Why does red text on a blue background seem to “jump out” at you, as if it were 3-D? Does it have something to do with the difference in wavelengths of red and blue light??
Thanks.
Is there a white shadow around the text? It might be that your monitor’s red and blue colors aren’t aligned. To simplify things, it’s like you have separate red, green and blue monitors that are built within the same box, and each color can be adjusted to overlay the others.
No shadow around the text. Maybe it IS the monitor, because I found the same effect in several different programs. The red text seems to be in a different plane, above the screen.
Am I red/blue colorblind or something?
I think part of the answer is that different wavelengths of light refract at different angles when passing through the lens of the eye, and so do not all focus at precisely the same point on the retina. Blue and red are the opposite ends of the spectrum and so this focal difference between them would be rather large. This may not be consciously noticeable but result in a subtle perception diffrerence.
Another possibility is that when the eye sees a color, the cells “burn out” on that color and you see an afterimage of the complementary color (if you then look at a white surface). Juxtaposed complementary colors seem to vibrate. But blue and red are not complementary so I don’t know if that has anything to do with this.
Do you wear glasses? I sometimes do (normally contacts), and I’ve found I have to be careful if I’m doing graphic design on a computer while wearing my glasses, as things might not actually be where I see them.
If I were to hazard a guess, it would be due to chromatic abberation, where different wavelengths of light will have different focal lenghts for a single lens.
When I’m wearing glasses, if I tip my head up and down, while looking at the same spot in the monitor, I can get red things to visibly shift up and down relative to everything else on the screen, and they do appear to be floating above everything else. I would suppose that the lens on the eye would do the same thing, but since I haven’t developed the talent to be able to clearly resolve things outside of the center of my vision, the effect isn’t as noticeable (or possibly the brain or structure of the eye compensates for this effect?).
CookingWithGas has it right. I took a seminar on using color in printed/online content, and they specifically looked at the focal depth of each color. IIRC, it doesn’t make obvious sense (okay, not to me) - Red is ‘closest’, then green, then yellow, then blue (perception-wise). So if you want something to stand out, red it is! Green next. And you only need about a 10% addition of either red or green to pop a color into focus.
Also, the cones that perceive green and red are clustered toward the center of the retina (best focus), where the yellow/blue cones are not as tightly concentrated in the best focal area. That’s why objects in pure yellow and blue appear ‘fuzzy’ or indistinct around the edges (compare printouts of the same object in different colors - you’ll see what I mean).
Combine those two and you get both the ‘red pops out’ and the kind of freaky blur between the two colors (blue ‘bleeding’ into the red, slightly).
(oh, and buckgully, too… missed the link - speed reading failure.)