What you say is true, except – and I only bring this up again because it’s the point at issue -

– except for the magentas, which require you to move towards the funny straight line between red and purple which represents the only edge of the gamut that doesn’t lie on a pure wavelength. :)

The bottom-left corner is blue. It’s all the purples that don’t have a wavelength.

… Which is interesting, but doesn’t make it not a color. And when you think about how colour vision works, is something you might expect.

Wittgenstein on colour is good if you want other fun things to think about. And there’s an Umberto Eco article somewhere with much weirdness regarding when one colour is declared different from another.

@31 Magenta is a color and “ain’t” is a word. It’s been in use in the English language for over 200 years. Everyone knows how to spell it and what it means. That’s pretty well the definition of a word.

It still amazes me that I meet people who say that “ain’t” isn’t a word but have no problem with silly words made up in the last few decades by business people like “proactive” or “incent”.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_vision#Cone_cells_in_the_human_eye

The bands are 400-500, 450-630, 500-700. Yes, they overlap. When light within the 400-450 range lands on the eye, the 400-500 band cells will tell you how much light. But it can’t tell you if it was 400 or 410 or 420 or 450 nm light that did it or a combination of frequencies that added up to some total. All it can tell you is a total.

This means that there are a LOT of different combinations of light in different intensities across the spectrum that the human eye will perceive as the same thing.

intensity 10@400 plus 10@410 plus 10@420 gives a total of intensity of 30 from the first type of cells in the eye (400-500). But if you are looking at a light that is emitting 15@405 and 15@425, you will perceive it to be the same colore because youre eye will report an intensity of 30 from the first type of cells.

If you take a single color/intensity light source and look at it with your eyes, your eyes will report three totals to your brain and yoru brain will perceive those totals as a color.

There are plenty of colors that you could come up with that don’t map to a single color/intensity light source but rather are the result of multiple colors mixed together.

For example, whatever color you percieve when you look at a light source that emits 10@415 and 10@690, that percieved color cannot possibly be created by a single frequency light source because the two frequencies are triggering non overlapping parts of two different types of cells in the eye.

So, “magenta” is hardly the only percieved color that doesn’t have a single fixed frequency on the spectrum.

I just blew everybody’s mind.

(And yes, violet does trigger the red and blue cones, while mostly leaving out the green ones — this is because the cones are weird and nonlinear, not because it’s not a pure hue. Magenta also triggers the red and blue, but in proportions that couldn’t result from any monochromatic source, only from separate red and blue wavelengths.)

Light is light. Red is no different than blue when it comes to light. But the angle at which you view that light makes a big difference.

Red is 0 degrees. Orange is tilted 22.5 degrees from that. Yellow is an additional 22.5 degrees.
Blue is 90 degrees from red which is why it trips our eyes out.

Any 2 colors or wavelengths 90 degrees will do funny things REGARDLESS of how high or low you go up the spectrum.

Saying “magenta aint a color” is like saying there’s is nothing in between 1 and 22.4 degrees.

That’s like saying gold aint a color because it’s not apart of RGB or the others.
It’s all about dimensional perspective.

John Keely, Walter Russell, Dan Winter and now myself have come upon these correlations regarding the octaves of light, gravity, time, etc.

E=mc^2 is Red
E=mc^3 is Orange
E=mc^5 is Yellow
E=mc^8 is Green
E=mc^13 is Blue
E=mc^21 is Violet

Follow Phi
–Jason Verbelli

When i see green or yellow i dont shout out the length of the waves im perceiving now do i?

When i mix red and blue paint i dont refer to it as “red and blue paint mix” i call it purple. Just like i call red and yellow “orange”.

This guy is the kind of geek that titers on about how the rotational speed of the earth when added to “how fast the car is moving” means were breaking speed records. Ever have one of those jackasses tell you that a “peanut” isnt actually a nut?

I don’t care what its taxonomy is – if you want to buy a peanut you look in the nut section of the grocery story.

“magenta” may not exist as a frequency but it sure as hell is labeled inside my box of crayolas.

And in fact there are thousands of colors in pigment that are not part of the visible spectrum. Crayola green or grass green for instance.

(I don’t have a clue how the brain registers these colors… I’ll leave that to theorists.)

This was news 80 years ago.

Mixing ‘additive’ primary colors of red and blue yields the ‘subtractive’ primary, magenta. Red and green together make the ‘subtractive’ primary, yellow. While blue and green make the ‘subtractive’ primary, cyan.

What kind of geek are you then?

The original article is really lame though. Ms. Elliott starts from a series of faulty assumptions (e.g. that every color we perceive ought to have an associated “spectrum color”, whatever that means) and uses the resulting confusion to illuminate absolutely nothing. Her analysis of what the brain does when perceiving color (“sum up” the wavelengths to calculate an average “spectrum color”) is so far from the truth that it’s silly. I hate this kind of pseudoscientific analysis, because it makes mysteries of completely understandable things.

Brown
It’s actually on the spectrum. It’s the same as dark yellow.

Cherry red
Not on the spectrum. It’s an extra-spectral color that contains mainly long wavelengths but a little bit of short ones.

Ultra violet
Your short wave receptor picks this up without a problem, but your lens filters it out because its damaging. Those who’ve had laser surgery and sliced off a bit of the lens are slightly more receptive to it.

Primary colors
We approximate to 3 because most people have 3 color receptor cones. We pick the wavelengths of the primaries at the point where the cone receptors tend to respond most.

It’s said that some artists have 4 (an extra short wave receptor).

Reptiles
When mammals appeared, they tended to have only two receptors, going back a bit evolutionarily from the reptiles. It wasn’t until primates that mammals returned to 3. Birds are even more sensitive to color, possessing another type of cone cell in addition to the ‘standard’ 3.

Colour is how your brain interprets those signals. Black, white, red, magenta – doesn’t matter. They really are all colours.

Magenta may not show up on a frequency scale, but it is a perceived colour – to say it doesn’t exist because its only a concept in your head is frankly retarded.

Strictly speaking constellations of stars are perceived objects only – the stars have no direct relationship to each other. We “create” a southern cross in our minds – in reality we are looking at a three dimensional object on a two dimensional plane.

now, for “science” purposes we might study the individual stars, and we can regard the system as three dimensional. But when i look up into the sky i see Orion.

You can talk about sensory inputs and how our body perceives sensations, but these are experiences – red is not red until the wavelength carrying it is perceived and correctly interpreted.

Science doesn’t see colour. Colour is what we call it. Life is more than nerve impulses and numbers. Maybe its a lie – maybe we don’t exist at all! – if i cant investigate the true fabric of existence i might as well relax and enjoy it.

I assume that’s to get better-looking photos, but it means you can’t do true CMYK colors on an allegedly CMYK printer! And there’s no way to compensate; true magenta is out-of-gamut, and so’s anything that needs it. I ran into this on a Lexmark and an Okidata, both $5000, allegedly proof-quality printers.

Luckily, Xerox puts their DocuColor engine into a desktop model (Phaser 7750 FTW).

Also people might be interested IRL color theories with the opponent process.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opponent_process