[HN Gopher] Why we're blind to the color blue
___________________________________________________________________
Why we're blind to the color blue
Author : goodway
Score : 317 points
Date : 2021-07-16 17:20 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (calebkruse.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (calebkruse.com)
| aaroninsf wrote:
| The use of "blind" in the title is problematic in several serious
| ways, not least, for being obviously false for any conventional
| interpretation.
|
| Idle comment: were divergent focal point such a significant issue
| for visual perception, IMO we could anticipate it would be widely
| applied by evolution, and we would see many prey species hiding
| inside blue blurs. There are innumerable reasons this is not the
| case; but that it isn't is one more problem with the conjecture.
| uj8efdjkfdshf wrote:
| It's no big surprise given that the fovea, which is responsible
| for detailed vision, contains no blue cones.
|
| [0] http://hyperphysics.phy-
| astr.gsu.edu/hbase/vision/rodcone.ht...
| IlliOnato wrote:
| What happens in monochrome light, say if you are in a darkroom
| with a monochrome blue light source, would you be able to focus
| on objects? Would they appear blurry? Or this "out of focus blue"
| only happens when other colors are present?
| rishikeshs wrote:
| The is interesting!
| abeppu wrote:
| There's an optometry place in my neighborhood with a back-lit
| sign with big, blue block letters. And every time I walk by at
| night I note how fuzzy it looks.
|
| I'm convinced this is an intentional troll. This optometrist
| knowingly picked a sign to make people momentarily question their
| vision.
| skunkworker wrote:
| This happens every wintertime for me as blue string lights are
| put up, and they always appear "fuzzy" compared to other
| colors.
| smusamashah wrote:
| I got dry eyes some time ago. Dryness gone but now I see
| starburst at night in headlights, neon signs and stars. Being
| unable to see stars as flickering dots anymore hurts me the
| most. Neon signs in particular if blue are totally whacky and
| unreadable until I go too close. I went to optometrist
| recently and they didn't understand why blue in particular
| and recommended a color blindness test which I obviously
| passed.
|
| Now I understand why blue in particular. Damage is done, I
| wish I could take it back.
| jbmny wrote:
| May I ask how exactly your dry eyes led to degradation in
| vision? I've recently been struggling with mild corneal
| abrasions that leave me with something resembling a
| "starburst" in my night vision, and I'm suspecting it may
| be caused by dry eyes.
| pionar wrote:
| Wait, stars are flickering dots for most people?
| munificent wrote:
| Yes, stars typically twinkle slightly.
|
| Stars are unimaginably small point lights in the sky.
| They look like larger dots because of imperfect focus in
| our eyes [1]. But since they are in fact so tiny, it
| means very small atmospheric variation and obstruction--
| heat shimmer, floating dust, etc.--can significantly
| momentarily occlude the star. That causes its perceived
| brightness to vary over time.
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airy_disk
| FPGAhacker wrote:
| From atmospheric distortion they can appear to flicker,
| or "twinkle" as the song goes.
| abeppu wrote:
| Do you also find that this effect is way more pronounced in
| recent years with LED string lights than colored lights many
| years ago? I think b/c LEDs are more monochromatic, I will
| notice a difference between my parent's extremely old string
| lights and newer sets.
| nyanpasu64 wrote:
| Technology Connections did some videos on "Making Holiday
| Lights Less Garish", where instead of using narrowband
| colored LEDs he filtered white ones:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PBFPJ3_6ZWs
| madaxe_again wrote:
| I've always found blue LED or cold cathode signs absolutely
| illegible at night - just an amorphous blur. I always thought it
| was just me.
| [deleted]
| seanalltogether wrote:
| I'm surprised the author doesn't mention the fact that only 2%-5%
| of the cone cells in our eyes can perceive blue. That's a huge
| factor in how well we process colors with blue light.
| chmaynard wrote:
| Citation please.
| ars wrote:
| Alternate source showing something similar:
| https://gamesx.com/misctech/visual.htm
| cgufus wrote:
| Interesting article and discussion.
|
| I always wondered how the focusing actually works. It happens
| ,,automatically", but what is involved? Are all cone types used
| for the focusing, or mostly the green-type ones? Or are there
| even special, dedicated cells for the focusing only? Does the
| control ober the muscle controlling the lens shape goes via the
| brain, or is there a more direct mechanism?
