As a resident of New York state I see dozens of NY state license plates every day. Except for a few holdovers that are white, they are all of them orange. Time of day doesn’t matter. Time of year doesn’t matter. Viewing angle doesn’t matter. Sunny or cloudy, indoor or outdoor, it makes no difference: orange, all of them, orange. I’m really kind of astonished that anybody would think anything different!
Orange. And blue. Those are the state colors after all.
They’re an ugly muddy yellow.
Thanks to everyone who has voted and/or commented on this crucial debate topic. 
It’s especially interesting to see the difference in vote ratios between the NY natives and outsiders.
I personally think the plates are orange, but readily acknowledge it’s neither clear nor obvious, and that they’re either a very yellowish orange, or a very orangey yellow. I also think that the dimmer the light, the more orange they seem.
You had to be there. But seriously, look at it in the context of the others, and the current one. It’s orange!
I have a feeling that the people who see the plates as “yellow” identify “orange” as more of a red-orange color. Like if you look at this chart, the second-to-last column is various shades of pure orange. (At least as defined by being the color in between red and yellow, or as “color wheel orange.”) I think the “yellow” people are defining “orange” as well to the left of this column, maybe the fourth or fifth column. I see that as “red orange” or “deep orange” or something like that, but for me, regular orange is the color at that next-to-last or last row, as that’s the color of most oranges I see. (Well, that and I do a lot of work with color in my profession.) If you guys know University of Tennessee colors, that orange is pretty much “color wheel orange,” or what I use as a standard for what is middle-of-the-road orange.
That said, contextually it also makes a difference. Place the New York plates next to a lemon, and I think everyone would agree it’s orange. Place the New York plates next to a Crayola orange crayon (which is redder than most oranges), and the plates will register as “yellow” to people. See shades of orange.
Actually, whoops. When I originally clicked on that, I didn’t see the specific plate it linked to (the 70s New York plate), but rather the current plate at the top of the Wikipedia page for vehicle registration plates of New York. That’s the one I said I’d call amber and can understand classifying as yellow, but I suspect the color balance is just a little off for that. The Wikipedia description of the current plate itself says “Empire Gold plates. Embossed dark blue numbers on orange plate.”
Sorry, I didn’t even see you replied to this. The plate you linked to I would unambiguously call orange (on the red side of orange). That’s not the plate I meant to say I understand classifying as yellow. When I clicked on your link, the pop-up to your specific image didn’t show on my device – I just saw the Wikipedia article and assumed you were talking about the plate on the top of the page. On another device (the one I’m writing from now), the image you meant to link to showed up.
At any rate, the picture of the current plate on the Wikipedia page is much yellower than any other photos I’ve seen of it. I’ve seen the plates in real life, too, and I don’t remember them being that yellow, but rather more like the plates previously posted in this thread, which are orange. (And, just for fun, I looked at that particular plate in Photoshop, and it is coming up as amber, even a bit on the yellow side of it, at a hue value of 47. For reference, orange is 30, amber is 45, yellow is 60. The previous plates posted in this thread were all around 30, so this picture seems to be color shifted quite a bit.)
No–the state colors are gold and blue.
As a life-long resident of New York state, they are not orange. They are more yellow than orange. Compare the license plate to a power extension cord (which are orange). See the difference?
They do have an orangish tint to them, but they are not orange. And I work in publishing and graphic arts, and they are a yellow gold.
I did an unofficial poll and out of twenty people at work, 18 said yellow, and two said yellow but not a canary yellow.
Heck–three years ago I owned an orange Jeep (yes–orange) and it had the NY plates. There was a huge difference between the orange of the Wangler and the yellow plates.
And just what is meant by yellow? Canary yellow? Pale yellow? The yellow of the double lines going down the street?
If you have one, take one of those orange extension cords and hold it up next to your license plate.
Do they match?
Nope.
If you mean the bottom one (2010): No way it’s orange. Some previous ones were, but no the bottom one.
Compare the license plate to a lemon (which is yellow). See the difference?
(Or a banana. Or a New Mexico license plate. Or a goldfinch. Or…)
Of course there’s a difference between the orange of a power cord and the orange of the license plate. Are you saying there is only one shade of orange? That seems like a very odd thing to assert.
