Category Archives: knowledge

Why yellow and blue don’t make green

[and why we should stop teaching it in schools]

You will find images like the one above, that show that red, yellow and blue are the primaries and that yellow and blue make green.

Sometimes this is represented as a colour wheel:

So some people say yellow and blue make green. And you will find other answers that say that yellow and blue make black. How can this be?

Well, we need to understand a little science to get to the bottom of this.

The figure below shows what happens when you mix an ideal yellow dye with an ideal blue dye. The blue dye reflects light perfectly in about a third of the spectrum (and absorbs perfectly in the other two thirds). The yellow pigment reflects light perfectly in about two thirds of the spectrum (and absorbs perfectly in the other third).

The problem here is that the blue and yellow pigments (between them) absorb perfectly across the whole spectrum. The people who say that yellow and blue make black are saying so because of this argument.

Note that blue is a particularly bad choice of primary because it absorbs so broadly across the spectrum. [Making the blue even purer would only make the problem worse by the way.] Yellow is a good choice of subtractive primary because it only absorbs in one third of the spectrum.

The problem is, the people who say that blue and yellow make black are wrong of course. Every child knows this. In practice, if we measure the reflectance spectra for blue and yellow pigments they don’t look like those ideal ones I showed above. For a start, they are quite smooth. Here is a reflectance spectrum for a real yellow pigment. (The reflectance factor, by the way, is the proportion – or per cent – of light that the colorant reflects at each wavelength.)

Notice that with a real yellow colorant, it does not reflect perfectly in the middle and long wavelengths and it does not absorb perfectly in the short wavelengths. It reflects and absorbs to some extent all the wavelengths but it absorbs more at the shorter wavelength and absorbs at less the middle and longer wavelengths. The same is true of a real blue colorant; it does not absorb perfectly at the middle and longer wavelengths. The consequence of this is that you don’t get black if you mix blue and yellow. You would get black if the pigments were ideal but they are not. We live in the real world. However, you certainly don’t get a lovely bright green as shown in the colour wheel with red, yellow and blue primaries. You would get a dark desaturated murky dirty greenish colour. The main reason for this is that the blue is absorbing too broadly. Interestingly, if you look at the artist John Lovett’s page he explains that to mix a yellow and blue you should use a yellowish blue (and a bluish yellow). 

Now let’s see what happens when we mix cyan and yellow dyes. We’ll start with the ideal colours.

It’s very nice. We get a lovely green colour. Cyan is a great subtractive primary because unlike blue it absorbs in only one third of the spectrum (the red or long wavelengths). Note that it is precisely because the cyan does not look pure that makes it a great primary – that’s why I get so furious about people saying the primaries are pure colours. The cyan looks bluish-green because it reflects in two thirds of the spectrum and only absorbs in the reddish part. Neither the cyan nor the yellow dye absorb in the middle (green) part of the spectrum and therefore the result of mixing cyan and yellow is a lovely green. Except it is not quite true. Remember, this is for ideal pigments. Real dyes do not look like that. Refer back to the measured reflectance spectrum for the real yellow pigment. In reality cyan and yellow do make green but the green might be a little less saturated than you may wish for because of the unwanted absorptions by the two dyes in the areas of the spectrum where ideally they would not absorb. (It was the great Robert Hunt, who worked for many years at Kodak – for those who knew him – who taught me about unwanted absorptions.)

Have you ever seen this happen. Of course, you have. Whenever you use a printer (which typically uses cyan, magenta and yellow primaries) to get a green, the printer is using cyan and yellow to make the green.

Remember those people who say that you can’t make blue because – yawn – it’s a pure colour that can’t be made by mixture? Well, have you ever printed out blue on a printer? Of course, you have. Let’s look again at our ideal primaries and see if we can explain it.

That’s right. Mixing cyan and magenta makes blue. The cyan absorbs in one third (the red third) and the magenta absorbs in one third (the green third) but neither absorb the short wavelengths.

John Lovett explains that you can do a decent job of mixing red, yellow and blue dyes, but only if you allow yourself to use multiple blues and multiple yellows, for example. If you want to do the best job possible using only three subtractive primaries, then the best you can do is to use cyan, magenta and yellow. 