|
| Is there an expert around to explain or give some links to
| explanations?
|
| (as a side comment: as a teenager I learned to control the focus
| point to a certain degree. There were these pattern-3D images,
| ,,Magic Eye", and since the perceived depth does not correspond
| to the actual distance of the image, they eye needs to correct. I
| guess the same applies to 3D cinema, and may well cause the eye
| strain reported by many)
| seunosewa wrote:
| I'd like to see what happens when the red channel is blurred.
| Digital images like JPGs seem to blur the red channel more than
| the blue and green channels.
| klodolph wrote:
| JPEG transforms the color into YUV channels. Y is the
| luminance, equal to R+G+B or something like that. The U&V
| channels (color) are often downsampled.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| Y is basically "mostly green, a bit of red and hardly any
| blue" rather than a flat R+G+B. So blurring the green channel
| (as TFA does) is nearly equivalent to blurring the Y channel.
| klodolph wrote:
| I guess that will teach me for saying "or something like
| that" rather than going into detail.
| Someone wrote:
| I would guess the deeper reason is that the sky is blue. That
| makes it more useful to have good vision in red and green.
|
| If we needed good resolution everywhere, we might have had eyes
| optimizing for different colors, four eyes, etc.
|
| Also, it isn't as simple as this article describes. The human eye
| can vary its focal distance
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accommodation_(eye)) over a larger
| range than the effect of color aberration, so the eye _could_
| optimize for having optimal focus for blue light or vary that
| over time.
|
| (https://www.osapublishing.org/josa/abstract.cfm?uri=josa-68-...
| indicates humans can learn to do that in the lab)
| crowbahr wrote:
| What's funny is that most mammals can't distinguish between red
| & green.
|
| For example: the reason why tigers have red camouflage is that
| their prey cannot distinguish them from the background green of
| the forest, combined with the fact that mammals cannot create
| green pigment for their fur (yet).
| throwaway8582 wrote:
| One theory I've heard is that hunting for fruit was probably a
| major driving factor in human color vision, as well as that of
| other primates. Good red/green vision would've helped our
| ancestors search for ripe fruit (usually red) by being able to
| easily distinguish it from foliage and unripe fruit (usually
| green).
| briefcomment wrote:
| The second to last demonstration blows my mind. I can't help but
| feel like I'm being duped, the result is so sharp.
| enriquto wrote:
| i guess with red you get a similar effect. The green channel is
| the one that affects most the perceived intensity. If you blur
| the green everything becomes blurred.
| ihojman wrote:
| easy physics question here: if the light converges in one focal
| point after passing through the lens, as pointed in the 2nd
| animation, that means that the outer light beams reach that point
| latter in time than the inner ones, right? My point is that at
| the same speed, they are traveling longer distances, and the
| animation does not show that, but that they get to at the same
| time.
| JacobDotVI wrote:
| >This is one of many examples of our brains being much more
| powerful than our eyes. Too often we think of our eyes as perfect
| cameras. However, it is the brain that is able to accomodate
| [sic] for all of the optical shortcomings in order to resolve the
| world.
|
| While this is a description of the human brain and human eye it's
| interesting to me that it is a very accurate description of the
| progression of camera technology in the last few years as we
| shift from the supremacy of Big Glass to the amazing results from
| computational photography being applied to cell-phone sized
| lenses
| rosstex wrote:
| If you like this, you'll very much enjoy this exploration of
| color and chroma keying in cinematography:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aO3JgPUJ6iQ
| crazygringo wrote:
| I don't believe the blurred images at the end have _anything_ to
| do with eye focus, as the author suggests.
|
| After all, chromatic aberration is blurring of only a very, very
| small amount.
|
| The demonstrated seemingly negligible perceptual effect of
| blurring blue to a _huge_ degree in a multicolor image doesn 't
| seem to have anything to do with that, but rather the fact that
| we perceive primary blue as a much _darker_ color than primary
| red or green, and we perceive differences in lighter colors much
| more easily.
|
| If the author were correct that we have big problems focusing on
| blue, then we'd see that blue text against a black background
| would be massively blurry -- but it's simply not. It's
| comparatively low-contrast (because blue is a dark color), but
| it's nearly indistinguishably as sharp as red and green.
| phnofive wrote:
| I agree, in that it was pretty easy to dismiss effects on the
| example image. Doing this with shapes and a variety of hues and
| luminances would be a better way to prove the point if it bears
| out.
