dark orange but situation in an otherwise light surrounding means that if your color rendering is based on mixing light, brown is literally impossible to make on its own. You cannot, inherently, get any light system to make brown on its own. It either has to frame it with a much lighter color in the screen, or it needs to be situated in a much lighter surrounding.

That's why this video is good educational material: it covers the contextual aspect of color that a lot of folks will have never even thought of. After all, pink is just red that you added white to, why not just add black to orange to get brown ("because that works for paint, but is literally impossible when your medium is light").

⬐ derefr

> Like, if you google 'dark orange', you get shown a bunch of brown swatches as the top results.

...unless you've got a universal web dark-mode extension. Then they're orange swatches. The swatches are visually brown by default, because the page they're shown on is white by default.

The video said "brown is orange with context", but I'd say it's more like "brown is orange with contrast."

⬐ Gupie

But there are light browns that are not orange, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khaki

⬐ etblg

Khaki (this one specifically: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khaki#Khaki) is like a desaturated orange. If you go in to the devtools and mess with the colour's HSL you can see how much more orange it looks just when increasing the saturation, and just how more brown it looks when lowering the darkness.

We've affixed a lot of specific names to colours around orange and brown, but they're basically variations of saturation and lightness on a certain range of hues (between yellow and red). The distinction between brown and orange is mostly subjective.

Which is what I like about this video. It gives a good sense of how much of the difference between two 'colours' is just naming and perception of a hue.

⬐ grenoire

Technically, it's not supposed to be orange but a light orange. I think the less green-heavy hues of khaki are definitely light oranges.

⬐ gmiller123456

Playing with some of the colors in Photoshop, I used an eyedropper to sample the khaki color. I get 169, 161, 150, RGB or 23,24,150 HSL. After playing around a bit, it seems that khaki is "dark orange", with equal amounts of RGB added to make it lighter. Or, "orange" desaturated and lightened.

⬐ Broken_Hippo

It is because brown really isn't just dark orange. There are oranges that are both dark and not brown - these usually are on the redder side of orange, like dark orange clouds in the sky at sunset.

Brown is, in general, a muted orange. Take the red and yellow, add a hint of green (or purple, honestly) - and you have browns.

⬐ phkahler

When I was a kid, my computer could only display 8 colors, as it had 1 bit each if R,G,B. I used to wonder about brown and orange in particular as colors that were not available. I figured orange must just be an unequal mix or red and green, but I couldn't even speculate about brown. Today when you mention it, it makes sense to me that these 2 colors are related.

⬐ legohead

I've never considered a tree, dead leaves, dirt, etc to be anything near the color of orange.

⬐ belinder

I think one of the points he is making is not that it's just dark orange, it's that we have a label for dark orange, but not a label for dark other colors on the same level of use as brown.

We call dark orange brown. Sure dark red could be called burgundy but it's not a word used as much as brown. So we use the word brown as much as the words 'dark red'.

⬐ Grustaf

He kept tslking about context etc so I was hoping there was more to it than brown just being dark orange. That’s about as exciting as pink being bright red.

⬐ vanniv

The context is basically the need for something bright to create the context required for the dark orange to be brown -- because otherwise it isnt dark.

⬐ amyjess

Eh, I could argue that "purple" is just dark magenta, or "teal" is just dark cyan.

And the difference between "pink" and "brick red" is that both are just desaturated reds at different levels of lightness.

⬐ ken

Maybe weird but not unique: every non-saturated color is like this. Try to set your RGB lighting strip to gray. Or watch the veins pop out of your LD's forehead when someone asks for gray lighting on stage.

⬐ whatshisface

Pass out grey translucent glasses with a little bit of diffusion to everybody in the audience.

⬐ MarioMan

Now I'm wondering if there are programmable lenses to provide basic, real-life filters at concerts and other events.

⬐ derefr

> Or watch the veins pop out of your LD's forehead when someone asks for gray lighting on stage.

White light + black fog from a fog machine? Can you "pigment" air like that?

⬐ mikedilger

Is our color perception influenced by our culture's language? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity_and_the_...

