A man preserving endangered colours

https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20210823-the-man-preserving-endangered-colours

by throw0101a • 5 years ago

66 38 5 years ago

injidup• 5 years ago

""" When compared with the synthetic dyes that are used today in essentially all our clothes and textiles, nature's version is almost always inexplicably better. It's the visual equivalent of a peach ripened by the tree, or a tomato baked in sunshine. Some lost part of you recognises that this is how it's supposed to be. Natural dyes are no different. """

Very poetic. But is there any truth to this or is it just poor journalism?

malfist• 5 years ago

Just your general "technology bad, hard way better" luddite ramblings. Just because something takes more work to do it that way, doesn't mean it's better.

ink404• 5 years ago

This is clearly something you'd need to see in person to understand before making a statement like that.

deertick1• 5 years ago

Totally disagree. 1) im 99% sure that some colors we cannot or do not precisely recreate using non natural dyes. Just thinjing about the complexity of organic material: that is bound to produce subtle textures and such that are not easily mimicked.

2) there is a spiritually satisfying element to recreating something in the original or natural way when a more complex way may be easier

3) it is important to preserve the heritage of human innovation. These techniques and recipes ought to be preserved for historical and sociological reasons, as well as in the event that shit goes to pot one day, we may still have some people that know how to make dyes from scratch.

Aardwolf• 5 years ago

I just saw a rose garden with differently colored roses, and some made me think: this is a color a computer screen can't show

km3r• 5 years ago

Many artificial dyes use CYMK dye colors to build up to the final color when they are mixed by our eyes. Natural dyes will often truly be that color or a unique combination of non-CYMK colors. The result of this is non pure white light will reflect off the surface of the dyed object in different ways. It's a similar reason many LED lights look different than natural sunlight, with the LED lights using a combination of RGB.

marto1• 5 years ago

Could that mean that animals with different sight systems see gibberish when presented with something artificially dyed ?

My thinking is this could affect visual cues for e.g. training.

hammock4• 5 years ago

Another aspect that is missing from consideration is the element of time.

Synthetic and natural dye will degrade or "patina" in different ways, over time and over the course of exposure to weathering, UV light, etc.

In many cases the synthetic dye does not degrade at all, which for many use cases can be undesirable.

BurningFrog3• 5 years ago

Does `truly be that color ` mean the dye only reflects the wavelengths around the individual frequency?

I can see how that would actually make it look better/different in non full spectrum light!

But I don't get how pre tech dye experts would pick such colors?

OscarCunningham2• 5 years ago

The Color Rendering Index [0] measures how well a light source shows the colours of various objects faithfully compared to natural light.

Perhaps we also need a dual index that measures how well a pigment retains the same appearance under various light sources.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_rendering_index

Bokanovsky• 5 years ago

The non-CYMK colours also reminds me of flowers. If you look at photos of flowers, or just look normally, you'll see solid/uniform colour.

But if you look at infrared photos of flowers or "how bees see them", they show the same flowers with landing strips for the bees.

sp332• 5 years ago

Synthetic and natural dyes each have their advantages, which is why they are still used in various applications. But which kind you like better is obviously a judgement call.

mc32• 5 years ago

I think it’s more poetic. Yes, the results may be different and they have values that synthetics don’t possess, more variability for example or less colorfastness, but to say that overall they are inexplicably better, is overselling it.

Sure, I like indigo, woad and maybe carrots or beets for Easter eggs but that doesn’t mean they are better. There may be preferences, yes. Better? That depends on use.

colechristensen• 5 years ago

A lot of it is poetry, but there is a grain of truth to it. There are only a handful of artificial dyes and they'll usually be engineered to make up a colorspace which is always smaller than what your eye can perceive.

For a more concrete example, no matter how nice your camera and printer are, the colors which can be reproduced are currently always restricted compared to the source material (reality), and not just in a matter of there being some small error, there are colors your eyes can see in nature which can't be printed with state of the art tech.

Especially with textiles, the colorspaces available with normal technology are quite a bit smaller than in nature.

Whether "natural" or "synthetic" (the distinction can be a bit silly) a substance will react to light in its own unique way. The number of different substances with different responses is obviously very large in nature, technology tries to recreate a full spectrum of color with only a few substances in combination, the result is naturally not as rich.

throw0101a2• 5 years ago

[…] there are colors your eyes can see in nature which can't be printed with state of the art tech.

As an example see sRGB, Adobe RGB, ProtoPhoto RGB, Rec. 2020/2100, etc:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_space

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rec._2020

throw0101a2• 5 years ago

As a sibling comment noted, there are only a limited number of artificial dyes in existence, so what you see in the natural world may have more colours.

See for example the splash that a 'new blue' made recently:

* "The first blue pigment discovered in 200 years is now commercially available", https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25807199

* "YInMn, the First New Blue Pigment in Two Centuries", https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25963292

crazygringo3• 5 years ago

That's not really relevant here though.