| jcoq wrote:
| I agree. Further, almost all of the blue channel in this image
| is from the white clouds or nearly black water. There's no
| other major source of blue.
| mtdewcmu wrote:
| What would be the result if you flipped the colors, so that
| the sharp elements are blue and the ocean is red or green?
| rst wrote:
| It also matters a bit that the blue channel is only 2% of all
| color-sensitive cones in the retina. That has a lot more to do
| with poor spatial resolution int the blue channel than the
| optics.
|
| http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/vision/rodcone.ht...
| gcanyon wrote:
| I'd love to see the same comparison across a range of images.
| isatty wrote:
| I think that the title is a massive oversimplification because
| chromatic aberration by itself is not enough for us to be blind
| to the color blue. We do have cones that can detect blue for
| one.
|
| We are however, less sensitive to it so maybe the eye doesn't
| focus based on that channel(?).
| formerly_proven wrote:
| I wanna point out that LCA cannot be responsible for e.g.
| blue displays being basically impossible to read. Why?
| Because they are still impossible to read when they're the
| only thing that's around, and blue LEDs are very
| monochromatic. So the eye would have to focus on the blue
| light, which would make LCA go away.
|
| I suspect that a plausible cause could be that there just
| aren't a lot of blue receptors in the retina, as the eye is
| pretty insensitive to blue overall.
| crdrost wrote:
| I'm not sure you're right. At night both I and my wife have
| reported difficulty reading glowing blue signs compared to
| glowing red/green signs at the same font size, brightness, and
| distance.
|
| I'm also not sure that the author is correct; the wrong-focal-
| distance explanation seems rather weak simply because our focal
| length is adjustable.
| techrat wrote:
| You're not alone. I normally have excellent night vision but
| seeing things in glowing blue, such as the clock on the
| coffee maker or the microwave, causes the digits to split
| like double vision and become blurry while everything else
| remains the same.
| royjacobs wrote:
| I have the exact same thing. It always makes me wonder why
| companies choose to have blue neon lights on their buildings
| because it's nearly impossible to read them when it's a thin
| font.
| jbluepolarbear wrote:
| You have astigmatism. I have a similar issue with blue when
| not wearing my glasses. I have 20/20 vision, but my
| astigmatism makes it difficult to focus on certain things. A
| computer being a big one. Blue light blockers help, but with
| proper astigmatism correction I don't need them.
| techrat wrote:
| 20/10 vision in one eye, 20/13 in another, no astigmatism.
|
| Blue LEDs in clocks when viewed at night look completely
| fucked up.
| jbluepolarbear wrote:
| I've never met anyone without some astigmatism;
| especially, people with other vision impairment.
| Astigmatism is the number one cause of night blindness
| which is what you described.
| pengaru wrote:
| > In Europe and Asia, astigmatism affects between 30 and
| 60% of adults.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astigmatism
| jbluepolarbear wrote:
| I can't actually verify that number presented in that
| paper. I've looked and that stat is attributed to that
| paper, but there's no evidence that the paper said that.
| Plus the paper is pay walled so unverified.
| pengaru wrote:
| Considering the obvious inability for anyone to reliably
| know the astigmatism status of everyone they meet, not
| only is your anecdata unverifiable it's completely
| absurd.
| ubercore wrote:
| I don't think it's night blindness. I have the same
| problem, with and without glasses (I have astigmatism).
| tcmb wrote:
| HN is so funny. 'I have no astigmatism.' -- 'Sure you
| do!'
| jbluepolarbear wrote:
| Because nearly every person has some amount of
| astigmatism.
| borski wrote:
| Sure, but presumably the parent has been checked by their
| eye doctor and indeed, not _everyone_ has it.
|
| Signed, a dude with very slight astigmatism :)
| techrat wrote:
| You're precious. Why don't you tell me what else my eye
| doctor has never diagnosed me with?
| jbluepolarbear wrote:
| 9 in 10 people have some affliction of astigmatism.
| Astigmatism is just that your eye isn't perfectly
| spherical. What does your eye prescription say in the cyl
| and axis fields, that's your astigmatism correction.
| techrat wrote:
| 'eye prescription'?
|
| Bruh. Read the comment of mine you replied to. 20/10 and
| 20/13 vision. I don't need prescriptions.
