It might seem a strange question but this is a question I answered on quora today. You can read the full answer here. However, in short, it is not simply the red wavelengths. Below you can see the light reflected by a typical red object such as an apple.
You can see that the apple reflects quite broadly between about 550 and 600nm. That includes all of the wavelengths we associate with yellow and orange as well as red. The apple even reflects nearly 10% of the light at 400nm (which we normally associate with blue) that falls upon it.
Colour is complex. You need to understand stuff way beyond the spectrum of light to understand colour.
Recently I had the idea of trying to teach the basics of colour theory using Instagram.
The idea is to keep the messages really clear and simple and combine them with colourful imagery.
You can see this on my Instagram account @colourchat.
I was inspired to do this after watching what GothamChess was doing on Instagram to teach some simple – and not so simple – ideas about chess. Who would have thought it? From chess theory to colour theory.
2020 was a depressing year in many ways for obvious reasons. However, I was still really proud of the four PhD students who graduated with me during this year.
Keith Findlater graduated with a PhD in high-dynamic range imaging, Sarah Hasbullah graduated with a PhD in colour for colour in fashion and body image, Jing Lin graduated with a PhD in the effect of coloured light on alertness and Jie Yang graduated with a PhD in colour and landscape images. It’s always exciting to see where graduated students go next. I already know that Sarah and Jie have academic positions and Keith has got a great job in medical imaging in the NHS.
We had a lot of fun with our third colour podcast. We started off talking about the colour vision of unicorns and my co-presenter Huw put forward a very entertaining suggestion of what their colour vision would be like if they existed. We then explored the effect of colour and light on health. The effect of colour on heart rate and blood pressure is still contentious which is extraordinary, I think after all of these years that the scientific community has been studying colour. We also spoke about the role of colour and light on sleep. Sleep is really really important. Watching this TED talk by Matthew Walker about sleep might be the most important thing that you watch this year.
In our second colour podcast we chat about how long human colour vision has been the way it has. When did we first colour? How long have we even been human?
Our first colour podcast was all about animal colour vision. Can dogs see colour? Are bulls enraged by the colour red? Can they even see it? And which animals have even better colour vision than we do. You can list to this short podcast here.
I started a podcast all about colour. It’s mainly for fun – and as an educational resource – but I hope you find it interesting. You can see the podcast here. Please take a listen and if you like it please think about liking it or sharing it.
For quite a long time I have been working on the relationship between colour and meaning. A lot of very good research has been carried out over the last few decades in this area. Typically, in this research, people are shown a colour and asked to respond what they think about it on a bi-polar scale; for example, is it warm or is it cool. Or, is it modern or is it old-fashioned. This research is very nice but in my opinion we should turn the problem on its head. Rather than asking what we think about a colour we should ask which colours do we associate with warm, which colours do we associate with modern, which colours do we associate with happy. There are several reasons for this. One is because I would like the research to be useful to, for example, designers. Designers don’t typically start with a colour and wonder what that colour represents. Rather, they might start with a brief that includes some concepts, such as modern and financial and think start to explore which colours might represent (or communicate) those words or concepts. It’s great to do this sort of research in the lab. However, I would really like to be able to generate a colour palette for any word or concept and it is clear that we can’t run costly and laborious lab experiments for every word (and for every word in every language actually).
I worked with a major paint company to automatically generate colour palettes for words using large-scale internet scraping following by machine learning. We have a pilot website with results for a few words. It looks like this.
Another way to get lots of data about this topic is using crowd sourcing. We have also been doing this and you can read our latest paper about this in the Journal of the International Colour Association. Details of this paper are shown below:
I am really excited to be part of the team of people who just launched the Colour Literacy Project – for further details see https://colourliteracy.org/
I started teaching my own multi-disciplinary approach to colour at Leeds University in about 2005 as I became frustrated with the way that traditional colour theory was being taught and how it was often presented in textbooks. Over the last few years I have discovered I am not alone. I found out that Luanne Stovall (https://www.luannestovall.com/) and Robin Kingsburgh (http://robinkingsburgh.com/colour-literacy-project) were doing something similar in their universities. And it was a pleasure to come across the fantastic resources of David Briggs for whom I have the highest regard – you can see his brilliant resource here – http://www.huevaluechroma.com/. I first became introduced to these people through Maggie Maggio (https://maggiemaggio.com/color/) who came to Leeds a year or so away and gave a brilliant and inspiring colour workshop. So it turns out that I am not the only one who is frustrated with the way that traditional colour theory is often presented and taught. However, with the Colour Literacy Project – supported by both ISCC (https://iscc.org/) and AIC (https://aic-color.org/) – we hope to change the way the world views colour in the 21st Century one step at a time. You can get involved to by visiting the Colour Literacy Project website.