⬐ improbable22

I don't know, but the words we use for it are certainly influenced by our culture!

Here's a paper with nice graphs, drawing where different languages put the boundaries between words -- they divide up the hue-saturation space into a varying number of blobs:

https://www.pnas.org/content/115/31/7937

(The data isn't theirs, it was painstakingly colected by going and asking lots of people "what colour is this pantone?". The paper does some fancy stuff on top of that. But it has nice graphs.)

⬐ ackshually

Technology Connections is so great. Never dissapoints.

⬐ geomark

This is great. I wish I had seen it before I did the unit on color with the kids in my after school club, although they did have their minds blown slightly when I made the screen on my cell phone all yellow and then put it under a microscope so they could see that there were only red and green pixels illuminated - no yellow light coming off that screen at all, it was all in their heads.

⬐ longtom

Grey is also weird for the same reason. The moon appears white at night, but its albedo (% reflected light) is actually 0.12 which is comparable to that of asphalt.

⬐ OrgNet

Black or white-ish asphalt?

⬐ longtom

Not black asphalt. Well, depending on the context it will appear black. :^)

https://i.imgur.com/dGDaVLz.jpg

https://nasaviz.gsfc.nasa.gov/vis/a010000/a011900/a011924/c-...

⬐ thdrdt

I always wonder if there will be displays in the future that combine emission and absorption at the same time.

Like a combination of OLED and E Ink.

This will also give you the possibility to turn your TV into a painting (without using power) when you are done watching.

⬐ aasasd

Some displays already have the two modes―alas don't remember what they're called, it's some variation of color eink. You get color indoors, or only black-on-white in sunlight.

Some ebook devices also have ‘backlight’―usually diffused light from the sides so it doesn't shine directly in the eyes. I think this is the crux of your idea, because currently even if you use lcd/oled with backlight, no-power eink will be severely washed out in comparison. And if eink gets good color and contrast in the future, it will then fulfill the two-mode technology.

⬐ jrockway

I think you're talking about the displays that the original OLPC used: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Display

⬐ aasasd

Yeah, apparently the Pixel Qi company is a spin-off from OLPC, and that's the name I've heard in the context of color eink tech (took me a while to remember it). Defunct since 2015, however.

The page on the wiki.laptop.org isn't too clear on the technology—presumably it's more complex than just LCD and eink slapped together. The Wikipedia page on the XO laptop seems to have some detail: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OLPC_XO#Display

⬐ Razengan

That's an amazing idea.

The E Ink layer would be great for status overlays or permanent elements that rarely change, like the date and battery charge, or a list of recent notifications while the "main/active" display sleeps when the machine is idle.

⬐ yoz-y

I dream of this kind of displays. It could also spawn a whole new medium of comic books, but with light effects.

⬐ derefr

> combine emission and absorption

If you think about it, that's what an LCD is doing. The backlight is emitting; the liquid crystals are absorbing. The display is white (i.e. passing through the emission from the backlight) where the liquid crystals aren't active; the display is black-ish (i.e. attempting to block as much of the emission as it can) when the liquid crystals are active.

It's sort of like painting on a lightbox with black paint.

⬐ aasasd

Obviously I now need to repeat the dark room trick but with cut-out pictures of chocolate, coffee, nuts, dirt and bears.

⬐ pininja

Big fan of this channel. He’s got a great series on the RCA CED.

⬐ fyp

I can kind of make sense of why humans(animals?) evolved to see brightness in relative terms. The same object will have different amount of light reflecting off it based on the time of day so you don't want your brain to register those as different scenes.

Hue also makes sense. It's the distribution of wavelengths being reflected.

But what does saturation correspond to? When do things become saturated/desaturated in the natural world?

⬐ jerf

Take an image and force all colors to the same saturation, and you may get an idea. If nothing else, there is advantage to extracting as much detail from the signal as rapidly as possible. Not everything has to have a direct, straight line relationship; second-order and third-order effects are perfectly selectable too. In fact straight-line relationships are the exception; even the ones we think we see are the confluence of a lot of individual second- and nth-order outcomes.