So finally you can see that the best subtractive primaries are cyan, magenta and yellow because the cyan is red absorbing, the magenta is green absorbing and the yellow is blue absorbing. And what is more, you now understand why this is the case (rather than accepting dogma). You also understand why there is a relationship between the CMY of subtractive mixing and the RGB of additive mixing.

The optimal additive primaries are red, green and blue (I will cover this elsewhere). And for this reason the optimal subtractive primaries are cyan (red absorbing), magenta (green absorbing) and yellow (blue absorbing). 

But don’t be fooled by this lovely subtractive colour mixing diagram. You might not get such lovely blue, green and red colours when you mix real CMY primaries (either on your printer or with inks/paints). Why not? Because of the unwanted absorptions.

If you want to to know more you could do worse that get a copy of Measuring Colour, now in it’s 4th edition, and authored by Hunt and Pointer. 

This post gets quite a few hits so I will take this opportunity to direct you to my short series of youtube clips that describe the issues discussed in this post in a visual way. You can see them here. If you want something a bit more technical check out this short lecture on colour primaries or visit my patreon.

Or visit my Patreon page here for more analysis like this

Why the ‘three colour primaries’ rule is wrong

A great many textbooks state that there are three colour primaries. This is normally followed by the statements:

  1. All colours can be made by mixing together three primaries.
  2. The primaries – which are often cited as being red, yellow and blue – are pure and cannot be created from mixture.

Not only do I profoundly disagree with these last two statements but I disagree with the statement that there are three colour primaries. Here’s why:

It is relatively easy to go into a lab or studio, start with three colours (any three; you pick’em) and find that you cannot make all colours. People who do this will often say, that theoretically you can make all colours from, say, red, yellow and blue but that practically you can’t simply because the primaries are not pure enough. The problem is, the more pure you make the primaries, the fewer colours you can make!! The fact is you cannot make all colours from three primaries no matter how carefully you choose the primaries. You cannot do it practically and you cannot do it theoretically.

We can trace the idea that primaries are ‘pure’ back to ancient Greece. In those times and for centuries afterwards it was even frowned upon to mix colours at all because of the loss of purity.

It turns out that if you want to make a large range of colours using three inks or paints, the primaries you should choose are cyan, magenta and yellow. Don’t just take my word for it. Go and ask HP, Canon or Xerox. These companies have made printers for decades and make a living out of selling devices that allow consumers to make a wide range of colours with just three primary inks. They all use cyan, magenta and yellow as their primaries.

But how can magenta be a primary you might ask? It’s far from pure. That is because the notion of primaries being pure is an outdated idea (outdated for several centuries I might add) and should not be taught in Schools. Cyan, magenta and yellow make good primaries for an ink system precisely because they are not visually pure – they each absorb in a narrow part of the visible spectrum and therefore emit light quite broadly. Blue would make a poor primary in an ink or paint system because it absorbs at too many wavelengths. Mixing together blue and red inks make a very dirty brownish black colour. So the gamut (the technical term for a range of colours produced by some primaries) of colours we can make from red, yellow and blue inks or paints is quite small.

So, we can’t make all colours from three primaries, the best primaries are not those that are pure, and primaries can be made by mixing other colours. It is easy to show that a blue can be made by mixing together cyan and magenta inks and this is shown rather nicely by the artist Scott Naismith in this very nice youtube video.

We tend to use three primaries in many systems because you can make a great many more colours with two primaries than with one and you can make a great many more colours with three primaries than you can with two. But you can’t make all colours with three. You can make more colours (a larger gamut) with four or five primaries – though you still can’t make them all – but we reach the point of diminishing returns. Is it worth the extra expense of having four or five primaries if three do a pretty good job? Usually not. However, sometimes we do think it is worth using more than three primaries. For a start, most printers use CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow and black) so that is four primaries. Then we have hexachrome printing systems with six primaries. The Quattron TV is manufactured by Sharp and has four primaries (red, green, blue and yellow) whereas most TVs only have three (red, green and blue).

