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Jedibri81 t1_j6czaon wrote

Shouldn’t that be a red ship and a brown ship? Red and blue would be purple

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anonny42357 t1_j6d7cfd wrote

AKSHULKEH

But actually for real, red + blue = sad poopy purple/kinda maroon.

Teachers have been teaching kids outdated crap based on colour theory from a zillion years ago when they didn't have synthetic pigments

Have you ever heard of CMYK? Cyan, magenta, and yellow are the actual primary colours for pretty much everything the average person would be doing. Black is used to make stuff darker and we will just ignore it (RGB is light and a whole other thing.)

Mixing different portions of any TWO of these three colours gets you nice bright colours. Adding the third brings the colour to a more poopy place. Mixing them equally makes neutral grey.

  • 1 cyan + 2 magenta = purple
  • 2 cyan + 1 magenta = blue
  • 1 yellow + 2 magenta = red
  • 2 yellow + 1 magenta = orange
  • 1 cyan + 2 yellow = green
  • 2 cyan + 1 yellow = turquoise

So red + blue = maroon because

  • 2 cyan + 1 magenta = blue
  • 1 yellow + 2 magenta = red
  • =
  • 3 magenta + 2 cyan + 1 yellow = poopy magenta-heavy purple/ maroon

Thanks for attending my TedTalk

[ if your interested in the extended-cut RGB-edition of my TedTalk:

CMYK is subtractive colour theory, because you're using pigments that absorb light and therefore subtract light/colour from what you see.

RGB is additive colour theory, because you're adding light to produce a colour.

Red-yellow-blue makes no sense and should be completely ignored by anyone with more than two brain cells. Teach your kid that their teacher was wrong.

RGB is how screens (TV, monitors, phones, etc) work.

  • 1 red + 2 green = yellow
  • 2 red + 1 green = orange
  • 1 green + 2 blue = turquoise
  • 1 green + 1 blue = cyan
  • 1 red + 2 blue = Indigo
  • 2 red + 1 blue = magenta

If you're a giant colour nerd and are interested in getting good colour from computer screens, you'll never be truly satisfied, because RGB actually cannot produce a good purple, and when you look at colour space reviews, you can see where they're all lacking, no matter how much you spend. Buy yourself a high quality IPS screen. AMOLED isn't great for colour and tends to oversaturate instead of looking realistic. TFT is downright tragic.

Thanks for reading the extended edition]

[you want part three? PURPLE DOESN'T EXIST. Yup. "Purple is your brain, making shit up," she typed, from her phone's purple keyboard.

Our eyes are also RGB, like screens. When we see colours, our brains process them by getting signals from separate red, green, and blue receptors.

Colours are visible wavelengths of light that are on a spectrum. In humans, the visible spectrum goes from Red (1) to green (2) to blue (3). The three receptors are triggered in varying amounts by different colours and our brain mixes them together to make all the other colours.

When we see purple, our red and blue receptors are triggered, so our brains say, "Fun colour mixing time! So red is at one end, and blue is at the other, so half way between is green. I see green. Wait. The green receptor isn't triggering, so it can't be green? But half way between red and blue IS green but it's also NOT-green? This is too much to deal with, so I'll just make up some reddish bluish nonsense and call it purple"

https://www.zmescience.com/science/color-purple-non-spectral-feature/ <- more sciency answer ]

=======

In summation, this punchline is valid.

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TerseSun t1_j6dv4h9 wrote

How do you not have more upvotes? That was fascinating.

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BioletVeauregarde33 t1_j6g65h9 wrote

Don't make me cry!

  • Someone whose favorite color is purple
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anonny42357 t1_j6glz1z wrote

Mine is too. Extra annoyingly, it's a very specific purple that I'm pretty sure computers will never be able to replicate. Dioxizine purple. So pretty.

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BioletVeauregarde33 t1_j6hv3pd wrote

Either way, whenever I told this joke, the ships were purple and black. Or rather, carrying purple and black paint.

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EnglishmanInMH t1_j6h6hjx wrote

That is possibly the most interesting thing I've read on Reddit.

Thank you for sharing your knowledge and informing us all.

P.S I struggled through the CYK bits because my teachers taught me wrong and my internal bias always tells me "Those words aren't even colours"! 😉🤣

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anonny42357 t1_j6ih0c0 wrote

It threw me for a while, too, because I was taught "red yellow blue" for two decades, and I'm a computer-ey person so RGB kind of works in my head. I rejected CMY, because it always looks dumpy on a computer screen, which is where I do a lot of my work.

Then I started working with paint and real-world colour, and red + blue does indeed make the most unsatisfying crap purple. A nice, clean, solid purple is my absolute favorite colour, and this red+blue travesty was unacceptable, so I put on my research hat.

Then I bought CMY paint, and lo-and-behold real purple happened. And a bunch of other nice clean colours.

Then I got really really into painting, and couldn't be bothered to try to accurately reproduce the exactly perfectly matched colours every time, so I just started buying paints that only have one pigment that is one specific colour in it … because:

Theoretically, CMY are primaries, but they have to be made out of real world materials, and sometimes those vary by manufacturer. It's usually Quinacridone magenta & Pthalocyanine (cyan), but there are a load of yellows out there with varying levels of toxic elements to them. I try to find PY47 (Lead Titanate) which I thought was the yelloweyist yellow I could find that had the lowest toxicity, but I just looked up, and I was wrong; it's extremely toxic. Good thing I rarely use yellow - and that I don't eat paint, lol.

I now have maybe ten or so single pigment colours so I can always know what I'm getting. And it's never poopy maroon! If you ever need a good purple, Dioxizine purple is your gal. But get some titanium white too, because diox purple is almost black if you don't add a bit of white. Computer screens can't come anywhere properly reproducing it, but trust me, it's pretty. (diox purple is sometimes called Carbazole Violet. Same thing).

Yes, I'm a nerd.

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SummerWedding23 t1_j6jkngs wrote

I love you Ted talk - for real you should try to do one on this - it was fascinating

1