⬐ pjc50

If you take the absolute value of differences between each pair of the three "color" signals, and find how varied they are, that is saturation.

https://www.rapidtables.com/convert/color/rgb-to-hsv.html

I suspect a lot of natural stripe patterns require saturation to distinguish them.

⬐ loa_in_

The (high) opposite of saturation, the "grayness" is a characteristic of glare, specular reflections, metallic materials (and salts).

⬐ joshspankit

Ripeness?

⬐ scotty79

Sunbleached? Roughened surface?

⬐ derefr

Humans eyes don't see color as HSV; we (probably) use the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opponent_process.

This means that the signal getting to our brains is actually a report of "how much {(red minus green), (yellow minus blue)} relative intensity" there is in view.

Saturation is our name for the feeling of having strong visual qualia, brought about by the magnitude of one or both of the relative-intensity signals being large.

• This is why oversaturated bright colours can trigger migraines in people—they're the strongest encoded signals, causing the most synaptic firing.

• This is also why some oversaturated colours don't seem as "bright" as others—you can make a "Brown 2.0" that's ultra-mega-brown, but it can't be as intense in {R-G, Y-B} terms as the pinkest pink (https://culturehustle.com/products/pink-50g-powdered-paint-b...), since pink/magenta is a full relative intensity pin {1-0, 0-1}.

• This is also why staring at oversaturated colours for long periods leaves more of a visual afterimage than staring at equally-bright white does. It's the {R-G, Y-B} intensity, not the brightness, that's using up the electrochemical messenger molecules in your retina.

⬐ mygo

Color is hard to talk about correctly. If you’re reading this, video creator, since you asked at the end, this was very well done. Really, really good. Thanks for distinguishing magenta. Thanks for discussing both the additive and subtractive color models. Thanks for going over a few mathematical ways to describe color (RGB, HSB, etc). Thanks for mentioning photoreceptors and the visual cortex, how colors appear differently in different environments, and how color is an event. Thanks for mixing paints!

I would include this as part of an introduction to color theory.

If you were to make a V2, I’d suggest discussing gray, since I’m sure you’d find a way to make gray interesting (I mean it is though) :)

⬐ cpcat

So basically there's no such thing as orange. It's just brown

⬐ spookthesunset

Orange itself is just a name for what sits between red and yellow. We didn't always have a name for orange either.

⬐ empath75

Bright brown.

⬐ VBprogrammer

As someone who suffers form a colour vision abnormality these things make me happy; if the world is so messed up for normal people then who cares that it's slightly more queer for me.

⬐ cturner

Classical works use colour in ways that are confusing to read. You either have to accept that it is describing a fantasy, or that the author's concept of colours is different than ours.

I had wondered if there was any example from own language of this, in order to get the benefit of that perspective. This seems to be it.

Perhaps we had a name for brown before orange. Whereas other colours tend to be named for the saturated version.

Has cultivation changed citrus colours, as with carrots?

⬐ None

None

⬐ Waterluvian

So after all that (it was fantastic) I just want to confirm my understanding: "brown" is literally just "dark orange", correct?

⬐ Noxmiles

So, brown is only a cultural construct - actually it's just a dark orange. The Video is amazing. I wish to read more scientific research on this subject.

⬐ garfieldnate

Technology Connections is one of my favorite channels! It's one of the few whose videos I consistently watch immediately after release.

⬐ shultays

I honestly couldn't see the orange when the square is surrounded by black. It was still brown for me.

⬐ ackshually

Were you in a bright room? That would have given you context, which is what he warned against.

⬐ shultays

Yea, that might be the case

⬐ Priem19

This was the last topic on which I expected to completely watch the video. Fantastic presentation.

⬐ analog31

While I was in school, a professor was grilling me on color, and said, okay smarty pants, if you think you know what brown is, show me a brown laser.

We happened to be in the lab, so I pointed to a brown spot on the wall, made by a very powerful laser. After that, we referred to it as the brown laser.

