
Brown: color is weird [video] - pmarin
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wh4aWZRtTwU
======
Quai
I really enjoy this guys videos. The refreshing level of details. Great,
geeky, humor.

I especially enjoyed his "rants" about the design of a old toaster, and
traffic lights, of all things.

~~~
chipperyman573
The one on traffic lights is way more interesting than it sounds! Everybody
should check it out. There's also a really interesting point he makes at the
end that applies to something a lot of people on HN might relate with
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiYO1TObNz8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiYO1TObNz8)

The toaster one is alright, it kinda bothered me when he said there was
"literally NO reason" to design something the way it was (I think it had to do
with the position of the coils) - obviously there is, it's probably just not a
reason he'd like (cost, ease of manufacturing, etc). It makes me wonder if
there was other info he skipped on because it "wasn't important" or "stupid".
That's a pretty minor point though, overall his videos are very good.

~~~
jngreenlee
He seems like a young technical Andy Rooney!

------
cheschire
Every “but wait!” Argument I tried to come up with, he answered seconds later.
Very well paced and about as full of bad dad-scientist jokes you could make
it.

~~~
scrollaway
He's one of my favourite YouTube channels and I found out about him a mere
weeks ago. Binged all his content. He has wonderful playlists on VHS and the
format wars, color TV, analog everything etc. I recommend you look at his
other videos and click on whatever titillates your interest.

~~~
gibolt
I recommend you look at his Patreon page. His quality, depth of research, and
overall uniqueness made supporting a no brainer for me.

------
ainar-g
If you've liked this video, you may also enjoy Alec's series on _LaserDisc_
[1] (no, it's not about CD) and RCA's _Capacitance Electronic Disc_ or _CED_
[2].

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLv0jwu7G_DFUoByWSHHoS...](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLv0jwu7G_DFUoByWSHHoSTlUIxY7VkJLi)

[2]
[https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLv0jwu7G_DFVP0SGNlBiB...](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLv0jwu7G_DFVP0SGNlBiBtFVkV5LZ7SOU)

~~~
ajot
The CED saga reminds me of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, as in a
"trilogy in five parts". Nevertheless, I love this guy and really enjoyed
listening to the story of the CED.

~~~
mbreese
CEDs were great. We had two generations of those players growing up. The best
part was that you eventually got to know exactly where the cut points were in
movies. Because that was when you had to go up to the TV to flip the disc.

I’ll have to listen to his story on them. Probably a very different view from
me as a kid just using them to watch movies pre-VCR.

~~~
nwallin
There are a _lot_ of HN appropriate lessons in his CED series. Especially the
one about being on time to market: if the CED hit the market before the VCR or
laserdisc did, it might have survived, or even possibly kept RCA alive. Or the
stuff about using tried and true methods instead of the fancy new tech of the
day.

My parents recently moved into a smaller home, and ... deacquired a bunch of
their furniture by way of my house. In the shuffle I ended up with a bunch of
my parents' old records. Being susceptible to impulse buys, I bought a record
player. I actually really enjoy the experience of playing records. There's
something about the physicality of it. I can't just press a button on my phone
and ignore it. I have to choose what to listen to next. I have to physically
flip the record twenty minutes in. It's not purely a background thing, it's a
physical process and experience. Music has gone from something I ignore to
something I participate in.

I'm not actually sure that's in any way relevant to the conversation at hand,
but when I started ranting, I felt it was.

~~~
ainar-g
Focus is a commodity. Sometimes, people just need rituals. I think, people are
slowly starting to realise this.