(Especially for a graphic design person! I have many years in publishing as well, though on the writing end of things, and I have yet to meet a graphic design expert who would argue anything resembling that. But hey, there’s a first time for everything!)
OK, that’s odd. The first time I clicked on that link, I just got the main Wikipedia page for NY licenses, but the second time I clicked on it, I got the one from 1973-1980 to show up on its own, which is orange. But I’m confused, since the link does seem to go to the main page.
I agree, the one on the top of the page or the 2010 one is not orange. I also think that the color balance on that picture is way off, as it’s so much different than every other photo of that plate.
Or just look at the composite image I posted which I took the time out to make to show the plate in various hues from red to yellow.
From left: red, orange (the original image of the plate, obtained from a New York Times article and whose source seems to be the actualy NY DMV), amber (halfway between orange and yellow), yellow.
I also find extension cords to typically be on the red side of orange. They are not what I would call a middle-of-the-road orange.
For example, this extension cord is WAY WAY WAY to the red side of orange. There are even large swaths of the picture (like in the bottom right of the cord bundle) that are pure red, believe it or not. RGB values of 255, 0, 0. Or a hue value of 0. The general range of hue values there are from 0 (pure red) to about 10 or 12 (orange red). They’re not even midway between red and orange–they’re to the red side of that. This is objectively speaking, defining red as 0 hue or 255,0,0 RGB, and orange as 30 hue.
Now, in real life it doesn’t look quite as saturated, but that “orange” is in actually midway between colorwheel red and colorwheel orange.
Having to choose between either yellow or orange, they’re orange.
To my eye that extension cord is orange and not way way way to the red side of orange. It’s your basic orange. Again, to my eye.
I do think that what many people call “orange” is really more orange-red. Look at the orange color chart I linked to in one of my previous posts, and see where “orange” starts for you.
Believe it or not, though, much of the cord below the cardboard packaging there is actually pure red. You see the picture of the saw to the right of the 100ft label? If you follow that straight down, the area below that is almost completely RGB values of 255,0,0 or close to them, as in pure red.
The most orange parts of that image are the actual plug ends. Those are a hue value of just below 15, so midway between red and orange on the color wheel, but still slightly on the red side of red-orange. I suspect that a lot of people might consider this their default orange, even though from an objective point of view (that is, if we define orange as the midpoint between red and yellow), it’s red-orange.
I mean, look at a picture of an actual orange. For me, that’s baseline orange. Now look at the picture of the extension cord. Can you see how red it is in comparison? I mean, it’s a really red orange.
Or, here, I just put this image together with a picture of that cord, an orange, and color swatch references below.
RED is RGB values of 255, 0, 0
ORANGE is RGB 255, 128, 0
YELLOW is RGB 255, 255, 0
The intermediate colors are, naturally, in between those values (DEEP ORANGE is 255, 64, 0, and amber is 255, 192,0)
That’s as objective as you can get about this.
Now, to be fair, colors and what we call them are subjective. Since I work with color on a computer almost every day, my definition of orange is very much tied to RGB 255, 128, 0 (as well as the color of orange the fruit, which is close to those RGB values.) I’m betting depending on cultural background and even things like whether you grew up with a certain brand of crayons or markers or whatever whose oranges were slightly different, you might have a different idea of orange. Crayola orange is much closer to that color halfway between red and orange which I labeled as “deep orange.” I’d believe it that different cultures will have a different average “red” and “green” and “orange” and “yellow” and “blue.” Heck, even maybe what sports teams you follow. Giants orange is very deep and reddish, but Volunteers orange (U of Tennessee) is very close to what my default orange is.
No, I meant the one I linked to originally, 1973-80.
RGB (255, 128, 0) looks orange to my eye: RGB color (255, 128, 0) to Hex, Pantone, RAL, HSL, HSV, HSB, JSON. Get color scheme.
Over the years, the San Francisco Giants, whose colors are “orange and black,” have used different shades of the color. This page has a good representative sample of the SF Giants’ orange throughout the years. I’m willing to bet that this has affected my subjective understanding of the color. I don’t work with colors and their strict RGB definitions on a regular basis.
But for the orange fruits on this page, some look yellowish while others look like (255, 128, 0).
Now the extension cord? The original pic, here at the top of this page, looks orange, but the one in your sample page (here) looks very different and very red. Why are they different?