Interesting Color Vision and Perception Info

This is a very short video I thought interesting



The reason I went looking for YouTube videos on color vision early this morning, is when reading a thread about deep red laser diodes, I was mulling over the reality of color vision, how colors don't really exist at all except through our eyes ability to allow the brain to distinguish some of the different wavelengths of light, as a genetically provided sense phenomena. I knew this, but for some reason the reality that colors don't really exist as we perceive them, except in us, became clearer. After that, I stopped thinking of color and started thinking in reference to wavelength alone for a few moments, finding I much prefer our colorful world over the cold reality of wavelengths, snapping back to the shared but colorful illusion of RGB and everything it can provide; millions of possible perceived variations, some colors such as magenta which as far as the R,G & B sensing cones of our eyes are concerned, don't even exist in relation to a wavelength except in our mental constructs of combined frequencies. Pushing further into thoughts about wavelength it occurred to me how we hear sound, it too is only differences of wavelength yet I hear pitch, of course sound is not perceived like we sense colors, but hearing is also a sense phenomena and except for amplitude and mixes, only a difference in wavelength. I'm up in the arctic again baby sitting some telecom gear, I guess I have too much time on my hands if thinking of such things.

Another YouTube I found interesting about color mixing:



Watch this video and it will auto-start another of the series which I find even more interesting.

Interesting video, I didn't know the genetics of it, where as I knew the mechanics quite well.

Still more, some of us are tetrachromats; with four color pigments in our Cone cells. Also, as I've mentioned before, there is a wide variation in the size and location of the spectrum we can see. 400nm-700nm is the officially recognized spectrum, but 300nm-900nm is the largest spectrum I could find reference to. My own vision was ~330nm-850nm as of about a decade ago.

Very interesting information. Never really thought about our color perception before and I do love a good informational video so a win-win. Thanks for posting the videos. Will have to watch the other 2 in the series of the 2nd video some time.

Someones post on extra-spectral colors worth reading if the concept is new to you as it was for me:

From extra spectral colors | Many Worlds Theory: Extra spectral colors are colors that don’t correspond to any one single wavelength of light. They are “real” colors, in the sense that retinal cones get stimulated and our brains perceive something. However, extra spectral colors don’t appear in any rainbow. To make an extra spectral color, more than one wavelength of light must hit our retinas. Our brains then take this data and “create” the color we perceive.

Cut and paste from http://techterms.com/definition/cmyk regarding cyan, magenta and yellow: These are the basic colors (black too, of course) used for printing color images. Unlike RGB (red, green, blue), which are used for creating images on your computer screen, these colors are "subtractive." This means the colors get darker as you blend them together. Since RGB colors are used for light, not pigments, the colors grow brighter as you blend them or increase their intensity.

The below color chart shows the extra-spectral colors of magenta, cyan and yellow which are perceptually between red, green & blue, or more precisely, are perceived by us when our eyes are exposed to two R, G or B wavelengths of light, as shown on this chart.

Great references. In that first video, that could explain why red/green colour blindness is so much more common than other types, because of the similarity in coding of the green and red receptors.