------
maxnoe
Also watch this please if you ever do plots using colormaps:
[https://youtu.be/xAoljeRJ3lU](https://youtu.be/xAoljeRJ3lU)

About the perceptual uniform, colorblind friendly colormaps in matplotlib
since 1.5. Now also adapted by most other plotting tools.

~~~
quietbritishjim
If we're on the "watch this YouTube video if you work with colours" train,
here's a great explanation of why gradients usually have a dark band in the
middle, on the MinutePhysics channel:

[https://youtu.be/LKnqECcg6Gw](https://youtu.be/LKnqECcg6Gw)

In short: the RBG values in an image are not actually the intensity of light,
but some nonlinear function of intensity. To do a weighted average of two
colours you need to first undo that nonlinearity, then do the averaging, then
reapply the function. Most software doesn't do that so the colours end up
wrong. This also applies to resizing images.

~~~
mantap
Pretty much the first thing you learn in game development (OK not the first
thing), is the difference between linear-RGB and sRGB and the need to do
lighting calculations in linear space in your shaders. It's crazy that
professional graphics software doesn't get this right.

~~~
martin_a
> It's crazy that professional graphics software doesn't get this right.

"Professional graphics software" does what it's supposed to be and sRGB is an
inferior standard in most use-cases of that software. Its gamut is simply not
large enough, but it's a nice smallest-possible commond ground.

~~~
marcan_42
This isn't a gamut problem, it's a bad coding problem.

"Professional graphics software" (i.e. Photoshop) absolutely does the wrong
thing for color blending with the default settings. It's not a problem of
being limited to the sRGB color space, it's about the math in use being
outright wrong for use on that color space. You need to go into the settings
and tick some checkbox to have some hope of it doing the right thing ("Blend
RGB colors using gamma"), and even then I bet it only applies to some
operations like blending itself, not scaling and other filters.

This is because all non-linear image encoding modes, like sRGB or straight
gamma, should be viewed as _compression_. You don't perform mathematical
operations on _compressed_ data. It's like trying to mix together two MP3
files by literally taking the bytes and averaging them out. That's madness and
does not work. You need to go into a linear format, like raw PCM, to be able
to do that (with the right word size). Same with images: you need to convert
from sRGB to linear light to be able to do math on them. But 95% of software,
including "pro" software, doesn't do this, it just blindly does math on
compressed (gamma encoded) data, and the result is ugly (we're just used to
it).

Of couse, with Photoshop you can set your image mode to linear light and
_then_ things work fine... but that's not because linear light is required to
make this stuff work, it's because Photoshop is _broken_ when not using linear
light and doesn't compensate for the encoding.

Meanwhile GIMP, a few versions ago, fixed this whole mess and actually applies
blending and filtering in linear light (regardless of what mode your image is
using in memory), making its blending and filtering much more pleasant and
correct than Photoshop's. So yeah, it may not support CMYK or other "pro"
features... but for a good chunk of basic editing in RGB space, you're
actually going to get more correct and visually appealing results if you use
GIMP than Photoshop.

------
seanalltogether
One thing he missed in the video is the fact that red and green cone cells
make up 95% of the cones in human eyes, hence our extreme sensitivity to
colors that fall between the two. Dark orange looks brown because we have so
much resolution in that space to work with, whereas dark green is just dark
green, or dark blue is just dark blue.

~~~
martin-adams
In the video he said that we recognise it as brown because we learned the name
for it and thus recognise it independently. Is that idea compatible with us
having more red and green cone cells than blue - i.e. having more resolution
to recognise brown?

~~~
marci
Also a matter of context. Brown is orange and grey can be red.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJBfn07gZ30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJBfn07gZ30)

Here's a part of a documentary talking about the cultural aspect of how we
perceive colours and the power of naming a color (with the Himba people)

[https://www.dailymotion.com/video/xl7eh1](https://www.dailymotion.com/video/xl7eh1)

------
willis936
I watched this with my SO last night. We have a very small cross section of
shared media interests (notable ones being star trek and grand designs). One
of the few youtube videos I’ve put on that she got excited about was Tech
Connections video on rice cookers. I mean, I know I really like his stuff.
Even though I’m deep in the weeds with most of his topics and already know it,
I still find pleasure in hearing advanced topics explained from base concepts
with such clarity. He knows his business and it shows.

