Colour Terms

Posted by Joey on 21:20 2/28/02

In reply to: Colour Terms posted by Irgend Jemand on 17:58 2/28/01

Irgend Jemand wrote:

It may be that my browser isn't cooperating, but I would only count the left colour as blue- the one in the centre looks rather green to me, and the one on the right rather purple. Is there some kind of German/American cultural difference at work here?

Mark wrote:

The center one is cyan, which is blue-green; but the right one is a light blue-- RGB value D0 D0 FF, which as you can see is not biased at all toward red. So you'd better adjust your monitor, or your brain.

This is interesting.

"Baby blue" looked purple to me too -- a light bluish-purple, like lavender or periwinkle. So do 80 through F0 on your second chart. I adjusted my monitor so that all three colors were at equal levels, but on that setting, your charts looked even _more_ purple to me.

I doubt that this is a cultural difference (I'm American), and I wouldn't be so quick to blame our monitors either. I've had many experiences where I disagreed with someone on what color something was, when it was in plain sight and well lit. Maybe I have some color-perception disorder, and maybe Irgend does too.... But I've always thought that color perception must vary slightly from person to person, and that it's normal. As has been discussed, the way people divide up and name colors is subjective, not an inherent quality of color itself. ::shrug:: -Joey

Color perception does vary slightly (but measurably) between people, so that is a possible explanation. (The blues all look blue to me!) I do want to emphasize that the colors I used are what your computer manufacturer thinks is pure blue. That is, I didn't search through colors till I found one that I thought looked blue; I used RGB values directly to specify pure blue. (Of course, if your monitor lets you adjust color values, there's no telling what you have there. :)