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  1. #1
    Player Mhaeric's Avatar
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    Apr 2012
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    Vancouver, BC
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    2,141
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    Mhaeric Llystrom
    World
    Balmung
    Main Class
    Red Mage Lv 97
    Orange and brown exist. Oranges are the various wavelengths of light between red and yellow, and browns are just those wavelengths with lower saturation.

    Purple doesn't exist in the sense that there's no pure wavelength of light we can ever associate with it. (Caveat here that indigo/violet, which do have pure wavelengths, often get colloquially lumped in with purple/magenta.) Purple/magenta is just an optical illusion resulting from how our biology works. In a gross oversimplification of what is actually happening, our brains take the RBG signals we receive and sort of average them out. Since both the red and blue sensors are being triggered our brain would ordinarily average that out to be green since that's the wavelength of light that lies between the two, but our green sensors aren't being triggered at all so our brain makes up the magenta/purple colour to be able to process that conflict. This has the illusionary effect of linking the red and blue ends of the physically linear colour spectrum into a perceptually circular one.
    (1)

  2. #2
    Player
    LolitaBansheeMeru's Avatar
    Join Date
    Jan 2020
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    435
    Character
    Amethyst Orchid
    World
    Leviathan
    Main Class
    Machinist Lv 80
    Quote Originally Posted by Mhaeric View Post
    Orange and brown exist. Oranges are the various wavelengths of light between red and yellow, and browns are just those wavelengths with lower saturation.

    Purple doesn't exist in the sense that there's no pure wavelength of light we can ever associate with it. (Caveat here that indigo/violet, which do have pure wavelengths, often get colloquially lumped in with purple/magenta.) Purple/magenta is just an optical illusion resulting from how our biology works. In a gross oversimplification of what is actually happening, our brains take the RBG signals we receive and sort of average them out. Since both the red and blue sensors are being triggered our brain would ordinarily average that out to be green since that's the wavelength of light that lies between the two, but our green sensors aren't being triggered at all so our brain makes up the magenta/purple colour to be able to process that conflict. This has the illusionary effect of linking the red and blue ends of the physically linear colour spectrum into a perceptually circular one.
    Purple exist in nature lavender is purple , Amethyst is purple ,Lighting is purple
    (1)

  3. #3
    Player Mhaeric's Avatar
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    Apr 2012
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    2,141
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    Mhaeric Llystrom
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    Balmung
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    Red Mage Lv 97
    Quote Originally Posted by LolitaBansheeMeru View Post
    Purple exist in nature lavender is purple , Amethyst is purple ,Lighting is purple
    Our perception of the combination of wavelengths of light that are reflected by or emitted by those things is purple. A pure wavelength of light that corresponds to purple doesn't exist. The reason those items look purple isn't because they're reflecting or emitting purple light, it's because our perception of the red and blue light they are reflecting or emitting is purple. It's a uniquely biologically based perception phenomenon.

    To take it one step further... in some respect, all of the colours technically don't exist except as a biological perception of the wavelengths of visible light. But even then, all of the colours along the wheel moving from blue to green to red have a one-to-one correspondence with specific wavelengths of visible light. Anything in the purple section between blue and red, however, doesn't.

    And to take it even one step further than that... if our eyes instead had yellow, indigo and orange receptors then those 3 colours would be the primary colours of visible light and their immediate combinations would be the primary colours of pigments, and the one that was the combination of orange and indigo would be that system's colour that didn't actually exist. And we probably wouldn't see red or perceive it as a shade of orange since orange would be the limit of our visible light. Likewise, we likely would have more colours past indigo that we don't see now since we'd be able to see further past indigo than we do now. Colour is inherently a function of our biology with light as the input variable.
    (2)

  4. #4
    Player
    ItMe's Avatar
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    Jun 2020
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    Lumsa Lomsa
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    4,178
    Character
    Iiiiiiiiiiit's Meeeee
    World
    Sargatanas
    Main Class
    Arcanist Lv 90
    Quote Originally Posted by Mhaeric View Post
    Orange and brown exist. Oranges are the various wavelengths of light between red and yellow, and browns are just those wavelengths with lower saturation.

    Purple doesn't exist in the sense that there's no pure wavelength of light we can ever associate with it
    You're right.
    What I was trying to get at is that our eyes only have cones for the colors red, green, and blue.
    All of the other colors are our brains making something up to associate with the other wavelengths.
    (0)