| washadjeffmad wrote:
| That's like saying you can run a 3 minute mile so you
| don't have a shoe size.
|
| This whole thread is silly.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| Aren't those numbers about your ability to focus on
| distance objects, though?
|
| I could totally believe the someone might have "perfect"
| vision that doesn't require correction, but still have a
| slight astigmatism that impacts their vision under
| certain specific scenarios such as when viewing blue LEDs
| in low light.
|
| I'm not necessarily saying that's what you have, but more
| just that to the extent your eyes have been evaluated, it
| was likely "yeah they look great as far as your ability
| to perceive the brightly lit eye chart, no need to do the
| more detailed analysis where we figure out the other
| parameters that will never be used because you're fine,
| bye."
| [deleted]
| naikrovek wrote:
| pro tip: don't tell other people about their own
| experiences unless they ask you, and you're a
| professional.
| jbluepolarbear wrote:
| Pro tip: nope
| sgtnoodle wrote:
| I dunno, but when I look at glowing blue signs and blue
| Christmas lights at night, they look significantly more fuzzy
| than other color lights.
| gisely wrote:
| Chromatic aberration may be a contributing factor, but I am
| surprised the author didn't mention that S cones (which we use
| to perceive blue) are only 2% of the cones in the retina [1].
| Additionally S cones are distributed randomly when compared the
| regular lattice of M and L cones. The distribution of the
| different cone types alone may be sufficient to explain why our
| acuity for blues is impoverished relative to reds and greens.
|
| [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cone_cell
| larsbrinkhoff wrote:
| Also, S cones are mostly found outside the fovea.
| arthur2e5 wrote:
| This lower resolution of blue is pretty well known in recent
| image compression work (XYB space of JPEG-XL and guetzil),
| and number of S cones is the only explanation I have seen on
| that.
| thehappypm wrote:
| I'm sure you could find an image where blurring blue ruins it,
| and blurring red and green have no impact. This feels like
| cherrypicking especially given how trivial it would be to just
| show a bunch of examples.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| The author is correct. Lighting designers sometimes use the
| effect deliberately to create blue spotlights that viewers
| can't focus on.
|
| That description doesn't do it justice - you have to experience
| it to appreciate it. It's very striking and slightly surreal.
| tobr wrote:
| They might be correct about chromatic aberration and the
| difficultly of focusing on pure blue, but the conclusion from
| their experiment is completely wrong.
| nickff wrote:
| I mostly agree with you, but would add that blurring the blue
| is affecting the sharpness of the ocean, which has little
| detail in that image; blurring red or green affects details on
| the land, which are very noticeable. One might think the cloud-
| ocean edges would be blurred by the blurring of blue, but the
| clouds are so much brighter than the ocean (red & green
| channels), that you can barely notice any difference.
| mrob wrote:
| See the very low coefficients for the blue channel when
| converting (gamma-compressed) RGB to luma. E.g. the common Rec.
| 709 standard assigns only 0.0722 weight to blue.
| Y' = 0.2126R' + 0.7152G' + 0.0722B'
| ywain wrote:
| This is basically the same as the Y component used in JPEG,
| right? Could the phenomenon described in the article be
| caused by the fact that they used JPEG images? I.e. would we
| observe the same thing happen with raw/uncompressed images?
| codetrotter wrote:
| Did you mean to respond to another comment in this thread
| where they were talking about YUV? Your comment does not make
| much sense to me here but would make more sense to me there.
| mrob wrote:
| Luma is an approximation of perceived brightness. All the
| conversion formulae weigh blue substantially less than the
| other primaries. This supports crazygringo's assertion that
| "we perceive primary blue as a much darker color than
| primary red or green".
| anamexis wrote:
| It makes sense to me here - GP discusses how we see
| perceive blue as a dark color, and parent comment
| corroborates that with a low luma coefficient for blue.
| bioplastic wrote:
| Indeed, green contributes more. Example of the Y channel
| after blurring r/g/b: https://imgur.com/a/3p15Qe1
|
| And colured versions: https://imgur.com/a/Knq2Ue3
|
| (image source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flower#/media/Fi
| le:Flower_post...)
| rob74 wrote:
| More, as in 10 times more for green, and 3 times more for
| red. So it's true that we're pretty blind to blue, just the
| "focusing" explanation is not correct...