------
boffinism
Am I the only one who already thought brown just _was_ dark orange? Like, if
you google 'dark orange', you get shown a bunch of brown swatches as the top
results. Isn't that... just what brown has always been?

~~~
Gupie
But there are light browns that are not orange, e.g.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khaki](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khaki)

~~~
Broken_Hippo
It is because brown really isn't _just_ dark orange. There are oranges that
are both dark and not brown - these usually are on the redder side of orange,
like dark orange clouds in the sky at sunset.

Brown is, in general, a muted orange. Take the red and yellow, add a hint of
green (or purple, honestly) - and you have browns.

------
ken
Maybe weird but not unique: every non-saturated color is like this. Try to set
your RGB lighting strip to gray. Or watch the veins pop out of your LD's
forehead when someone asks for gray lighting on stage.

~~~
whatshisface
Pass out grey translucent glasses with a little bit of diffusion to everybody
in the audience.

~~~
MarioMan
Now I'm wondering if there are programmable lenses to provide basic, real-life
filters at concerts and other events.

------
mikedilger
Is our color perception influenced by our culture's language?
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity_and_the_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity_and_the_color_naming_debate)

~~~
improbable22
I don't know, but the words we use for it are certainly influenced by our
culture!

Here's a paper with nice graphs, drawing where different languages put the
boundaries between words -- they divide up the hue-saturation space into a
varying number of blobs:

[https://www.pnas.org/content/115/31/7937](https://www.pnas.org/content/115/31/7937)

(The data isn't theirs, it was painstakingly colected by going and asking lots
of people "what colour is this pantone?". The paper does some fancy stuff on
top of that. But it has nice graphs.)

------
ackshually
Technology Connections is so great. Never dissapoints.

------
geomark
This is great. I wish I had seen it before I did the unit on color with the
kids in my after school club, although they did have their minds blown
slightly when I made the screen on my cell phone all yellow and then put it
under a microscope so they could see that there were only red and green pixels
illuminated - no yellow light coming off that screen at all, it was all in
their heads.

------
longtom
Grey is also weird for the same reason. The moon appears white at night, but
its albedo (% reflected light) is actually 0.12 which is comparable to that of
asphalt.

~~~
OrgNet
Black or white-ish asphalt?

~~~
longtom
Not black asphalt. Well, depending on the context it will appear black. :^)

[https://i.imgur.com/dGDaVLz.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/dGDaVLz.jpg)

[https://nasaviz.gsfc.nasa.gov/vis/a010000/a011900/a011924/c-...](https://nasaviz.gsfc.nasa.gov/vis/a010000/a011900/a011924/c-1280.jpg)

------
thdrdt
I always wonder if there will be displays in the future that combine emission
and absorption at the same time.

Like a combination of OLED and E Ink.

This will also give you the possibility to turn your TV into a painting
(without using power) when you are done watching.

~~~
aasasd
Some displays already have the two modes―alas don't remember what they're
called, it's some variation of color eink. You get color indoors, or only
black-on-white in sunlight.

Some ebook devices also have ‘backlight’―usually diffused light from the sides
so it doesn't shine directly in the eyes. I think this is the crux of your
idea, because currently even if you use lcd/oled with backlight, no-power eink
will be severely washed out in comparison. And if eink gets good color and
contrast in the future, it will then fulfill the two-mode technology.

~~~
jrockway
I think you're talking about the displays that the original OLPC used:
[http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Display](http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Display)

~~~
aasasd
Yeah, apparently the Pixel Qi company is a spin-off from OLPC, and that's the
name I've heard in the context of color eink tech (took me a while to remember
it). Defunct since 2015, however.

The page on the wiki.laptop.org isn't too clear on the technology—presumably
it's more complex than just LCD and eink slapped together. The Wikipedia page
on the XO laptop seems to have some detail:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OLPC_XO#Display](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OLPC_XO#Display)

------
aasasd
Obviously I now need to repeat the dark room trick but with cut-out pictures
of chocolate, coffee, nuts, dirt and bears.

