was blind, but now i see (<-- a pun)

what we see:

what we learn we see:

i am flabbergasted at how mislead i was in elementary school. intrigued by ars technica's article on the recent question into whether magenta is a real color, i began to investigate this chromaticity diagram further (oddly enough aspell doesn't even know that chromaticity is a real word)

when we were young we were told that the three primary colors are red, yellow, and blue, and that with these three powerful colors we can make any color in the world! this was enough for a young person. when i was a little older (5th or 6th grade?) i was let in on the secret of additive vs. subtractive colors, and that additive colors (red/green/blue) applied to light, and subtractive colors (good ol' red/yellow/blue) applied to things like paint and crayons. i didnt care about the physics or where these came from. apparently these are more psychological primary colors (read: we dont care about how this works). arent sensation and perception amazing?

in later years i would go on to learn about rods and cones in the eyes and how they pick up wavelengths of the elctromagnetic spectrum that we perceive as colors. i know about what wavelength applies to which color and what comes before and after on the EM spectrum. but i still assumed that every color of light could be made with RGB and every color of reflective objects could be made with RYB.

this graph above got me very interested in this shroud that seemed to be over our eyes. it is a plot of all the colors the average person can see. the triangle chunk taken out of it is the subset of visible colors that can be represented using the RGB model. maybe we dont care. apparently the colors outside the triangle are inefficient to reproduce electrically, and they are very similar to colors that are inside the triangle, but still. we dont see a triangle of colors, we see a tongue! i couldnt believe that humans simplify visible colors into linear combinations of these three without there being an awareness that other visible colors exist outside this subset. our tvs and computer screens cannot reproduce these ignored colors. also worth noting is that the red-yellow-blue model is old and deprecated, and now we "know better" that the best choices as the three primary subtractive colors are yellow, cyan, and magenta (all this time i have been confused into thinking that cyan and magenta were primary additive colors, not subtractive...)

the answer to ars's article is that magenta is a combination of other colors, and not a true monochromatic color. but most of what we see in the real world is not a perfect monochromatic color either, and our accepted scheme for representing color cannot realize any monochromatic colors anyway.