| bioplastic wrote:
| To be honest I need to rethink the arguments of the
| linked article - if we just use coloured filters in front
| of our eyes which exclude each channel, the image (I
| think) remains sharp (or at least that happens with
| red/cyan anaglyph glasses).
| fotta wrote:
| Blue is my favorite color. Has my whole life been a lie?
| emerged wrote:
| Blue is my favorite color and it seems like whenever I call
| something blue somebody tells me it's green. I don't like
| green.
|
| I have no idea what to make of that.
| anonAndOn wrote:
| Maybe it's the lighting?[0]
|
| [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_dress#/media/File:Wikipe
| -t...
| ulrikrasmussen wrote:
| That explains beautifully why I always feel like I've lost my
| contact lenses when I'm at a concert and the lighting goes all
| blue.
| obloid wrote:
| That was my first thought when reading this. On numerous times
| I've been watching a stage show and can see everything great.
| Then the lights turn blue and it's just a blue blur.
| einpoklum wrote:
| TBH I was totally in the dark about this. With the article having
| put this in focus for me, I now feel a little blue about the
| whole affair, though in a diffuse kind of way.
| mdeck_ wrote:
| Blue LEDs and black lights show this effect very clearly. This is
| e.g. described much more succinctly in the top comment here:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/3c1qsg/why_do_b...
|
| > 2 reasons: 1) You don't have the nearly as many short
| wavelength detecting blue cones as you do red and green in your
| fovea. 2) The angle of refraction is dependent on wavelength and
| short wavelengths get refracted more than relatively longer ones
| by your eye and therefore focus in front of your retina if you
| are myopic (nearsighted). The black lights are throwing off a ton
| of very short wavelength light and when coupled with the larger
| pupil you have in the dark it sets your eye up for a bunch of
| chromatic aberration. They should look clearer if you are
| hyperope or overcorrected in your myopic prescription, or if you
| view them at a closer distance.
| qwertox wrote:
| Nice style of the videos. Also the content, of course, but it's
| nice seeing them so chalkboard-like.
| lordnacho wrote:
| This would seem to explain why when you go to the optician, he's
| got a lot of red/green tests but never blue one as far as I can
| tell. The critical graph is the one with the blue peak to the
| left and the red and green near each other on the right.
|
| Also it seems to hint that there's a fourth receptor that humans
| don't have in the gap region. Tetra-chromatic creatures do exist
| IIRC.
| seba_dos1 wrote:
| Even tetra-chromatic humans exist, although it's pretty rare.
| The fourth cone tends to peak between green and red though.
| arendtio wrote:
| Does someone know, if this phenomenon is this also related to our
| bad visual capabilities at night?
| atishay811 wrote:
| This is amazing to see. We should use this for image
| optimization. When we compress channels, we should compress the
| blue channel to like 30% while keeping others at fairly large 80%
| and it might appear better than a 60% compressed image.
| nimish wrote:
| That's chroma subsampling, most commonly 4:4:4 4:2:2 and 4:2:0
| where this principle is used
| trollbridge wrote:
| That's exactly why images tend to be compressed in a YUV colour
| space instead of an RGB one.
| MaxBarraclough wrote:
| As triclops200 says, lossy image compression algorithms have
| long taken advantage of this. You might be interested in this
| page, _Your Eyes Suck at Blue_ , which shows an image with the
| blue channel increasingly compressed:
|
| https://gamesx.com/misctech/visual.htm
|
| _edit_ See also this counterpoint:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=573593
| triclops200 wrote:
| We already do and have done historically. The most obvious
| example I know of is that 8bit color uses 3 bits for green and
| red and 2 for blue.
| _0ffh wrote:
| For some time many graphics cards had a 16 bit "hi-color"
| mode with 5:6:5 bits for RGB (SVGA, etc.). Most graphics card
| modes that used only 8 bits per pixel used that value as an
| index into an 256x(8x3) bit color palette (MCGA, VGA, etc.).
| Grakel wrote:
| Doesn't hurt that there's hardly any blue in that image and it's
| dialed down almost to black.
| excalibur wrote:
| So if you're looking for ways to hide data in an image, making
| slight adjustments to the blue channel isn't the worst idea.
| schneems wrote:
| The animations are really nice. Does anyone have a guess what
| tool they're made with (based on font or other hints)?
