Tag Archives: colour

depressed people feel more gray than blue

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People with anxiety and depression are most likely to use a shade of gray to represent their mental state. 

Peter Whorwell, Professor of Medicine and Gastroenterology at University Hospital South Manchester, worked with a team of researchers from the University of Manchester, UK, to create an instrument that would allow people a choice of colours in response to questions. He said, “Colours are frequently used to describe emotions, such as being ‘green with envy’ or ‘in the blues’. Although there is a large, often anecdotal, literature on color preferences and the relationship of color to mood and emotion, there has been relatively little serious research on the subject”.

The researchers have developed a colour chart, The Manchester Color Wheel, which can be used to study people’s preferred colour in relation to their state of mind.

For more information see http://www.alphagalileo.org/ViewItem.aspx?ItemId=67637&CultureCode=en

why is hue circular?

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Everyone is familiar with the colour spectrum. If you pass white sunlight through a prism then it splits into the component wavelengths. The shorter wavelengths appear blue, the longer wavelengths appear red, and in between we have the familiar colours that I learned as school as Richard Of York Gave Battle In Vain, for the sequence red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet, and that I have since understood is taught in the US as a person: Roy G Biv. I wonder if there are any other mnemonics that people know of? Of course, many people believe that Newton was in error when he identified 7 colours in the spectrum – he was probably influenced by Aristotle who wrote about there being 7 fundamental colours as there are 7 tones in the musical octave. I’ve posted about the indigo issue before – http://colourware.wordpress.com/2009/07/20/indigo-a-colour-of-the-rainbow/ – so won’t repeat that here.

Newton was probably the first person to create a hue circle (others, such as Forsius, created colour cicles but often included white and black in the circles). Newton created a true hue cirlce where he took the colour spectrum and wrapped it around, noticing that the two ends of the spectrum (where the reds become bluish and the blues become reddish) look rather similar.

Of course, there was a gap because the two ends of the spectrum did not quite match and thus Newton had to add in some purplish colours – these are hues that are never seen in the spectrum (and are sometimes called extra-spectral hues or non-spectral hues). The hues in the spectrum can be created by a single wavelength; however, the extra-spectral hues only occur when we see several wavelengths at the same time. For example, when we see short and long wavelengths together we can see purple.

In my lecture at the University of Leeds (www.leeds.ac.uk) this week someone asked “Why do the two ends of the spectrum look similar at all when the light is so different physically (at one end the waves are short and high energy and at the other they are long and low energy)?” Very very good question – if changes in wavelengths change the hue why should wavelengths that are so different look so similar?

So, why is hue circular? The answer is that it has very little to do with wavelengths and physics and more to do with human physiology. The human visual system captures light with three classes of cell (called cones) in the retinae of the eye. The signals from these cones are processed by the human visual system to create opponent signals (red-green and yellow-blue). This puts red and green opposite each other and yellow blue opposite each other and results in the perception of hue being circular. It also explains why some hues particularly contrast – sometimes called complementary colour harmony.

dinosaurs were ginger

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In a previous post I wrote about the work of Jakob Vinther at Yale who was studying dinosaur fossils – http://colourware.wordpress.com/2009/08/15/what-colour-were-the-dinosaurs/. This work raised the intriguing possibility that we may be able to work out the colours of dinosaurs based on an analysis of fossil records. Today I read a report that a team of British, Irish and Chinese scientists have done just that – they studied microscopic structures inside the fossilised feathers from a Sinosauropteryx discovered in north-east China and found that the Sinosauropteryx had alternating ginger and white rings down its tail. The work was published in Nature.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1246535/Dinosaurs-colour-discovered-time–GINGER.html#ixzz0eEDBTy0Z

CREATE – deadline for applications approaching!!

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The deadline for applications to attend the final CREATE event in Norway is coming up – end of January. Please take a look at the CREATE webpage – http://www.create.uwe.ac.uk/ – and think about putting an application into this event. If accepted you will receive funding for travel and living expenses and, more importantly, you’ll get a fantastic networking opportunity to meet about 100 other people from all around Europe who are as interested in colour as you are. You don’t have to be European to qualify but you probably need to be based in Europe.

The venue in Norway is stunning and well worth the trip.

Shades of grey – novel

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It was nice to stroll into Leeds today and see all the green grass after all this snow we have had. All I have seen for the last 3-4 weeks is white – or rather, shades of grey as the snow melted, refroze and melted etc. So speaking of shades of grey, I came across a novel today in Waterstones of that very name – Shades of grey by Jasper Fforde – published in Dec 09. This novel is a sci-fi vision of the future where democracy has been replaced by colourtocracy; a social hierarchy based on your colour vision. Sounds interesting but it could take me some weeks to read it so if anyone has read it please reply to this post with a brief review.

Notice how the cover has red, yellow and blue on it. A further indication that the notion of red, yellow and blue as the primary colours is well and truly embedded in the general consciousness of the population (whether it is true or not that these are the primaries!).

Out of interest, I also bought The rain before it falls by Jonathan Coe (I love everything by this author) and Gateway by Frederik Pohl. Not of colour interest … but could be good reads.