------
pininja
Big fan of this channel. He’s got a great series on the RCA CED.

------
fyp
I can kind of make sense of why humans(animals?) evolved to see brightness in
relative terms. The same object will have different amount of light reflecting
off it based on the time of day so you don't want your brain to register those
as different scenes.

Hue also makes sense. It's the distribution of wavelengths being reflected.

But what does saturation correspond to? When do things become
saturated/desaturated in the natural world?

~~~
joshspankit
Ripeness?

~~~
scotty79
Sunbleached? Roughened surface?

------
mygo
Color is hard to talk about correctly. If you’re reading this, video creator,
since you asked at the end, this was very well done. Really, really good.
Thanks for distinguishing magenta. Thanks for discussing both the additive and
subtractive color models. Thanks for going over a few mathematical ways to
describe color (RGB, HSB, etc). Thanks for mentioning photoreceptors and the
visual cortex, how colors appear differently in different environments, and
how color is an _event_. Thanks for mixing paints!

I would include this as part of an introduction to color theory.

If you were to make a V2, I’d suggest discussing gray, since I’m sure you’d
find a way to make gray interesting (I mean it _is_ though) :)

------
VBprogrammer
As someone who suffers form a colour vision abnormality these things make me
happy; if the world is so messed up for normal people then who cares that it's
slightly more queer for me.

------
cpcat
So basically there's no such thing as orange. It's just brown

~~~
empath75
Bright brown.

------
cturner
Classical works use colour in ways that are confusing to read. You either have
to accept that it is describing a fantasy, or that the author's concept of
colours is different than ours.

I had wondered if there was any example from own language of this, in order to
get the benefit of that perspective. This seems to be it.

Perhaps we had a name for brown before orange. Whereas other colours tend to
be named for the saturated version.

Has cultivation changed citrus colours, as with carrots?

------
Waterluvian
So after all that (it was fantastic) I just want to confirm my understanding:
"brown" is literally just "dark orange", correct?

------
Noxmiles
So, brown is only a cultural construct - actually it's just a dark orange. The
Video is amazing. I wish to read more scientific research on this subject.

------
garfieldnate
Technology Connections is one of my favorite channels! It's one of the few
whose videos I consistently watch immediately after release.

------
shultays
I honestly couldn't see the orange when the square is surrounded by black. It
was still brown for me.

~~~
ackshually
Were you in a bright room? That would have given you context, which is what he
warned against.

~~~
shultays
Yea, that might be the case

------
Priem19
This was the last topic on which I expected to completely watch the video.
Fantastic presentation.

------
analog31
While I was in school, a professor was grilling me on color, and said, okay
smarty pants, if you think you know what brown is, show me a brown laser.

We happened to be in the lab, so I pointed to a brown spot on the wall, made
by a very powerful laser. After that, we referred to it as the brown laser.

~~~
robbrown451
You can't have a magenta laser either (since magenta can't be represented by a
single wavelength). Or a black laser. Or for that matter, a C sharp laser.
That doesn't mean those concept are particularly hard to wrap one's head
around.

~~~
JdeBP
Nowhere in that anecdote does anyone assert that brown does not exist. "If you
think that you know what brown is" is not talking about existence.

~~~
robbrown451
It seems a bit of a pedantic distinction, but ok. I edited the comment. I
don't think it changes the spirit of the comment, though.

I've seen many people try to argue that magenta doesn't exist, or isn't a
color, etc., simply because it doesn't correlate to a single wavelength.

Regardless, what is he trying to say, then? That brown can't be understood
because there is no such thing as a brown laser? My point remains.

~~~
analog31
I was just recalling an amusing anecdote. The brown color produced by the
laser was because it burned the wall. It's too late for me to edit the post
for clarity.