| calebkruse wrote:
| Thanks! These were all done by hand in Procreate on an iPad
| since I wanted to give them more of a chalkboard feel.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Interestingly, many ancient text sources do not speak of blue
| color at all, using other expressions.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wine-dark_sea_(Homer)
| glial wrote:
| There's a fascinating Radiolab episode that expands on this
| topic, asking the question about whether 'blue' is a feature of
| nature or a cultural invention & transmission:
|
| https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/segments/21121...
| perihelions wrote:
| (Non-rhetorical question). I don't understand why the article
| writes off kuaneos / kuanos as "later stages of Greek", when
| it's already present in Herodotus [0]. Just how a big of a
| sample size do they have between Homer and Herodotus, that they
| can interpret the evolution of such a minor, infrequent word?
| Isn't Homer basically "before written literature" Greek anyway?
|
| edit: Also, wasn't Homer supposed to be a blind dude?
|
| [0]
| https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecbatana#Historical_descriptio...
|
| > _" The battlements of the first circle are white, of the
| second black, of the third circle purple, of the fourth blue
| [kuaneoi], and of the fifth orange:"_
| tobr wrote:
| The author is wrong, that experiment doesn't show anything about
| focusing. The blue channel in RGB is simply _much_ less bright
| than the green, which means it has much less contrast, which
| means that manipulating it in various ways has less of a
| noticeable effect on the image as a whole. This happens to be
| true for blurring it, but also adjusting the contrast, inverting
| it, pixelating it, offsetting it, averaging it completely,
| whatever manipulation you can think of.
| [deleted]
| Camillo wrote:
| Snell's work on optics would later be overshadowed by the GNU
| alternative, Fresnel.
| leblancfg wrote:
| And its BSD fork, Libresnel
| Camillo wrote:
| I can't believe this awesome joke is getting downvotes. It's
| like pearls before swine, but I'm leaving it up so you can find
| out which amongst you are objectively bad people.
| aimor wrote:
| I'm tempted to experiment. If I take a blue LED and a green LED
| in the dark, when I focus on one the other should appear blurred.
| floatrock wrote:
| Blue LED clocks (like on 'high end' microwaves or appliances)
| are one of my biggest pet peeve. I'm not an old fart by any
| stretch -- my eyes are fine -- but the blue blur when looking
| at the clock at night is a real thing.
|
| Fun fact: this phenomenon is similar to why older cars had
| yellow-tinged fog lights. It's partly light scattering in
| suspended water droplets (fog), it's partly the perception
| factors talked about in the article, but basically reds and
| yellows have lowest "light scatter". You're not gonna build a
| red foglight for red-is-danger reasons, so yellow foglights are
| the next best thing.
| SomeHacker44 wrote:
| Yep, exactly. Scattering of light is proportional to the
| fourth power of the frequency (or, equivalently, inversely
| proportional to the fourth power of the wavelength).
|
| I've been telling this to my kids whenever I got the
| inevitable "why is the sky blue" line. :)
| klodolph wrote:
| My experience is that in the dark, I can't focus on a blue LED
| _at all._ It will just look a bit blurry.
| Kenji wrote:
| That's complete bullshit. The image remains sharp because the red
| and green channel remain sharp. It's obvious that the entire
| image has a nasty yellow tint. This has nothing to do with
| chromatic aberration, try again.
| drcongo wrote:
| One of my favourite series in art is Yves Klein's blue work. For
| anyone unfamiliar, he found a blue that he considered the bluest
| possible blue [1], and went on a journey painting everything in
| that blue. I loved that he did this, and then eventually managed
| to get to an exhibition of his work at the Tate Modern and was
| absolutely blown away by it - it really needs to be seen in the
| flesh to appreciate it. There's something about his blue, that
| when painted on to a sculpture, almost makes the 3D disappear and
| the sculpture looks 2 dimensional. Extremely beautiful.
|
| As a side note, some (many?) cultures around the world have no
| word for blue, blue is just other shades of green.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Klein_Blue
| pier25 wrote:
| Great anecdote!
|
| Reminded me of the short story Zima Blue by Alastair Reynolds
| (which was adapted into an animation short on Netlifx's "Love,
| Death and Robots").
| thom wrote:
| I found that episode very moving. It captured the feeling I
| suspect many of us experience, of having started out with
| simple, blissful naivety, before slowly accreting layers of
| grown up, professional bullshit until a craft loses its joy.
