Hello.
This video will be exploring the color brown.
Viewer discretion is advised.
Red.
Green.
Blue.
These three colors are almost like magic.
They’re able to fool our eyes into thinking
we’re seeing almost any color you can think of.
And yet… they can’t.
They’re actually very limited.
But at the same time, they’re nearly limitless.
What do I mean?
Well,
brown.
Brown.
Feast your eyes on the delightful world of
brown.
There are so many good browns out there!
The bark of a majestic tree.
The amazing woodgrain of your favorite videocassette
recorder.
Fresh coffee beans, delicious chocolate,
really, brown is the color of some awesome stuff!
Yeah, there are also some less…
appealing brown substances out there but on the whole brown’s a nice color,
and underappreciated!
But the funny thing about brown is that it’s
a color that doesn't really exist.
OK, it does, but it also kinda doesn’t.
It literally depends on how you see things.
So, we’re gonna be talking a bit about RGB
lighting again, so in a sense this video is
a continuation of “the weird world in RGB”.
If you haven’t seen that video you might
want to check it out.
Here’s a card:
[excessive straining]
[incessant coughing].
Now
[cough]
that…
[cough]
[cough]
that, that, that doesn’t always work...
so there’s a link down below if you need it.
Have you ever seen a brown light?
This may seem like a rather silly question
but it’s pretty much the entire point of this video.
So yeah.
Now, you’ve probably seen like a sign for
a UPS store which is lit up and contains brown,
but there’s a weird thing going on with
that sign.
It’s not actually brown.
It’s orange.
But darker.
Brown is an amazing color because it highlights
how we perceive and describe the world.
Our eyes are just fancy light detectors, barely
able to see three colors, but our brains;
they’re pretty good at interpreting what
the output from those light detectors means.
And the fascinating thing about
brown
is that
it’s a color that exists due to context,
not wavelength.
Take a look at a rainbow.
Rainbows are super helpful because they break
out the visible light spectrum and show us
the limits of what we can see.
They’re also super interesting because they
exist only to humans.
Well, they exist only to organisms that see
in visible light.
And they also kinda don’t exist at all.
Rainbows aren’t physical objects, they’re
just the result of weird things that happen
when electromagnetic radiation gets diffracted
and reflected through water droplets and observed
from one location in space.
Anyway, the important thing about rainbows
is that they contain the color spectrum.
That’s our friend Mr. Biv, Roy G.
These are all the wavelengths of light that
we can detect with our eyes and thus…
see.
Now, you may notice that brown’s not in here.
I suppose that’s not too surprising, when’s
the last time you had a brown Skittle?
M&M’s though...
*taste the brown*
The fact that brown does not appear in the
rainbow tells us that there is no such thing
as brown light.
Don’t believe me?
Well, I don’t blame you.
The screen you’re looking at is showing
you brown, with light.
So how can there be no such thing as brown
light when you’re looking right at it?
Well, in fact, this isn’t brown.
It’s orange, with context.
Let’s play around with some RGB lights,
shall we?
I’ve gone with some LED tape light this
time because I have more precise control over it.
So, quick refresher, the colors red green
and blue work together to create virtually
all colors of light because they roughly correspond
to the long, medium, and short cone cells
in your eyes.
Mix the ratios up between these three colors
and you can trick your brain into thinking
it’s seeing just about any color at all.
Red alone… well it, it’s red.
As we add green light it shifts to orange,
then yellow.
Now as we take away the red, it becomes a
yellow-green, and finally it’s solidly...
green.
Then we add blue and now it’s shifting towards
a blue-green, and now a cyan, before we start
taking away the green and it heads into solid
blue territory.
Start to add red to this and you get a purplish
color.
Keep going and we get magenta.
And finally, as we take the blue away, we
start back at red.
The only thing we’ve been messing with here
is the hue,
not the Dewey or Louie.
And hue exists on a circle.