The set of synthetic dyes we have does a pretty fantastic job at covering all the colors seen in the natural world, plus a whole lot more. We go way beyond the natural world, in fact, when you look at the bright/fluorescent colors you see in an athletic clothing store, as I mentioned in another comment.

What makes that 'new blue' you refer to special has nothing to do with how we perceive it directly -- it's trivial to recreate that hue. It's useful for the very specific use case of mixing colors while oil painting. It's for artists trying to blend colors.

crazygringo3• 5 years ago

Short answer: it's poor journalism.

Long answer: there are mainly three factors that contribute to inaccurate color reproduction.

The first is limited color gamut. That's not really a factor in dying fibers though -- we have plenty of synthetic dyes for things like bright orange, fluorescent green, etc. Just visit any athletic clothing store. And while yes nature has all sorts of shiny bright iridescence caused by diffraction etc., those properties are destroyed as soon as the material is smushed. You can't turn gorgeous insect wings into dye.

The second is that while our eyes perceive only RGB in response to a wide spectrum, there are an infinite number of spectral patterns that we ultimately perceive as e.g. a certain orange. An orange dye from one source (natural or synthetic) will have a different source spectrum from pretty much any other orange dye (natural or synthetic). BUT it's pretty easy to match the color we perceive perfectly for a single lighting condition, e.g. sunlight. But this brings us to:

The third factor, which is the spectrum of lighting. The spectra of sunlight, of fluorescent light, of LED light, is all different. The color we perceive is essentially the spectrum of the light source multiplied by the spectrum of the dye. Therefore when we change the lighting spectrum, this can change the ultimate RGB color we perceive -- so that two orange dyes that appeared literally identical in sunlight now appear subtly different under a fluorescent light.

So it is true that different dyes behave slightly differently under different lighting conditions. But there's no better or worse here, and there's absolutely no "peach ripened by a tree" or "how it's supposed to be". That's complete and utter nonsense.

The solution for good color matching isn't dyes from natural sources -- it's balanced, full-spectrum white lighting.

hammock4• 5 years ago

And while yes nature has all sorts of shiny bright iridescence caused by diffraction etc., those properties are destroyed as soon as the material is smushed. You can't turn gorgeous insect wings into dye.

Seems like a great technological opportunity for someone to figure out.

Recently I advised someone not to buy granite countertops sight unseen, since the way they look in person is so different from the way they look in a photo - a photo completely misses the reflections, iridescence and other three-dimensional aspects of the actual product.

IncRnd• 5 years ago

According to my eyes, it is true. The colors he works with are beautiful and visually different from synthetic dyes.

swayvil2• 5 years ago

Well there was a study.

RattleyCooper• 5 years ago

Whether natural dyes look different or not is unknown to me, however I bet $100 that dude couldn't tell the difference if you mixed in a bunch of synthetically dyed material with the naturally dyed stuff. Put the natural and synthetic dyes in a lineup together and I bet there is no way for him to reliably tell them apart.

dillondoyle• 5 years ago

Might it be like diamonds where the imperfections give it away? Maybe we'll see similar marketing that natural is more unique than 'artificial.' I could see that having $elling value in fashion, one of my friends does natural dying in Mexico and the selling point is uniqueness.

drdeca2• 5 years ago

Is one allowed to vary the lighting conditions while examining them?

If in one collection, one has different mixes of 4 fixed dyes or pigments which each respond to the light in a particular way, then, the way the result responds to different light sources should be in a particular 4d space, while more generally pigments could have the lighting->appearance function be a point in a larger space which that 4D space is a subset of, right?

I don’t particularly know what I’m talking about in this comment, but it seems to me like it should be right..

Though, even if what I said is right, there’s still the question of whether a person could reasonably learn to recognize whether such a response function (“response function” is not some technical term that I know. If it is a technical term, it is likely I’m using it wrong. I’m just using it as a description of the function from lighting to apparent color.) is from such a 4D subspace or not.

Based on a video I saw, I suspect that in some cases, yes, but in general idk. How often would the function be very close to something that is in the 4d subspace but isn’t quite?

I imagine a machine could do it easily.

Assuming you have a cheap way of producing light of a variable wavelength? Do we have such a thing? I think electron vibrating lasers (Idr the proper name for them) have a tunable wavelength, but I imagine those are expensive, and also probably something that isn’t a laser would be preferable.

dm319• 5 years ago

As we have three cones used to observe tone and colour, the colour/tone of something occupies a 3D space.

However, as you say, a pigment colour has high dimensional properties - the spectral response. As others have mentioned this determines how it impacts on the observed/perceived colour, depending in the spectral response of the light it reflects.

swayvil2• 5 years ago

Computer colors. On the screen. Are more like references to color than actual color. A minimal kind of "red symbol", referring to a memory of something red.

I've come to realize this recently. I've been doing a lot of flower gardening.

Digital music is similar.

1% substance and 99% mindgame

A man preserving endangered colours

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