Tag Archives: colour

Race for colour

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The films were made by a young British photographer and inventor called Edward Turner, a pioneer who can now lay claim to being the father of moving colour film, well before the pioneers of Technicolor.

The footage will be shown to the public from 13 September at the museum in Bradford. And a BBC documentary, The Race for Colour, will be broadcast on 17 September in the Yorkshire and south-east regions on BBC1. I will feature in the film for a minute or two. Exciting.

For further details see the story in the Guardian.

on-line test for colour blindness

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Quite a lot of people are colour blind and have poor colour discrimination. There are tests that can be carried out and these include the Ishihara test (which is a screening test that I certainly remember from School) and the Munsell 100-hue test (where people have to arrange a number of coloured discs in order). These tests need to be performed whilst being viewed in daylight. There are online tests but these are less reliable – partly because the viewing conditions vary such a lot. I recently came across a new online test provide by X-rite. It seems to be based on the 100-hue test (or, at least, something similar) and I can see how it could work, despite being an on-line test). I just had a go. It gave me a score of 34 and suggested that for my age group (and gender) the best score was 0 (perfect colour acuity) and the worst was 99 (low colour acuity). Hmmmmmmmmm. I have a version of the 100-hue test and I can perform it perfectly. My real score should be 0. I have perfect colour discrimination. So, much as I like the X-rite test, I have not changed my opinion that on-line tests like these should be used for fun and should be understood to not provide an accurate assessment of your colour vision. On the other hand, it could just be bitter because I only scored 34. 🙁

special females

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Our colour vision results from the fact that our eyes contain three types of light-sensitive cells or cones that have different wavelength sensitivity. Some people (called anomalous trichromats) are colour blind and this is usually because one of their cones is mutated and has a different wavelength sensitivity compared with those in so-called normal observers. Colour-blind is a misnomer really because anomalous trichromats can still see colour; they just have less ability to discriminate between colours than normals. Some people are missing one of the cone classes altogether and are referred to as dichromats; they have even poorer colour discrimination but can still see colour. Only monochromats are really colour blind and they are extremely rare.

For a long time I have known that some females have four cones classes (this makes them tetrachromats). Dr Gabriele Jordan, a researcher at the Institute of Neuroscience (Newcastle University) has spent the last 20 years working on human colour vision. She has discovered that tetrachromatic females exist and that although this gives them the potential for colour discrimination much better than normal trichromats in practice most have normal colour discrimination. However, in a recent report she has found a tetrachromat who really does have enhanced colour discrimination. This is really exciting news!

The report in the Daily Mail suggest that a functional tetrachromat could be able to see 99 million more hues than the average person. Personally I am skeptical of this claim even if, as I suspect, it means 99 million more hues than the average person. The number of colours that an average person can see is debatable but I think may be about 10 million (see my previous blog post).

jaws

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“Wearing a light blue wetsuit that matches the colour of the sea will make you less likely to become the victim of a shark attack, according to researchers.
Sharks are completely colour blind and only see things clearly if they are mostly light or dark, scientists have claimed.”according to the Daily Mail.

This does not make a lot of sense – if sharks are colour blind then it wouldn’t matter what colour you wear. But later in the article the point is put better by Professor Nathan Hart, from the University of Western Australia: ‘It’s the high contrast against the water rather than the colour itself which is probably attractive to sharks. So you should wear perhaps more muted colours or colours that match the background in the water better.’

Apparently sharks really are monochromats – so colour blind in the popular understanding of the word – and so it’s really a case of matching the yoru swim suit with the lightness or brightness of the surrounding water. Don’t wear a very bright or a very dark swim suit, in short. Maybe this can lead to better designed swimwear!

1950s graphics

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When I was younger I was a big fan of Marvel comics. I loved The Fantastic Four and Spiderman in particular. I remember that US-based comics (Marvel and others) around the 1960s included the most outrageous adverts that offered fantastic products at very low prices. I always remember wanting some of the sea monkeys and also some of the x-rays specs. Though they were inexpensive, USA seemed a million miles away to me at the time and the notion of buying something from the USA and having it delivered to the UK seemed too fantastic. So I never placed an order. Probably a good thing – check out this interesting review of the 10 most outrageous comic-book advertisements. See also here for more about the monkeys!!

I was reminded of all of this when I came across an article today in the Daily Mail about the work of Peter Stults, an American artist who has taken modern movies and imagined how they would have been advertised in the 50s and 60s. Really interesting and evocative.


ps. If you like Marvel you may like to read what I found out about the colour of the Hulk.

The evolution of colour in design from the 1950s to today

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I am editor for an academic journal about colour – the Journal of the International Colour Association. We just published our 8th issue today which is a special issue containing some of the best papers from the VI conference of the Italian Colour Group. Readers of this blog will probably particularly enjoy the paper by Francesca Valan on The evolution of colour in design from the 1950s to today. Valan introduces the notion of chromatic cycles and observes that the higher the chroma the shorter the duration of the trend. Some interesting predictions are made about the popularity of certain colours in the near future. To see this and all the other papers from this issue click here.

measuring skin colour

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I came across an article in the Daily Mail about a phone app that can be used to measure skin colour. It is produced by Fujitsu. Trying to measure colour using a digital camera is difficult. The RGB values you obtain depend upon the lighting and the settings of the camera and even on the make of the camera. Technically, we say that the RGB values are device-dependent. Fujitsu have got around this by using a mask (see picture) that contains some standard colours that are skin tones. Presumably the app grabs the RGB values of the standard colours and then uses these to make an adjustment to the captured RGB values of the actual skin. It’s very clever and I am impressed.

UK goes red, white and blue mad!

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This was a picture taken whilst shopping in Tesco today. There are union jack flags everywhere you look at the moment in the UK. The Olympics has not even started yet – the reason there are so many flags already is, of course, the sixtieth anniversary of the Queen taking the throne of the UK. The red, white and blue colours of the union flag – red = Pantone 186 (C), blue = Pantone 280 (C) – derive from a combination of the three flags from England, Scotland and Ireland.

The English flag dates from 1194 when Richard I introduced the cross of St George as the national flag of England.

The Scottish flag was a diagonal white cross on a blue background.

When Queen Elizabeth I died, the scottish king James (King James VI of Scotland) inherited the throne of England and became James I. James I proclaimed himself King of Great Britain and essentially unified England and Scotland. But which flag to use? A new flag was created that was a combination of the previous two and known as the Union flag. A white boarder was added around the red cross because the rules of heraldry demanded that two colours must never touch each other.

The union flag was used at sea from 1606 but became the national flag of Great Britain in 1707 under the reign of Queen Anne. We now had the United Kingdom of Great Britain. In 1801 Ireland became part of the United Kingdom. The Irish flag had been a diagonal red cross on a white background.

The combination of all three flags resulted in the familiar Union Jack.

The name was later changed to United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland when the greater part of Ireland left the United Kingdom in 1921.

Why is Wales not represented in the Union Jack? To read why this is please visit here.