| The desire to strip it all away, not just the ways in which
| your work has changed over the years but also the ways in
| which it has changed you.
|
| I had no idea Alastair Reynolds was behind the story, I've
| enjoyed his work quite separately.
| archduck wrote:
| Yes!! The lack of green-blue distinction is prevalent enough in
| linguistics that the term "grue" has entered the lexicon.
|
| Paul and Kay (1969) argue for a linguistic universal which
| posits that the set of _which_ colors a language has is a
| function of _how many_ colors it has. (Stealing from https://en
| .wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity_and_the_...):
|
| 1. All languages contain terms for black and white. 2. If a
| language contains three terms, then it contains a term for red.
| 3. If a language contains four terms, then it contains a term
| for either green or yellow (but not both). 4. If a language
| contains five terms, then it contains terms for both green and
| yellow. 5. If a language contains six terms, then it contains a
| term for blue. 6. If a language contains seven terms, then it
| contains a term for brown. 7. If a language contains eight or
| more terms, then it contains terms for purple, pink, orange or
| gray.
|
| The opposite of the grue phenomenon exists too, i.e. languages
| which subdivide the "blue" part of the spectrum into separate
| lexemes. In Russian, for instance, _goluboy_ = light blue,
| whereas _siniy_ = blue to dark blue. This morning I was reading
| the Wikipedia entry for _color revolution_ , and there's a
| quote from Belarusian President Lukashenko, "They [the West]
| think that Belarus is ready for some 'orange' or, what is a
| rather frightening option, 'blue' or 'cornflower blue'
| revolution." I had to chuckle about that - it sounds so goofy
| in the English translation, but that's only because we don't
| have a lexical distinction there. (Now I would have personally
| translated it to _light blue_ , but that's another matter.)
| drcongo wrote:
| Fantastic post, thank you!
| selestify wrote:
| As someone who hasn't seen it in the flesh yet, and doesn't
| "get" modern art unless someone explicitly spells it out for
| me, could you elaborate more on why it's so spectacular?
|
| For example, Blue Monochrome [1] seems to my uneducated eye to
| be just a layer of pure blue that every wall painter recreates
| every time they paint a wall blue. Why is the Blue Monochrome
| piece more than just a wall painted blue?
|
| [1] https://www.moma.org/collection/works/80103
| jessejmc wrote:
| Don't know about Yves Klein specifically but remember seeing
| this video from Vox:
|
| "Why these all-white paintings are in museums and mine
| aren't" [1]
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9aGRHOpMRUg
| ameetgaitonde wrote:
| I like to wander around art museums, and on one visit, I
| shared a gallery with what seemed like a private tour
| group.
|
| One woman was conducting the tour for three people, when
| they stopped at one of these all-white paintings.
|
| She was describing the potential meaning behind the work,
| and noted that sometimes the artist expresses textures, or
| covers some background work.
|
| It's hard to describe, but I felt this sort of absurdist
| joy when I watched all four of them lean in very closely
| for half a minute, only to discover absolutely nothing
| unique about the work in its texture or color.
|
| Maybe sometimes art isn't made for the observer, but the
| observer's observer.
| sneusse wrote:
| That's the missing piece! Now I know how to spend my next
| rainy day!
| pjc50 wrote:
| Klein blue is outside the color gamut that can be represented
| on normal monitors, so it's physically impossible to get the
| full impact of it through a picture. It just looks .. deeper.
|
| There are a few flowers that have this property; fuscias, and
| others with strong UV fluorescence.
| WhompingWindows wrote:
| Consider the time period and the historical context. It's
| modern times, Cold War is occurring, and WW1 and WW2 left
| scars across Western Europe and caused major changes in the
| art world, including being a boon to abstraction and
| fragmenting styles into many eclectic directions.
|
| Chemistry has DRASTICALLY altered painting from the
| Renaissance to the World War era. New pigments have been
| constantly highlighted and displayed in artwork. Finally, an
| insanely blue blue has been invented, bluer than any other
| blue paint in the past.
|
| The artist highlighted above attempts to showcase the new
| technology in its purest form. Though, despite this strive
| for purity of blue, the application is inherently uneven. If
| you look into the painted canvas up close, you will see
| imperfections and patterns in "just a wall". It's also a
| statement, it may cause reactions and cause viewers to
| question the boundary between art and not-art.