⬐ robbrown451

You can't have a magenta laser either (since magenta can't be represented by a single wavelength). Or a black laser. Or for that matter, a C sharp laser. That doesn't mean those concept are particularly hard to wrap one's head around.

⬐ JdeBP

Nowhere in that anecdote does anyone assert that brown does not exist. "If you think that you know what brown is" is not talking about existence.

⬐ robbrown451

It seems a bit of a pedantic distinction, but ok. I edited the comment. I don't think it changes the spirit of the comment, though.

I've seen many people try to argue that magenta doesn't exist, or isn't a color, etc., simply because it doesn't correlate to a single wavelength.

Regardless, what is he trying to say, then? That brown can't be understood because there is no such thing as a brown laser? My point remains.

⬐ analog31

I was just recalling an amusing anecdote. The brown color produced by the laser was because it burned the wall. It's too late for me to edit the post for clarity.

⬐ robbrown451

Yes and it is an amusing anecdote. I commented because I've seen so many people who think that "color" must have a one-to-one relationship with wavelength of light, and it seemed your professor was doing that as well.

⬐ analog31

Actually, he was trying to get me past thinking that way. It all got started when I was trying to figure out RGB colors for some computer display.

⬐ robbrown451

Fair enough. I wasn't trying to take away from your anecdote or slight the professor, just add some commentary on that way of thinking about colors.

⬐ rabuse

We do have other labels for colors nowadays though (ex. Olive, Khaki, Navy)

⬐ kwelstr

Why is yellow ignored as a primary color green pushed as a primary color?

⬐ joefkelley

Roughly, we have three types of color-sensitive cone cells in our eyes. They each have different behavior in terms of how much they "react" to different wavelengths of light. Take a look at this chart: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trichromacy#/media/File:Cones_...

Each individual wavelength activates all three to some extent: think about this as a point in 3d space. For example, 400nm corresponds to something like (0.1, 0.05, 0.0), from that chart. 500nm might be (0.1, 0.4, 0.3).

But we experience a mix of many different wavelengths at once. So we can not only experience just these points in 3d space, but we can also experience any linear combination of any of these points. For instance, a mix of half 400nm and half 500nm light might be "sensed" by us as (0.1, 0.225, 0.15), even though maybe there's no individual wavelength that corresponds to that point. Any linear mix of any number of any wavelengths covers the entire gamut of what we can perceive.

The question then for someone picking primary colors for an additive display is: if I can only do a linear mix of three wavelengths, what wavelengths should I pick? What covers the biggest subset of the whole perceptible gamut? It just so happens that red, green, and blue do the best.

If you swapped green for yellow, there would be a section in that 3d space that you could no longer create. Specifically, the area where M cones are strongly activated compared to L and S. Unsurprisingly, this would be the greenest greens.

⬐ kwelstr

Thank you, as a painter this has bothered me for a long time.

⬐ cwingrav

Additive vs Subtractive colors: https://stackoverflow.com/a/6531772/2664702

⬐ bityard

Possibly because yellow is not a primary color of light and green is?

Or do you actually believe there is a green cabal with an agenda of some sort?

⬐ bityard

Because that's not how light works.

⬐ a-nikolaev

Red, blue, and yellow are subtractive primary colors. E.g. if an object absorbs(subtracts) red light, then under white light it looks green (blue+yellow remained). This is how colors work in painting.

On the other hand, your monitor does not absorb colors, but emits it. If you shine red and green light on a white surface (or on your eye directly), you will see green. This is called additive color. RGB (red, green, blue) are primary additive colors.

https://drawpaintacademy.com/subtractive-additive-color/

⬐ kwelstr

Thank you.

⬐ robbrown451

Magenta yellow and cyan are subtractive primaries. Cyan might pass for blue, but magenta really isn't red.

And really you could say red green and blue are subtractive primaries (as well as additive), but we use cyan ink because it subtracts red light. (etc)

⬐ a-nikolaev

Yeah, technically yes, but the poster above refers to the primary colors used in arts, which are red, blue, and yellow. They do represent subtractive colors magenta, cyan, yellow.

