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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • Seems you didn’t get my point:

    Says the diagram in the OP, the EM spectrum of a 5800K star, which clearly shows a peak within the visible spectrum in the blue band, and a significant (25% or so) drop off by the time it gets to the red band. Those aren’t relatively equal.

    Then show me an EM spectrum of this mythical “white light” temperature. No matter what temperature you choose, they all have different drop-offs at different frequencies, look again at this graph I linked to before:
    Black body

    The function isn’t even symmetrical, so even if you chose one with the peak in the very middle of the visible spectrum, you’d still get different drop-offs in the blue band and in the red band. So how do you choose which temperature is this perfect white? I’ll tell you how you did, you just chose one that looked white to you. You don’t like 5800K because it looks blue to you. But it only looks blue in certain context! And there’s more, did you know that at lower luminance level, your neutral white will seem more blue?.

    Additionally, you don’t need the full continuous spectrum to produce the “same” white. You can just combine single RGB wavelengths to get white for example. In fact, that’s exactly what we’re talking about as we’re presumably both looking at the image on RGB screens. But you run into the same problem, because there’s no single definition of what exact wavelength red, green or blue is, nor what their relative power should be to produce “neutral” white. But of course this “RGB white” only looks white to humans, some animals would see a different color from the full spectral white.

    I am talking about what color it is

    But color is perception and only that. You can talk about temperatures and wavelengths but from a physics point of view they’re just that - temperatures and wavelengths, not colors! When you go shopping for a laser, you buy a 450 nm or 473 nm or 488 nm laser. You don’t buy “blue laser” because all these three numbers are “blue”.

    Color (American English) or colour (Commonwealth English) is the visual perception based on the electromagnetic spectrum. Though color is not an inherent property of matter, color perception is related to an object’s light absorption, reflection, emission spectra and interference.

    (…)

    Most light sources emit light at many different wavelengths; a source’s spectrum is a distribution giving its intensity at each wavelength. Although the spectrum of light arriving at the eye from a given direction determines the color sensation in that direction, there are many more possible spectral combinations than color sensations. In fact, one may formally define a color as a class of spectra that give rise to the same color sensation, although such classes would vary widely among different species, and to a lesser extent among individuals within the same species. In each such class, the members are called metamers of the color in question. This effect can be visualized by comparing the light sources’ spectral power distributions and the resulting colors.

    [1]


  • 5800K is not white…

    Says who?

    …(relatively equal amounts of all visible light wavelengths)

    That’s the keypoint, relatively equal. You’re comparing black-body radiation temperatures but at no temperature is the spectrum actually constant across the frequencies which we call visible light. So which temperature you choose to call “white” is up to how you decide to define it. And because our eyes have different sensitivity for different frequencies, I doubt that even if you produced a perfectly constant spectral power distribution of visible light, that you would perceive it the same as what you call white on the diagram. Not to mention such a light source could be harder to find than you might think.

    If you don’t believe me, you can start on Wikipedia and from there go down the rabbit hole that colors and color perception are.

    White light

    (…)
    A range of spectral distributions of light sources can be perceived as white—there is no single, unique specification of “white light”. For example, when buying a “white” light bulb, one might buy one labeled 2700K, 6000K, etc., which produce light having very different spectral distributions, and yet this will not prevent the user from identifying the color of objects that those light bulbs illuminate.[30]

    Interestingly, you can define what a perfectly white object is, with the caveat that what frequencies in what ratio actually hit your retina is again dependent on the light source.

    White objects

    Color vision allows us to distinguish different objects by their color. In order to do so, color constancy can keep the perceived color of an object relatively unchanged when the illumination changes among various broad (whitish) spectral distributions of light.[30]

    The same principle is used in photography and cinematography where the choice of white point determines a transformation of all other color stimuli. Changes in or manipulation of the white point can be used to explain some optical illusions such as The dress.

    While there is no single, unique specification of “white light”, there is indeed a unique specification of “white object”, or, more specifically, “white surface”. A perfectly white surface diffusely reflects (scatters) all visible light that strikes it, without absorbing any, irrespective of the light’s wavelength or spectral distribution.


  • It’s called white, but you can see it’s pretty clearly blue

    It’s more complicated than that. “White” is a completely made up term, it has no physical basis. Colors are a perception, they’re not physically real. We just gave labels to some frequencies of the electromagnetic spectrum and their different combinations. And just like a camera, the human brain uses white balance correction to compensate for the fact that in different times of the day, the sunlight reaching us here on Earth has different color temperature (because it travels through different thickness of atmosphere), and by extent to compensate for different color of artificial lighting. So what our brain perceives as “white” is much dependent on context. It’s how the infamous white+gold/blue+black dress illusion works. It’s why when you put on ski goggles with orange lenses, the snow looks yellow at first but becomes “white” after a while. Then you take them off and the snow becomes momentarily blueish before it balances to white again. You can also force yourself to have the white balance temporarily out of sync in each eye.

    If you printed out your chart and looked at it at different times of day or under different lighting conditions, what you’d think as neutral white would change too. So you can’t really say which white is the “true white”, it’s all relative.