|
| It's not my cup of tea compared to masterworks of Van Gogh or
| Homer or any of the legendary painters, but art goes through
| many phases and is used to express many different ideas. What
| I do think is bonkers is that modern artists (who are well-
| connected) may be paid millions of dollars for these works,
| which to me don't showcase skill and talent, but which reward
| creative ideation and concepts.
| jdmichal wrote:
| > Finally, an insanely blue blue has been invented, bluer
| than any other blue paint in the past. The artist
| highlighted above attempts to showcase the new technology
| in its purest form.
|
| I was thinking something along these lines. Based on the
| first Wiki article, Klein was involved in developing this
| pigment. If so, the work stands on the merits of that
| achievement alone. He was, for that moment, literally the
| only person in the world that could have created that
| painting.
| lmohseni wrote:
| There's a really great short story by Alistair Reynolds
| about an artist that's obsessed with a certain Zima blue
| (name of the story) which is essentially an extended
| meditation on the above, I think you might like it. :)
| drcongo wrote:
| There's some great answers to your question below, but I'll
| add mine anyway. Because of the way our eyes see blue (as
| highlighted in the OP), and especially Yves Klein blue, it
| has some slightly magical properties in art. The flat blue
| canvases are absolutely uninspiring at first glance, but
| stand in front of it for 30 seconds and it starts to recede -
| it becomes hard to tell how far away the canvas actually is.
| You're unable to make out texture on the surface because the
| brain is struggling to actually work it out. It's most
| striking on the sculptures though, they almost entirely lose
| their depth and become a flat thing that changes shape as you
| moved around it. Imagine a 3d rendering of a gallery scene
| where there's one model that is untextured and unlit - it's
| like a brilliant blue silhouette.
|
| I took my then 5 year old daughter to the Tate for the
| exhibition and it had the same effect on her, while almost
| everything else on show had no effect at all. The only other
| thing she loved was Bridget Riley, and I think Yves Klein's
| blue work is somewhere in the same realm - the art is in
| defining something that makes the viewer's brain do some of
| the work, that is going to be experienced slightly
| differently by everyone who sees it.
| ricardobeat wrote:
| As mentioned above, it just looks different in person, that
| picture does not do it justice by any means. It's kinda like
| when you see a 3D render with inaccurate physics, but this
| one is in the real world - it feels out of place. Or like
| catching a really pink sunset: you can look at it for as long
| as you want and the color never ceases to impress you.
| Qub3d wrote:
| That's awesome. Looks like his hue is very, very close to YInMn
| blue, one of my favorite contemporary scientific discoveries:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YInMn_Blue
| agumonkey wrote:
| funny how it's different when interpreted in biology limits
|
| also how no art teacher ever told us about Klein's blue the way
| you did.. they simply used it as an authority figure
| EamonnMR wrote:
| Is this why I can't focus my eye on a blue LED while focusing on
| the surrounding area?
| contravariant wrote:
| Oh, so that's why I can't read blue lettering at night. Always
| wondered.
| macando wrote:
| You know what's funny about this?
|
| The most common color of Call To Action buttons on websites is
| _blue_.
| ncpa-cpl wrote:
| I think this is why one of the older analog video formats, I
| can't remember if it was VHS or NTSC, used less bandwidth for
| blue color than for the other colors. This was not noticeable
| unless blue letters were recorded, which always looked more
| blurry than letters in other colors.
| maddyboo wrote:
| Could this be a factor in why we didn't evolve to see a wider
| range of wavelengths?
|
| Is the visual spectrum just barely within the range that our
| brains can correct for the diverging focal lengths without
| needing additional lenses or modifications to the eye?
| jjk166 wrote:
| Water is relatively opaque at wavelengths above and below the
| visible spectrum. Air is also much more absorptive outside of
| the visible range. These two effects compliment eachother -
| water has a very sharp increase in opacity in the ultraviolet,
| while air has a sharp increase in the infrared. Our eyes are
| full of water and we look at things through air.
| Coincidentally, the visible spectrum matches the peak output
| from the sun. While you can go a little further into the
| infrared and ultraviolet ranges, there simply isn't much more
| to see, it would be as if we were looking through muddy water
| and dimly lit fog. Any mutation allowing you to see these
| wavelengths would convey no advantage.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-07-16 23:00 UTC)