~~~
robbrown451
Yes and it is an amusing anecdote. I commented because I've seen so many
people who think that "color" must have a one-to-one relationship with
wavelength of light, and it seemed your professor was doing that as well.

~~~
analog31
Actually, he was trying to get me past thinking that way. It all got started
when I was trying to figure out RGB colors for some computer display.

~~~
robbrown451
Fair enough. I wasn't trying to take away from your anecdote or slight the
professor, just add some commentary on that way of thinking about colors.

------
rabuse
We do have other labels for colors nowadays though (ex. Olive, Khaki, Navy)

------
kwelstr
Why is yellow ignored as a primary color green pushed as a primary color?

~~~
a-nikolaev
Red, blue, and yellow are subtractive primary colors. E.g. if an object
absorbs(subtracts) red light, then under white light it looks green
(blue+yellow remained). This is how colors work in painting.

On the other hand, your monitor does not absorb colors, but emits it. If you
shine red and green light on a white surface (or on your eye directly), you
will see green. This is called additive color. RGB (red, green, blue) are
primary additive colors.

[https://drawpaintacademy.com/subtractive-additive-
color/](https://drawpaintacademy.com/subtractive-additive-color/)

~~~
robbrown451
Magenta yellow and cyan are subtractive primaries. Cyan might pass for blue,
but magenta really isn't red.

And really you could say red green and blue are subtractive primaries (as well
as additive), but we use cyan ink because it subtracts red light. (etc)

~~~
a-nikolaev
Yeah, technically yes, but the poster above refers to the primary colors used
in arts, which are red, blue, and yellow. They do represent subtractive colors
magenta, cyan, yellow.

~~~
robbrown451
I'd say red yellow and blue is used in elementary school art class, and not
much more. And even then, kids almost always have more colors to work with
than three.

The subtractive color model isn't really good for paints anyway, it is best
with translucent inks/dyes, where the white from the paper comes through.

------
sixothree
To be fair, the title is "Brown; color is weird"

------
tasogare
tl;dv: "Brown is just orange, but darker."

~~~
jmiserez
"tl;dv" is so new/unused there's no results on Google (or Urban Dictionary for
that matter). How is that possible? o_O

~~~
shakna
The more common usage would be "tl;dw"

~~~
tasogare
Yes, I tried to adapt the shortcut with "viewed" but didn’t think of "watched"
(not native speaker of English).

~~~
Normal_gaussian
dw was already used for "don't worry", so its a shame shame that tldw caught
on instead of tldv

~~~
belinder
when would you use _too long dont worry_?

~~~
Noxmiles
tl;idc is the real thing you have to use

------
t_treesap
I used to like this guy, and his factual information is usually interesting,
but he sometimes expresses opinions that downright infuriate me, to the point
I had to stop listening.

~~~
tessellated
Care to give examples?

------
gowld
Everytime he said "context", he should have said "contrast".

He also didn't mention that grey is dark white, by the same phenomenon.

And of course red is dark pink, for rooster teeth fans.

~~~
sneakernets
Well, Contrast is usually in parlance as extremes. I think he means in context
of what else is in the image, not just contrast. For example, you can have a
"dark green" and "dark orange" used in a graphic of a tree on a black
background, and you would perceive it as brown due to the context of the
"tree-ness" on your screen.

------
GistNoesis
Color is cool. Let's add another dimension to this video.

It's one way of conveying information the brain can interpret in a flexible
way.

But the brain is also good at depth perception. Let's combine these :

For example in the app I released yesterday StlToRelief :
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22319140](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22319140)

I use a color gradient to increase the perception of depth. It makes a thin
bas-relief standout.

With color-mixing 3d-printing this is an effect we can now exploit.

There is a closely related phenomena that we have when doing war paints for
camouflage. Area (i.e. peaks like the nose) that would naturally catch the
light appear brighter so you have to paint them dark while hollow area that
naturally appear dark must be painted white. The resulting painting make a
face look flat which stand out less.