The truth is there is no perfect set of primaries and there is no fixed number. A set of primaries is simply a set of colours in a colour system that can make a useful range of colours (gamut). Very often three hits the commercial soft spot but that’s just about engineering and economics.

For further information list to my podcast about colour

 

Listen here

Or visit my patreon page at https://www.patreon.com/colourchat

colour lighting



Very excited with the temporary installation of our new spectral lighting system at Leeds University. Whereas most coloured lights are based on RGB, we have a system that has a lot of spectral control (it works by having 11 different coloured LED primaries). We have several PhD students who are using these lights with their research. Nic and Yiting are looking at the effect of light and colour on alertness and also on impulsivity. Meanwhile, Soojin (pictured) is looking at the effect of colour on creativity (though in her study we won’t be using really saturated colours like those shown in the pictures). Hoping for some great publications on this soon. However, if you are interested in whether coloured lighting can affect heart rate and blood pressure take a look at our AIC publication (pdf) that we presented in Tokyo in 2015.

RGB displays are more complicated than you think

Nexus_one_screen_microscope

Most people assume that display screens are based on RGB – that is the amount of red, green and blue light emitted is controlled in three signals. We tend to think that there is an RGB ‘value’ at each pixel. However, the reality is a bit more complicated. The picture above is a close up of the sort of display on the Samsung Galaxy S phones, as well as the Nexus One. It is called an RGBG pentile layout. This layout was introduced because our eyes are more sensitive to green light (so green pixels don’t need to be as physically large to appear just as bright to our eyes). However, it means that the ‘pixel’ in a standard AMOLED display consists of 8 colours: RGBG on top of BGRG. Some people claim this leads to less sharp images compared to the standard RGB displays of LCD displays (see below) that are sometimes referred to as real-stripe displays.

LCD-rgb-subpixel-matrix

Some of the AMOLED displays have an RGBW layout, which adds a white subpixel next to the standard RGB subpixels. This allows the display to have an edge in brightness due to a dedicated white subpixel. With that advantage the backlight doesn’t need to be as bright, which saves battery since the backlight is a major user of battery in a mobile device. There is also Samsung’s latest Super AMOLED display technology that has a new subpixel arrangement called the Diamond Pixel. The first phone to use this pentile type was the Galaxy S4. There there are twice as many green subpixels as there are blue and red ones, and the green subpixels are oval and small while the red and blue ones are diamond-shaped and larger (the blue subpixel is slightly larger than the red one).

Displays are much more complicated and varied than you might think. One consequence is that it is not so easy to compare the resolution of different displays technologies beacause they vary in what they call a pixel.

non-visual effects of light

Most people know that the ear system has two functions: hearing and balance. It is less well known that the visual system also has two functions. The first is seeing. The second is a set of non-visual functions including circadian rhythm. Mechanisms are being discovered that are particularly sensitive to blue light. So short-wavelength, or blue, light inhibits melatonin which is a chemical that makes you drowsy. So looking at bright lights late at night, especially blue ones, can contribute to a poor night’s sleep. So put your smart tablet away now and go to sleep!

In all seriousness though, I knew there was a reason why I do not like watching Chelsea on Match of the Day.

colour

Studying these functional effects of colour and how they can be used in design is a major theme of the research I lead at the University of Leeds in the School of Design. If you have interest in these areas please contact me.

Looking for colour blind people

colour blind example

Most colour blindness is hereditary. The faulty ‘gene’ for colour blindness is found only on the X chromosome. You have two X chromosomes if you are female or an X and a Y chromosome if you are male. It is because females have two copies of the X chromosome that they are far less likely to be colour blind. A male inherits his X chromosome from his mother and his Y chromosome from his father. So men do not inherit colour blindness from their fathers but from their mothers who can be carriers if they have one faulty X chromosome. Snoooooooooze. Probably you are bored reading this. The real point of this post is to say that Bradford University in the UK are studying colour blindness and are seeking females who are not colour blind but who have a child or a sibling who is. If this sounds like you please get involved in the study, help someone get their PhD, and maybe find out something interesting and useful. For more details see here.

colour helps you sleep

cat-686827_640

Light in our natural environment tends to be bluer first thing in the morning and redder at dusk.