Effect of colour names on consumer decisions

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For several decades there has been a great interest in understanding how we use colour names. Do we use the same colour categories (even though they may be called different things in different languages) irrespective of language and culture; in other words, is our perception of colour the same across all cultures and this shapes our use of colour names? Or, is our perception of colour shaped by our language. A well-known study by Berlin and Kay in the late 1960s suggested that language is shaped by perception. But the alterantive hypothesis – known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis – that perception is shaped by language also has support. We may soon know more about this issue because of an interesting on-line colour experiment being carried out by a scientist at Hewlatt-Packard. California-based Nathan Moroney’s multi-lingual colour-naming experiment uses a clever design that allows each participant to perform a small part of the experiment; but when lots of people take part – from all parts of the world and using different languages – some interesting and valuable data is collected. I won’t say any more about the work here because it is not complete yet; but I urge you to go and take part in the experiment. It only takes a minute or less to do it. And there is a debriefing document that you can read about the results obtained so far. Please visit http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Nathan_Moroney/mlcn.html.

Meanwhile a study by Skirinko (at the University of Virginia) and colleagues at Rice University reveals that the colour names that companies such for their products can have a big effect on sales. Consumer reactions are more positive to fancy names such as mocha as opposed to simple and generic names such as brown. The explanation for this is based on categorical perception; people use categories and a name such a mocha maps to a more positive cataegory than the simpler brown. So it is perhaps not jsut the colour of a product that affects sales; sales may also be affected by the langauage used to describe the colours of products.

The work by Skirinko et al. was published in Psychology and Marketing in 2006.

adobe photoshop colour management

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Now, before I write anything thing, I should say that I am a big fan of Adobe products. And it’s hard to think of a company that has done more to progress colour management than Adobe. At the Leeds University’s School of Design, where I teach, we use many Adobe products and Photoshop and Illustrator are virtually standards in their respective fields.

However, I don;t like the way Adobe presents its colour management options.

Colour management is difficult and certainly imperfect. For those users who don’t know or care about colour management the efforts of companies like Adobe and many others (especially those that constitute the ICC – http://www.color.org/index.xalter) have made colour fidelity much better over the last couple of decades. Open source profiles and the use of, for example, the sRGB colour space have ensured that even for users that don’t care or know about colour management, things pretty much work ok. And for those that are experts and know the difference between an input gamut and an output gamut; well, the colour management facilities provided by Adobe, for example, in Photoshop provide excellent tools and resources.

But I can’t help thinking that there is a huge gap between the naieve user and the expert user. Most of the design students in our school, for example, are not colour-management experts but, then, neither are they naieve users. However, the way that most software is designed (and this is not specific to Adobe, to be honest) is that it’s either all or nothing. As soon as you click on colour management options you are presented with a huge range of options (working spaces, rendering intends, colour temperatures, etc.). It just seems to me that this presents the user with a bit of knowledge with a problem since by fiddling with these settings they are more than likely to make things worse rather than better.

If I ruled the universe, then I would have software that is adaptive – that is, it would present colour management options in levels. It would be great if the software could work out your level of colour knowledge and present options accordingly; but if this is too difficult – or unpopular – then at least it could provide a number of levels: naieve, casual, knowledgeable and expert, for example. This way, users would be presented with an appropriate array and range of options.

As it is, I can’t help thinking that the software writers enjoy showing as many options as possible – as if they are shouting,  “Look how many features we have!”  – without regard for whether it is helpful to the user.

flickr colour tool

design, , ,

I just came across a really cool tool – see http://krazydad.com/colrpickr/

You click on a swatch colour and the tool finds images from flickr that are that colour. It doesn’t sound that great. But please give it a try. It’s mucho fun!! 🙂

Why are carrots orange?

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Carrots are orange because they absorb certain wavelengths of light more efficiently than others. Beta-carotene is the main pigment and is mainly absorbs in the 400-500nm region of the visible spectrum with a peak absorption at about 450nm. Carotenoids are one of the most important groups of natural pigments.  They cause the yellow/orange colours of many fruit and vegetables. Though beta-carotene is most abundant in carrots it is also found in pumpkins, apricots and nectarines.  Dark green vegetables such as spinach and broccoli are another good source.  In these the orange colour is masked by the green colour of chlorophyll.  This can be seen in leaves; in autumn, when the leaves die, the chlorophyll breaks down, and the yellow/red colours of the more stable carotenoids can be seen.

However, the properties of beta-carotene are not what prompted me to make this blog. Last night I was watching the 4th in the series of Christmast Lectures by Prof Sue Hartley – the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures are a series of lectures given by a prominent scientist each year to an audience of children and broadcast on TV – http://www.rigb.org/registrationControl?action=home.

Prof Hartley’s lecture was about selective breeding and how humans had used this technique of thousands of years to make food safer and easier to eat. The section about wheat was particularly good.

However, she also talked about the colour of carrots and said that not all carrots are indeed orange at all. They come in many varieties including white and purple.

Prof Hartley said that it was the Dutch who selectively bred wild (white) and cultivated (purple) carrots to create the orange ones that we all know today. The orange was popular because it is the Netherland’s national colour and, at the time, the Dutch were fighting for independence. It was this story that has led me today – yes, Christmas Day – to make a virtiual visit to the British Carrot museum to research this story. You can follow my tracks at – http://www.carrotmuseum.co.uk/. Yes, such a place really does exist! 🙂

It turns out the story is not so clear as that told by Prof Hartley (though I am sure she is aware of this and was simply making it interesting to the children).   Certainfly the first cultivated carrots – in the Afghanistan region – were purple and orange carrots were cultivated in Northern Europe about 500 years ago. However, some scholars dispute the Dutch story about breeding orange carrots because orange was the national colour. Indeed, there is, apparently, a Byzantine manuscript from as long ago as 512AD that depicts orange carrots. So the mystery deepens and I have far better things to do on Christmas day than to research this further. Perhaps if any experts in carrot technology come across this page they can add an informative footnote?