Magenta Ain't A Color

http://www.biotele.com/magenta.html

by brm • 17 years ago

97 29 17 years ago

shizcakes• 17 years ago

This article is useless. Magenta is a combination of colors, and is not represented by any single wavelength of light. That doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Saying magenta doesn't exist is like saying green paint doesn't exist, because it's a combination of blue and yellow (within subtractive primaries).

From wikipedia: Magenta is a purplish red color evoked by lights with less power in yellowish-green wavelengths than in blue and red wavelengths (complements of magenta have wavelength 500–530 nm).[1] In light experiments, magenta can be produced by removing the lime-green wavelengths from white light. It is an extra-spectral color, meaning it cannot be generated by a single wavelength of light, being a mixture of red and blue wavelengths. The name magenta comes from the dye magenta, commonly called fuchsine, discovered shortly after the 1859 Battle of Magenta near Magenta, Italy.

tptacek• 17 years ago

So, magenta : color :: c major chord : note?

parenthesis• 17 years ago

A single note played on an acoustic instrument is itself (typically) a compound of multiple frequencies, usually (but not in e.g. a church bell) in a more or less harmonic relationship.

cchooper2• 17 years ago

There's a difference. A chord is always composed of multiple notes. There's no single note that can sound like a chord. But a colour like yellow can be generated by a single wavelength or a combination of wavelengths that average out to yellow (so long as those wavelengths are not too far apart).

So in colour there is no sharp dividing line between a 'chord' and a 'note'. Some 'chords' look like 'notes' and some 'notes' look like 'chords'. Magenta is interesting because it's always a 'chord'.

tjmc• 17 years ago

I think more magenta : colour :: alloy : element

davi2• 17 years ago

Magenta exists. But article is not useless. It is talking about perception of electromagnetic cocktail.

Check out this experiment: http://www.greatreality.com/Color2Color.htm

[related HN thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=459970]

jcl• 17 years ago

Still, the article should have been more careful about terminology, especially in the title. Color is a description of human visual perception, of how a set of light amplitudes and frequencies is perceived. A photograph displayed on your computer monitor has different frequencies from light given off by the photograph's subject, but it has the same colors.

Magenta is definitely a color. What the author meant to say is that magenta can't be a single frequency -- but that title wouldn't have gotten as many clicks.

mjgoins• 17 years ago

I believe this was posted for the humor value, no? I mean, the writer doesn't even realize that the word "qualia" is plural.

jgfoot• 17 years ago

If magenta ain't a color, then what does GR : COLOR=1 : PLOT 20,20 get you, hmmm?

Deestan• 17 years ago

      File "<stdin>", line 1
        GR : COLOR=1 : PLOT 20,20
           ^
    SyntaxError: invalid syntax

cabalamat• 17 years ago

According to the article "Pink (or magenta, to use its official name) simply isn’t there". Since when are pink and magenta the same color?

Raphael• 17 years ago

Many people call magenta "hot pink" and pink "salmon".

herval2• 17 years ago

My manly eyes only see 16 colors (only women see more than 16 colors!). Magenta is one of them, so Magenta is a color! :-)

critic• 17 years ago

I see 2^24 = 16777216 colors, and I'm not a woman.

thalur• 17 years ago

but can you name them all? ;)

palish• 17 years ago

Isn't RGB insufficient to represent all visible colors? In that case, the human eye would be able to see more than that.

herval2• 17 years ago

you don't have a lot of sense of humour either, do you

akirk• 17 years ago

Somebody should tell T-Mobile. How can you own a color if it ain't a color? ;)

zachbeane• 17 years ago

When I was younger, I never understood why, say, day-glo colors didn't show up in the spectrum. Jim King's color science tutorial at http://home.comcast.net/~jk05/presentations/color.html helped me understand.

voidpointer• 17 years ago

Since when is it necessary for a color to be generated by a single wavelength of electromagnetic radiation? A good way to look at colors their perceptual relationships such as complimentary color is the color wheel used in the HSL and HSV color models. Magenta is at 324° by the way; that's between red and blue (more towards red). Going to the opposite side of the color wheel (324°-180°=144°) gives you (surprise) green, the complementary color to magenta. Magenta happens to be the area where the color wheel "joins" the opposite ends of the visible electromagnetic spectrum. There is nothing mystical about that fact which explains why greens is the only color that has a complementary color that is not made from a single wavelength.

mdonahoe• 17 years ago

Then I guess white isn't a color either since I don't see it on the spectrum

Magenta Ain't A Color

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