Researchers from the University of Manchester looked at the change in light around dawn and dusk to analyse whether colour could be used to determine time of day. They constructed an artificial sky beneath which they placed mice and they then measured the body temperature of the mice for several days and their body temperature was recorded. The highest body temperatures occurred just after night fell when the sky turned a darker blue – indicating that their body clock was working optimally. When just the brightness of the sky was changed, with no change in the colour, the mice became more active before dusk, demonstrating that their body clock wasn’t properly aligned to the day night cycle.

According to Dr Timothy Brown: “This is the first time that we’ve been able to test the theory that colour affects the body clock in mammals. It has always been very hard to separate the change in colour to the change in brightness but using new experimental tools and a psychophysics approach we were successful. What’s exciting about our research is that the same findings can be applied to humans. So in theory colour could be used to manipulate our clock, which could be useful for shift workers or travellers wanting to minimise jet lag.”

colour physics 101

kindle_colourphysicsfaq

Download my colour physics FAQ e-book for the Kindle here.

Also available as a physical book from Amazon.

  • What is colour?
  • How does colour vision work?
  • Why is the sky blue?
  • What is the colour spectrum?

The answers to these and many other related questions about colour physics are each provided in a short and easy-to-understand form. Will delight and entertain colour professionals and curious members of the public.

accurate colour on a smartphone or tablet

Electronic displays can vary in their characteristics. Although almost all are based on RGB, in fact the RGB primaries in the display can vary greatly from one manufacturer to another. Colour management is the process of making adjustments to an image so that colour fidelity will be preserved. In conventional displays – desktops and laptops – the way this is achieved is through ICC colour profiles. Colour profiles store information about the colours on a particular device that are produced by RGB values on that device. So to make a display profile you normally need to display some colours on the screen and measure the CIE XYZ values of those colours; you then have the RGB values you used and the XYZ values that resulted. The profiling software can use these corresponding RGB and XYZ values to build a colour profile so that the colour management engine knows how to adjust the RGB values of an image so that the colours are displayed properly. Building a profile often requires specialist colour measurement equipment – though this can often be quite inexpensive now. If you are using your desktop or laptop display and you have never built a profile then you are probably using the default profile that was provided when your display was shipped. The default profile will ensure some level of colour fidelity but particular settings (such as the colour temperature or the gamma) may not be adequately accounted for. If you want accurate colour then you should learn about colour profiling.

It all sounds simple except for the fact that ICC colour profiles are not supported by iOS or Android operating systems on mobile devices. I find this really surprising but that’s how it is for now. Maybe it will be different in the future.

This means that ensuring colour fidelity on a smartphone or tablet is not so straight forward. So what can you do?

Well, there are two commercial solutions to this problem that I am aware of. They are X-rite’s ColorTrue and Datacolor’s SpyderGallery. ColorTrue and SpyderGallery are apps that will use a colour profile and provide good colour fidelity. These are great solutions. Perhaps the only drawback is that the colour correction only applies to images that are viewed from within the app. Having said that, they allow your standard photo album photos to be accessed – but the correction would not apply, for example, to images viewed using your web browser. This is why a proper system implemented at the level of the operating system would be better, in my opinion.

There are two alternatives. The first would be to implement your own colour correction and modify the images offline before sending them to the device. This would not suit everyone – the average consumer who just wanted to look at their photos for example. But it is what I typically do here in the lab if I want to display some accurate colour images on a tablet. But if you were a company and you wanted to display images of some products for example – it might be a reasonable approach. It has the advantage that the colour correction will work when viewed in any app on the device because the colour correction has been applied at the image level rather than the app level. But it does mean you need to do this separately for each device and keep track of which images are paired to each device. This is ok if you have one or a small number of devices but maybe not so good if you have hundreds of devices.

The second alternative would be to build your own app. If you want to do things with your images that you cannot do in ColorTrue or SpyderGallery or if you have lots of devices and you can’t be bothered to manually convert the images for each device, then you could install your own app that implements a colour profile and then does whatever else you want it to do.