Actually, in cmyk’s context, it would be the presence of all primary pigments rather than the absence of light.
Pantone is recognized as the world’s color experts.
In English, there are only a small number of names for colors. Every other color is actually the name for something else being used to describe the color of a thing.
“Blue” is a color. Turquoise, teal, azure, cerulean, cornflower, sapphire and ultramarine are all different things that are bluish.
Funny. They don’t look bluish.
Learn the names of artists’ paint colors. They’re fun to say (French ultramarine blue, raw sienna, Hooker’s green, Payne’s grey, indigo), pretty universal (if you don’t get into ‘Winsor blue-- green shade’ or ‘quinacridone’ level), and you could probably describe most of the others by saying, “it’s cerulean blue with just a hint of viridian.”
I worked in a paint store (well the paint dept. of a Montgomery Ward store) for three years in college. In general many of the names are arbitrary, but after a while you learn what women mean when they say “less salmon, more peach”, and though it is a bit vague, you can actually communicate about colors. The whites are the worst: “No, that is an eggshell, THIS is an off-white!” The blue-green range is nearly as bad, what with sea foam vs. aquamarine etc.
Add in the fact that paint color depends on the lighting, and perception changes dramatically depending on the amount of area and contrasting colors nearby, and it is pretty hopeless to try to pin it down.
I find I have to filter my descriptions of colors, lest my gender preference be suspected. Recently I slipped up when I misplaced a lilac colored USB dongle. Got a lot of WTF? responses to the email I sent out. Had to follow up with “purple”.
The fact is that few men will know what you are talking about of you say teal instead of green, so having a more extensive color vocabulary doesn’t buy you much when half the population doesn’t speak that language.
In English, words sometimes have more than one meaning. All of those are absolutely names of colors. Some of them are also the names of other bluish things (a couple stones, a bird, a flower), whence the color names are derived, but that doesn’t mean they’re not really names of colors. Azure, cerulean and ultramarine are nothing but color names.
Color is just part of the electromagnetic spectrum, how can wavelengths be smaller or larger than that
To be pedantically correct, “ultramarine” is the name of a natural mineral pigment–so it is a thing–but the significance of that thing is entirely contained in its color.
“Azure” derives from the name of a place where lapis lazuli (containing ultramarine pigment among others) was found, but in modern usage “azure” as either noun or adjective is strictly a color term.
It gets muddier. Sometimes the color name started out referring to a thing which illustrated the color, but the color has become the more predominant usage. A teal is a kind of duck, but I would guess most people would think first of the color, and some people may not know it’s a duck at all. Fewer people know that “beige” is a kind of fabric. Many colors are loan words which are a thing in a another language, and which English borrowed just for the color description. “Taupe” is “mole” in French. We decided it was handy to mean “mole colored”.
And “orange” is a color name by any sane definition, although it’s also a thing, and the color name was derived from the fruit.
Well, “teal” might actually work with a man of the right age. Ferrari offered it as one of the four or five colors for one of their models, and Toyota then offered it on the Supra a few years later and the MR2 a few years after that. At least that’s why I know what “teal” looks like.
But that doesn’t always help–a man over 35 might readily identify forest green as a distinct color, but he’d call it “British racing green”.
It’s fun to play with colors in programs like Photoshop or Paintshop. In standard RGB white is 255,255,255, black is 0,0,0.
this link has a few of the standards. Unfortunately, a lot of the color lists Google finds are in Hex. :smack: Apparently the web guys use hex instead of standard RGB.
You can learn a lot by mixing RGB and seeing how colors emerge.
link
ewwwww, I think they have a cream for that.
An Ultramarine is also a member of a specific chapter of Space Marines in ye old 40K sci fi, although it was (basically) named after the color, and not vice versa.
The Planck length is simply what you get when you combine c, G, and h-bar with appropriate powers to yield a measure of distance. Whether this distance has anything to do with anything is anyone’s guess.
No, i’m pretty sure that’s an ecru.
Well, yeah: Why do you think the value of each element tops out at 0xff (255)?
You can learn even more by investigating different color spaces. For example, printers use CMYK because Cyan, Magenta, and Yellow are their (subtractive) primaries, and the Key is black because Cyan plus Magenta plus Yellow gives you an ugly muddy brown even aside from how expensive it is to use all three inks instead of just buying black ink separately.
Even among people who use additive color spaces (they play with light, not inks or dyes) there’s considerable variation. Video geeks might feel more at home with a color space in the YCbCr family, which encodes the luminance signal (Y) separately from the chrominance signals (Cb and Cr). This allows you to use lossier compression and still end up with an image that looks good to humans, due to the way our eyes and brain work. (Also, having a separate luminance signal allows black-and-white displays to just decode that and ignore that messy ‘color’ stuff entirely.)
There are 7.7 billion more names for colors than for God? :eek:
Yep, and then every year their “colour designers” will go through and rename a bunch of them to make them more current and fashionable.