RE: [Leica] Re: Color accuracy

[Tim Atherton <tim@KairosPhoto.com>]

> The trouble is that most chemical and electronic color processes use only
> three fixed colors to form an image. They are all based on the
> Young-Helmholtz
> theory of color vision that specifies that a minimum of three colors are
> necessary to specify colors. But there are some colors that the
> eye can visualize
> that lie outside the range embodied by the three primary colors
> incorporated in
> film layers or digital sensors. The human eye uses more than
> three types of
> color sensors - but then nature is not constrained by accountants
> or production
> engineers.

I had some interesting reading this week about how even among say major
European languages, some colours have names in one, but not in another. And
what is called by one name in one language is a different colour in another
language. And there is also one culture that apparently doesn't have words
for colour (as someone joked - the only culture to have erected temples to
the zone system...!)

The point was further made that linguistics and semiotics has major problems
when it comes to colour as it doesn't conform to most other forms of
cultural communication  (in art, for example, drawing or sculpture or music)
which can all be spoken of and explained in some way in linguistic terms.
And that try as we will (all those colour theories being a good example) we
never quite succeed in classifying and ordering colour, as much as we would
like to be able to order it nicely, even in a scientific sense (Newton being
a good example - what's with all that violet in the spectrum - which, of
course to the French, isn't violet at all...).

tim

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