Many people wonder how many colors exist in nature? Some say there are 3, others say there are 7, and some insist on thousands. So how many colors are there really? Let’s look into this in more detail.
Do colors exist?
Color is a function of the human visual system. Objects have no color, they only reflect light, which is “colored” in one hue or another. Spectral power distributions exist in the physical world, but color exists only in the mind of the observer.
Color is determined first by frequency and then by how those frequencies combine or blend when they reach the eye. Light falls on specialized receptor cells on the retina, then the signal is sent to the brain along the optic nerve before being processed in the occipital lobe. As a result, we perceive light as one color or another. Thus, a person can distinguish about 15,000 colors.
Interesting fact
If you do not train your color perception, the human eye can distinguish only up to 100 shades. Conversely, those who constantly deal with colors and paints – artists, designers, illustrators, etc., are able to distinguish many times more shades.
Precisely because the brain is responsible for the perception of colors, people can see the same objects in different colors. Conduct an experiment: offer your friends or family to come to a nature park (it is in the natural environment you can observe a great variety of shades) and ask them what shades of colors, plants, sky they see. This will help you see that people will not always see the same colors as you do.
7 colors
The theory of 7 colors was formulated back in the 17th century and it is associated with the name of Isaac Newton. He conducted an experiment on splitting of a sunbeam through a prism. As a result, Newton got 7 colors (colors of the rainbow): red, orange, yellow, green, blue, blue and violet. Having formed a circle, Newton noticed that the received colors can be combined, forming absolutely new shades which are not in his system.
Over time, the color wheel was refined by Goethe and Ostwald.
3 basic colors
Often the circle is reduced to 3 basic colors – yellow, red and blue. They are also called “pure”. This concept is related rather to the human need to reproduce different shades, since it is the mixing of the listed colors that can give the greatest number of derived colors. Monitor screens create all the hues from these 3 colors specifically. Test your screen through analyzers like fullwhitescreen.com. Make your favorite color the full screen.
Does the color black exist?
When talking about the most common and familiar colors for humans, we don’t miss the opportunity to think of black. But in fact, it is hard to call black exactly a color. As it was agreed at the beginning of the article, all objects reflect light, so what we used to call black is just objects that absorb light, not reflect it.