Four Key Insights about Colour

This presentation, prepared for the Colour Society of Australia national conference "Colour Connections" in March 2021 is an overview of some fundamental aspects of colour that are often poorly understood or poorly explained. The slides are mostly taken from my online public short course "Understanding and Applying Colour", offered four terms each year through the National Art School, Sydney: https://nas.edu.au/product-tag/dr-dav...

Some of this content is covered in my chapter on "Colour Spaces" in the "Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Colour" (2021, ed. Derek Brown and Fiona Macpherson)
https://www.routledge.com/The-Routled...

Popular misconcetions about colour vision are discussed in more detail in my article "The YouTube Theory of Colour Vision" for the ISCC blog "Hue Angles"'
http://hueangles.blogspot.com/2018/08...

The part about the distortion of the traditional color wheel is from my presentation for the ISCC Munsell Centennial Symposium in Boston in 2018 and available on the ISCC website:
http://www.iscc-archive.org/Munsell20...

And finally, some of these topics are presented in more detail in my earlier videos "What is a colour? Perception or property?":    • What is a Colour? Perception or Prope...   and "Hue and its components:    • Hue and its components (Version 1.0)  

SUMMARY

1. The colour that we see a light or an object as having is not a physical property. It is the way in which we perceive a physical property -– subject to both the state of the observer and the viewing conditions.

2. Hue is the way in which we perceive a direction of imbalance among the long, middle, and short wavelength components present in a light (relative to daylight) or that an object is disposed to reflect. Our visual system does not identify individual wavelengths, but only variations in the overall balance of long, middle and short wavelengths.

3. We cannot mix colours. The unconscious assumption that colours reside and mix in paints underpins the idea that the colour green is “made of” yellow and blue, which in turn underpins the odd hue relationships of the traditional colour wheel.

4. Just three attributes, such as hue, lightness and chroma, are required to describe the colours of objects, but other colour attributes are needed to describe colours of lights, to describe the colour appearance of an illuminated scene, and to highlight other relationships among object colour perceptions.

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