r/colors

Hi everyone,

I wanted to share this week’s data visualization from reddit's ColorGuessr

How to read this image:

• The top solid bar shows the original, true shade (with the color name).
• The block of vertical stripes directly underneath it is a compilation of 450 individual players trying to recreate that exact shade. Every single stripe is a unique player's guess!

as i monitor the consistency keeps improving :)

I’d love to hear if you think you have a "perfect" color memory and break into 90s/100

can’t wait to see what these visualizations looks like once we hit 2,000+ plays!

I've seen many people (me included) talk about how cyan and magenta should be treated differently from blue and pink respectively, but a distinct colour should have many objects that are iconically that colour and not a similar colour.

What I mean by that is that there should be things that are usually that shade, and not any other shade. Like tennis balls are almost always chartreuse, and not regular green, even though tennis balls of any colour exist, but are rarer. Or how traffic cones and pumpkins are usually thought of as orange even though red and yellow variants of them exist, they are just rarer.

So, what things are distinctly cyan and magenta, which are usually not blue and pink respectively?

Black lines delineate primaries in additive and subtractive systems; RBG and CMY are both represented symmetrically, with CMY primaries offset from RBG. White lines delineate boundaries between non-primaries. I truly believe this is how the color wheel was meant to be read.

There is no second o / ou because of colrv0/colrv1 fonts being aweseom and called that :3

Hey all, looking for opinions! I'm trying to paint this sunset but I have no idea where to start on the base. Dusty mauve? Warm peach? Lavender? What do you think? I'm trying to create a color pallete to work off of!

If you call the violet section “MAGENTA” i’m coming for you

Like, what colours would you change or add to it?

This only works because it's a good enough approximation of the CMY (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow) model, and that’s exactly why I hate when people say "bUt It'S fOr PaInTiNg," as if CMY hasn't been proven to be better at making vibrant colors. Like why even teach red-yellow-blue when you know how muddy the colors are when mixing them?

Also, I'm very sick of people saying RYB is "just for beginners." That's worse in my eyes because you’re teaching kids a broken model that contradicts their own knowledge. Just imagine the number of poor kids thinking it's their fault when they mix red and blue and a color that looks like dried-up blood appears, and not knowing they can just mix magenta/pink with blue to get bright purple. Plus, CMY (+K) is literally how every quality printer, which is supposed to print mostly accurate colors, works, and you're telling me kids have to use the shittier version of it?

To me, there are only two valid models: subtractive (CMY) for pigments/ink and additive (RGB) for light. RYB is just a historical accident based on unavailable pure cyan/magenta pigments in the 1700s, and we have those pigments now. Still sticking to RYB in modern times is like teaching geocentrism for simplicity. It's wrong and outdated. Either omit it completely, or present it as a color palette or a historical artifact, and not the real primary colors.

(Added paragraph) ALSO, one of the reasons why they still bring up RYB is because you can cut it in half and say one part is hot and the other is cold. But that in turn over-represent orange, which is just a small slit of colors between red and yellow. You can't just stretch a color wide just because it fits your half-baked theory that colors have temperatures. Is an orange popsicle hot now? And if you're saying that it's about feelings, like hot = happy, cold = sad, you probably should realize that opinions of colors are subjective. It's just that people have different brains. Same reason why major and minor scales in music don't usually convey definitive feelings.

Please tell me the majority is with me on killing off RYB and letting CMY take its place, or at least including CMY as well in those art classes.

TL;DR: RYB bad, CMY or RGB good. Include CMY if RYB not killable.

Edit:

• I've seen some people say that RYB is better for painting because it's got better-looking colors, which, I admit, I failed to realize. CYB does result in lighter colors. And RGB does work in painting, but the mixed colors are darker, like red + green = dark yellow, aka olive green. Point is though, CMY is just more accurate when describing why the colors behave that way, better than RYB does. And RYB is just a color palette that mimicks the CMY at this point. And even with that, I bet artists buy more colors than just what's on the color wheel when they paint.
• A commenter said it's hard for manufacturers to pump out accurate cyans and magentas, which I also agree with. If only they could, my point would've landed much harder.
• Also, some points about it's harder to teach CYM than RYB... How? It's just the same thing but with some words switched around, no? And besides cyan and magenta, I guess, kids should be already familiar with all the colors on the model. So I'm confused by this argument.
• BTW, please read as many of the threads below this post as you can. So many amazing points from people and I made some additional points as well. Truthfully though, thanks for anybody that's willing to provide compelling arguments or informative insights, geniunely didn't think people would bring so many other arguments to this. (Y'all should give u/PotatoTheOdd much more upvotes.) I'm even thankful if you read this rant all the way to this paragraph. How did this post would get this much traction btw? More than 1k upvotes? Holy shit.🙏 (In hindsight I probably could've worded the rant much less in-your-face-ly, anyways)
• Even if it's been said to dead, thanks for the award🙏🙏🙏

I decided to do a different take on this whole trend. These are my borders; you might agree or disagree. Remember that different screens shift colors different ways.

I’ve been arguing with a friend on wether or not this color is brown