⬐ robbrown451

I'd say red yellow and blue is used in elementary school art class, and not much more. And even then, kids almost always have more colors to work with than three.

The subtractive color model isn't really good for paints anyway, it is best with translucent inks/dyes, where the white from the paper comes through.

⬐ sixothree

To be fair, the title is "Brown; color is weird"

⬐ kazinator

Brown is just dark yellow.

⬐ emerongi

What about beige?

⬐ tasogare

tl;dv: "Brown is just orange, but darker."

⬐ pmarin

Not really, it depends on the surrounding context like it's explained on the video.

⬐ brianmcc

Being colourblind I wasn't going to bother with this video but this and the other comments about his series have piqued my interest!

⬐ jmiserez

"tl;dv" is so new/unused there's no results on Google (or Urban Dictionary for that matter). How is that possible? o_O

⬐ shakna

The more common usage would be "tl;dw"

⬐ tasogare

Yes, I tried to adapt the shortcut with "viewed" but didn’t think of "watched" (not native speaker of English).

⬐ Normal_gaussian

dw was already used for "don't worry", so its a shame shame that tldw caught on instead of tldv

⬐ belinder

when would you use too long dont worry?

⬐ Noxmiles

tl;idc is the real thing you have to use

⬐ t_treesap

I used to like this guy, and his factual information is usually interesting, but he sometimes expresses opinions that downright infuriate me, to the point I had to stop listening.

⬐ tessellated

Care to give examples?

⬐ gowld

Everytime he said "context", he should have said "contrast".

He also didn't mention that grey is dark white, by the same phenomenon.

And of course red is dark pink, for rooster teeth fans.

⬐ sneakernets

Well, Contrast is usually in parlance as extremes. I think he means in context of what else is in the image, not just contrast. For example, you can have a "dark green" and "dark orange" used in a graphic of a tree on a black background, and you would perceive it as brown due to the context of the "tree-ness" on your screen.

⬐ GistNoesis

Color is cool. Let's add another dimension to this video.

It's one way of conveying information the brain can interpret in a flexible way.

But the brain is also good at depth perception. Let's combine these :

For example in the app I released yesterday StlToRelief : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22319140

I use a color gradient to increase the perception of depth. It makes a thin bas-relief standout.

With color-mixing 3d-printing this is an effect we can now exploit.

There is a closely related phenomena that we have when doing war paints for camouflage. Area (i.e. peaks like the nose) that would naturally catch the light appear brighter so you have to paint them dark while hollow area that naturally appear dark must be painted white. The resulting painting make a face look flat which stand out less.

⬐ Quai

I really enjoy this guys videos. The refreshing level of details. Great, geeky, humor.

I especially enjoyed his "rants" about the design of a old toaster, and traffic lights, of all things.

⬐ chipperyman573

The one on traffic lights is way more interesting than it sounds! Everybody should check it out. There's also a really interesting point he makes at the end that applies to something a lot of people on HN might relate with https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiYO1TObNz8

The toaster one is alright, it kinda bothered me when he said there was "literally NO reason" to design something the way it was (I think it had to do with the position of the coils) - obviously there is, it's probably just not a reason he'd like (cost, ease of manufacturing, etc). It makes me wonder if there was other info he skipped on because it "wasn't important" or "stupid". That's a pretty minor point though, overall his videos are very good.

⬐ jngreenlee

He seems like a young technical Andy Rooney!

⬐ GaryNumanVevo

Technology Connections is criminally underrated. Their content is presented in an engaging way, always interesting, always fun.

⬐ S_A_P

Agreed. This is something my 12 year old son really enjoys watching as well. I like that he usually does a pretty good job of striking a balance between deep dive and conceptual high points. On school nights, he will sing "Technology connections" to the melody of Lucky Charms "Its magically delicious". Try to not do that the next time you see that channel...

⬐ CWuestefeld

I loved his rant about space heaters. He showed a bunch of different products, all the same kind of heater, down to having identical 1500W output - but they were rated for small, medium, and large rooms, with proportional pricing. He went on to explain some basic thermodynamics (as opposed to marketing)...