Why Do People See Colors Differently?
Techquickie
·Techquickie
·2017-05-06
·
913 words · ~4 min read
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So, you bought your fancy high-end ultra wide monitor with an IPS panel, 10 bit
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color, adaptive refresh, and an attachment for keeping your drinks cool.
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Maybe you've even used some calibration tools to get things looking just right.
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But then, when you have a friend over for Counterstrike, he starts complaining
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that the colors seem a little off. How could that be? Well, considering that
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people vary wildly in everything from
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musical ability to whether or not we find spray cheese appealing, it might
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not be surprising to learn that people perceive colors differently as well. And
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I'm not talking about really obvious things like color blindness or needing
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glasses because everything's blurry without them. What I'm referring to
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instead is variations between people's cone cells, the things in your eyes that
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allow you to see color. You have three normal types of cones, each sensitive to
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a different range of wavelengths. One kind for colors in the red to yellow
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range, one for greens, and one for blues and violets. This arrangement of cones
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actually inspired the RGB color model that you see in monitors, TVs, and
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basically every gaming keyboard for the past couple of years. Since red, green,
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and blue match up well to the three kinds of cones we have, RGB ends up
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being a great base for reproducing lots of different colors. But because some
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people have small variations in cone
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composition, our sensitivity to these different colors of light will also vary
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greatly from person to person. So to get an idea of how a regular person sees
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color, a test was conducted back in 1931
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on a handful of people and the results were averaged and have been used as a
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baseline for much of color science ever
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since, including the way that we think about display design. So, modern flat
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panel displays will give off different amounts of energy in the red, green, and
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blue parts of the visual spectrum, but they don't exactly match the proportions
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that were found in the 1931 experiment.
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To complicate things further, monitors can differ wildly from each other in how
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vividly they show each of these colors, which you can see clearly on spectral
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power graphs, which show very different amounts of energy per color between
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displays. And even though modern screens
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have better picture quality and lower power consumption than old bulky CRTs,
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those old monitors were actually better at producing uniform colors. Flat panel
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displays have narrower band color, meaning that they give off purer reds,
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greens, and blues, which show up as pointier bumps on a graph like this. But
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because of the variations in people's cone cells that I mentioned earlier,
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this makes it easier to pick up on small variations between monitors and also
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easier for two different people to be looking at the same monitor yet see
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different colors. a phenomenon called metameic failure. So when you put this
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together with other factors such as different color spaces and backlight
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types, which you can learn about in these videos, it's really no wonder that
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different people notice such drastic discrepancies in current generation
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displays. One solution which is already being used in higherend laser projectors
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is to use two different shades of red,
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green, and blue as your primaries, giving you six base colors instead of
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three. This helps spread out the color energy and make things look more
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uniform. But differences between our eyes will continue to make this a tough
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problem to tackle for some time. Until then though, we can continue to enjoy
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our arguments about whether malberry magenta and passion pink are actually
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the same color. Thanks once again, by the way, to our friend Tyler from
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Spectraal for helping us out with this video. He is like a color wizard of some
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you hear about us section. Go check it out. It's linked down below. Thanks for
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