• KaChilde@sh.itjust.works
    84·
    3 days ago

    “Yeah! The real primary colours are CMY!”

    Also bullshit.

    Our RGB primaries are a simplification that comes from availability of pigments. While blue was originally a very rare and valuable pigment made from precious stones, it was still more available than magenta or cyan, which are made synthetically.

    All of the following is taking paint mixing into mind.

    When looking at a continuous colour wheel:

    You can see where each colour sits on the spectrum. When you consider a RBY palette, we are limited to essentially the colours in this triangle:

    Mixing a vibrant Purple or Green is often difficult with a basic rby colour palette, and a Magenta or Cyan is impossible. We define a primary colour as “foundational colours that cannot be created by mixing other colours”, which means that CMY are real primaries, right? Well, if we look at the CMy palette:

    We DO get a wider range of colours, but you’ll notice that a true purple, green, blue, and red are still outside of our range. You can get a pretty close red with Yellow and Magenta, but it will never be as vibrant as a pure Red pigment. So then Red is a primary?

    When painting, you should use the colours that you need for the work, and mix from there. The ‘primary colours’ are a tool to teach students the theory of colour mixing. It is not a perfect guide, but teaching complex colour theory to novice painters is just intimidation. Most people get an intro to art, learn RBY, and then leave art, don’t think about it again until a TikTok titled “school LIED to you” introduced CMY.

    EDIT: this is from the perspective of an artist. I am not an expert, and certainly got something wrong in here, but the primary argument has always annoyed me

    • squaresinger@lemmy.world
      22·
      3 days ago

      Are you confusing subtractive and additive colors? For subtractive (used for e.g. paints) you use CMY, with white being what you get with no colors and black is a perfect mix of full CMY. With subtractive each color takes light away.

      Additive (used for lights) works the other way round: the base colors are RGB. No light colors is black, all light colors is white. Adding another color in additive adds more light.

      So, sure, if you use additive base colors in a subtractive process, you will get garbage and vice versa.

    • AnarchoEngineer@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      12·
      3 days ago

      The real fascinating thing is that Impossible Colors exist, which means it’s kind of impossible to actually represent all colors or impossible to precisely represent them.

      Imo it seems colors are relative to how our brain and eyes are adapting to their current field of view, meaning the color you experience is not fully dependent on the light an object actually reflects nor the activation of your rods and cones but is dependent on the way your brain processes those signals with each other. Ergo, you can’t actually represent all colors precisely unless you can control every environmental variable like the color of every object in someone’s field of view and where someone’s eyes have been looking previously etc.

      • Brosplosion@lemmy.zip
        3·
        3 days ago

        Pedantic, but anything measurable and continuous is impossible to precisely represent. π/e meters for example.

        • TonyTonyChopper@mander.xyz
          3·
          3 days ago

          If you want to be even more pedantic you could say no metre stick is exactly 1 metre long according to the current definition of a metre. If you want to be scientific then all of them are within some reasonable range like 1.000 ± 0.002 m. If you want to be historic then at one time there was a perfect metre stick

          In 1799, the metre was redefined in terms of a prototype metre bar. The bar used was changed in 1889, and in 1960 the metre was redefined in terms of a certain number of wavelengths of a certain emission line of krypton-86. The current definition was adopted in 1983 and modified slightly in 2002 to clarify that the metre is a measure of proper length. From 1983 until 2019, the metre was formally defined as the length of the path travelled by light in vacuum in 1/299792458⁠ of a second.

    • Valmond@lemmy.world
      5·
      3 days ago

      Well written!

      Yes we can use any colors as “primary colors”, I use 6 when I paint (plus burnt Sienna & Umber because I’m lazy).

      The colors you chose lets you mix up paints in a gamut, a gamut of colors is what you can get from those “primaries” that constitute said gamut.

      Cheers.

    • nilloc@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
      3·
      2 days ago

      In printing it’s a little different, but if you need an exact color you can add it to the process, much like adding a varnish or other fancy finish.

      Orange was always a problem when I was a designer. It had to be specific, you had to send a Pantone chip along, hope it hadn’t faded or changed color over the years (or buy new ones constantly) and then it still came out different than planned.

  • dreadbeef@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    16·
    3 days ago

    I think the original quote was something like “Eraserhead is my most spiritual film” “Elaborate on that.” “No.”

  • FishFace@piefed.socialEnglish
    145·
    3 days ago

    But they aren’t. They’re the colours corresponding to the peak frequency responses of the cone cells in your retinas.

