Tag Archives: colour

The future of colour is quantum

news, technology, , ,

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Although our digital displays can show literally millions of colours in fact they show us less than half of the possible colours in the world. This is partly because of the reliance on trichromatic devices – what you probably know as RGB. No matter how we choose them, it is impossible to mix together three colours and make all of the other colours. This is despite this embarrassing statement on the BBC website:

Red, yellow and blue are primary colours, which means they can’t be mixed using any other colours. In theory, all other colours can be mixed from these three colours.

This is just plain wrong. It is not the case that in theory, all other colours can be mixed from these three colours. In theory, and in practice, they cannot.

But I digress. The point is that using a three-colour primary system – a trichromatic system – is never going be able to reproduce all of the possible colours in the world. But even if we do use three, we could do better than the current TVs, phones and tablets on the market if we could improve our technology. The problem is that the red, green and blue lights in these displays are not as bright and colourful as they could be. That is where quantum dots come in.

Quantum dots are tiny crystals that can be precisely tuned to efficiently produce very specific colours. The crystals are grown from a mixture of various semiconductor materials and liquid solvents. By carefully controlling the conditions, engineers can adjust the size of the crystals, which determines the wavelength of the light that the crystals emit. Smaller quantum dots, with a diameter of two nanometres (two billionths of a metre) or so, emit short-wavelength, or blue, light. Bigger dots, with diameters closer to eight nanometres, produce light that’s nearer the long-wavelength, or red, end of the spectrum. We can expect to see new technology on the market soon offering brighter and more colourful displays.

Colour: Art and Science

art, culture, design, , ,

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I run a module at the University of Leeds called Colour: Art and Science. For me colour is a classic meta-discipline and understanding of colour requires and appreciation of ideas from lots of different academic fields. So I like to present a very multi-disciplinary perspective of colour and I have students enrol from all sorts of different departments in the University which is a lot of fun. One of the main reasons I run this blog is as a resource for those students.

So I was interested to just come across this Brief History of Colour in Art by Sarah Gottesman which covers some of the same stuff that I talk about.

In the same vein I came across this discussion by @CINEMAPALETTES about cinema colour palettes that shows how colours are used to set the mood of iconic films.

The redder the male, the more successful it is.

nature, , , , ,

redbird

According to Joseph Corbo, an associate professor of pathology and immunology at Washington University, the genes affecting red coloration belong to a wider family of genes involved in detoxification. Redness may be a sign of a robust, quality mate who can easily cleanse harmful substances from his body.

“In many bird species, the redder the male, the more successful it is at finding mates,” – Joseph Corbo.

For more see http://www.deccanchronicle.com/science/science/200516/researchers-solve-mystery-of-red-colour-in-birds.html

what colour is your passport?

culture, design, fun, , , , , , ,

passport colours

Whenever I am travelling to a conference and standing in a line at an airport it seems to me that everyone has either a burgundy passport like me or a red one if the are from USA. It turns out that most passports really are the same colour as this great infographic shows. Well, one of only about four colours so it seems. It’s interesting the way they are grouped; I wonder why Africa tends to use green or black. For the full story see. here.

colour helps you sleep

knowledge, nature, news, , , , , ,

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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

advanced stuff, knowledge, , , , ,

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.

I like pink

culture, design, , , , , ,

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Pink is one of my favourite colours. Generally, however, if you ask people what their favourite colour is, the most frequent response is blue irrespective of gender, age or culture. Adults, that is. Because most young girls prefer pink. There is a huge commercial machine that pushes girls towards pink and boys towards blue. I support the Pink Stinks campaign which I blogged about in 2009, but I fear its chances of success are slender.

In my 2009 I linked to a BBC article that noted that pink for girls and blue for boys was not always the case. People cite the Ladies’ Home Journal from 1918 saying:

There has been a great diversity of opinion on the subject, but the generally accepted rule is pink for the boy and blue for the girl. The reason is that pink being a more decided and stronger colour is more suitable for the boy, while blue, which is more delicate and dainty, is prettier for the girl.

For some reason I always thought that it was the association of blue with the British Navy in the first world war that started the association of blue with boys. But today I read an article that suggests that the association did not start until the 1950s!! Apparently in 1927, Time magazine surveyed 10 major departments stores across the country about how each store associated pink and blue with boys and girls. The results showed that most children dressed in gender-neutral clothing and typically wore white because it was easy to bleach and keep clean. It wasn’t until the 1950s that pink became a female colour according to Estelle Caswell. Read all of what Estelle had to say here.

Egyptian Blue – the first synthetic pigment

art, culture, , , ,

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The first synthetic pigment – Egyptian Blue – was made by the Egyptians around 4500 years ago. A technique developed by scientists at the British Museum has allowed them to discover traces of Egyptian blue on ancient objects that no longer have their original paint finishes intact. Before the Egyptians learned how to make a synthetic blue pigment from sand and copper the main blue pigment was obtained from the mineral lapis lazuli, first found in Afghanistan about 4500 BC. Extracting blue from lapis lazuli was extremely expensive.

Blue remained an expensive pigment however and came to symbolise truth, peace, virtue and authority in fine art. Images of Mary usually showed her wearing a blue robe. Blue was used for symbolic reasons. Cheaper blue pigments became widely available in the modern era of synthetic pigments.

Further details can be found here.