  • 🇰 🌀 🇱 🇦 🇳 🇦 🇰 🇮 @pawb.socialEnglish
    101·
    3 days ago

    A lot of formulaic stuff in media is bullshit. So much shit is done for no other reason than because it worked once before. Primary colors are one of them. Story structure; forget the actual name of it but every story doesn’t need to be arranged in that particular order of start, build up, conflict, resolution (Pulp Fiction is a great example of something that ignores this rule). And more.

    • raef@lemmy.world
      2·
      3 days ago

      It’s the inverted checkmark, but Pulp Fiction is rearranged so that all the different stories fit onto the inverted checkmark at the same time

    • FishFace@piefed.socialEnglish
      34·
      3 days ago

      Primary colours are not made up, they are the approximate peak response frequencies of the cone cells in your retinas.

      • rumba@lemmy.zipEnglish
        5·
        3 days ago

        They kind of lie to us a bit in school when they teach us that to simplify the actual case. Other people have posted the actual curves.

        L cones are most responsive to yellow-green, not red.

        M cones peak in the green-cyan range.

        S cones are most sensitive to violet rather than blue.

        The whole RGB and CMYK mixing works observationally for us. But the biology behind it isn’t as neat and as clean as the story they tell us when they’re teaching us about the primary colors.

  • RaoulDook@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    2 days ago

    He was a master of comedy even though it wasn’t his focus. He just wanted to make cool art, and to him his movies were like moving paintings. I think Wild at Heart could be his funniest film.

    • khannie@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      3 days ago

      I think this has lost some truth with the advent of very high definition oled phone screens in fairness. I’m a quality whore and having my phone very close to my face is a decent experience for most movies.

      Obviously for stuff like Interstellar or Dune I’m going big.

      • passenger@sopuli.xyz
        4·
        3 days ago

        To me it sounds horrible, unergonomical, full of distractions if in the public…

        But yeah it’s mostly funny how he hates it.

        Do what u want!

        • SlurpingPus@lemmy.world
          2·
          3 days ago

          Afaik he sorta changed his position later on, or rather said that he would be making content for phones from then on. I imagine he still wasn’t happy with watching a traditional film on a phone.

    • rmuk@feddit.ukEnglish
      1·
      2 days ago

      That comment was really awful, just super nasty and totally uncalled-for interesting.

    • ShaunaTheDead@fedia.io
      261·
      3 days ago

      Right, CMY for ink, RGB for light though.

      this image is pretty helpful. With light you’re starting with white (the center of the left diagram) and subtracting colours to get your ideal colour. With ink, you’re adding colour to get your ideal colour, and adding all of your colours will get you to black.

      • edinbruh@feddit.itEnglish
        19·
        3 days ago

        Your intuition is on the right track, but it works “the other way around”.

        RGB are additive primary colours, because the colour you see when you look at something that emits light is the actual colour of the light. And so when you mix two coloured lights, the colours add up (additive colours). And adding every colour gives you white.

        CMY are instead subtractive colour, because when you look at something that does not emit light, the colour you see is just the light that bounces off of it, while some colours get absorbed. So when you mix paints, the resulting paint absorbs more colours, and you only see what’s left, so the colours subtract down (subtractive colours). And subtracting everything gives you black.

        P.s. mathematically, any three independent colours could be used as primary. Independent means that you can’t get any of the three by mixing the other two (i.e. blue, red, and purple are not independent). But those two triplets are the most obvious choices. You might recall that as a kid, they taught you that primary colours were Red, Blue and Yellow instead of CMY, and yet mixing worked fine.

    • fonix232@fedia.io
      91·
      3 days ago

      Uhm… No.

      It depends on you doing additive or subtractive colour mixing.

      Additive mixing (e.g. light, in the form of colour LEDs or similar colour sources) must utilise RGB, due to how physics works.

      Subtractive mixing (such as, printing, painting, etc.) on the other hand is better off with CMY+K for higher precision, again, for physics reasons.

      altr

      • ozymandias@lemmy.dbzer0.com
        1·
        3 days ago

        ummm… yeah i know.
        primary colors are from subtractive mixing, ie mixing paint… like i said.
        and it originated from back when they couldn’t make a good cyan or magenta, so the color wheel had blue and red instead.
        you’re supposed to be able to mix the primary colors to get any other color, but that’s bullshit unless you want it to look like a medieval painting.
        additive color came a few centuries later with electricity and artificial lighting and is not relevant.

  • B-TR3E@feddit.org
    3·
    3 days ago

    Well, Plato had some unique ideas about colors, too. He was a genius nevertheless…