Well, sometimes, there’s a bunch of ways
to represent color, but here;
Let me show you my play button.
The outer ring contains all of the pure colors
of light that we can produce in an RGB space.
You’ll notice that it follows the color
spectrum, though violet is replaced with magenta,
and it bleeds back into red.
In case you forgot,
magenta is a weird color
that our brains made up!
It comes from an object emitting both high and low frequencies of light,
so near-blue and near-red,
but few middle frequencies like green.
Magenta doesn’t exist in the rainbow, yet
there it is.
Anyway, back to the tape light.
These lights can make any sort of RGB combination
you like, just as the sub pixels in your monitor can.
But they can’t make brown.
Why not?
Because again;
Brown light doesn’t exist.
There is only brown.
Uh, well, here.
How does one make brown in the RGB space?
Surely it’s possible.
I mean.
Look at all the brown.
Well, notice what’s going on inside the
triangle.
This triangle represents the relationship
between hue, saturation, and brightness
in a 2D space.
If fully saturated, and fully bright, we find
ourselves in the right corner.
All monochromatic, or spectral, light sources
exist here.
If brightness stays the same but saturation
falls, we head towards the top corner, and white.
In an RGB space, this is accomplished by adding
both blue and green to red, pushing the composite
color towards white.
Of note is that brightness is technically
increasing since we are adding more light,
but you’ll see why we don’t say that shortly.
As brightness decreases, we head towards the
bottom corner, and black.
In RGB, this is done simply by producing less
light.
As you approach no light at all, you approach
black.
This can be a little confusing to conceptualize
because the axes are weird.
You might think saturation exists on the X
axis, going left to right, but in fact saturation
remains at 100% all along this edge of the
triangle - only brightness varies.
On the opposite edge, brightness remains at
100% as saturation changes.
And on the left edge, saturation stays at
zero but brightness changes, and in fact that’s
why this edge is simply black to white.
The axes are really here, with this being
the saturation axis and this being the brightness axis.
It isn’t really important to the point
here, but it is interesting.
Now this is just one of the ways we can show
a color palette.
There are plenty of other options, like this
one where the box contains hue and saturation,
and brightness is controlled via the slider
on the right.
Or there’s also YouTube’s favorite, the
Hue Cube.
But for what we’re talking about here the
color wheel is best.
So, how do we get brown out of the color wheel?
Well, we’re gonna put our hue at something
like 30 degrees, and drop the brightness.
That, my friends, is brown.
Brown is just orange.
But darker.
Now, I’m sure many of you already knew this,
but I am routinely fascinated by this.
Because again.
Ya can’t make brown light.
Here, let’s go back to the tape light.
We know that to make brown we need to make
orange, and darken it.
So, we’ll make a nice orange color.
Now decrease the brightness.
That’s… still orange.
This is not brown.
At all.
Oh, but it is!
We just don’t have any context to suggest
that this should be brown.
Because you cannot create that context with
a light source on its own.
Here.
I’m gonna leave you in the dark for a moment.
We’re gonna stay here for a brief period
so your eyes get used to the darkness.
Yes.
This sure is dark.
Not a lot to see here, that’s for sure.
Now, this demonstration is only really gonna
work if you can be in a completely dark room
so… maybe try and do that?
I’ll give you a second.
Are you there yet?
Are you in your dark place?
OK.
Cool.
So,
*fart noise*
I have brought to you a square of orange.
This is a very pretty orange square, isn’t
it?
Now, it’s not the brightest orange square
out there, in fact I’ve yet to see one of
those, but it sure is orange.
But is it?
Let’s fade from black and into white.
Oh no!
It was brown the whole time!
How could I have been fooled?!
♫ smarmy slow jazz ♫
Those words on the screen up there? They're important.
Don't bother reading these words.
They won't do you any good.
Yes. Yes it is.
Well, you were fooled because you didn’t
have any context to tell you that this color
was brown.
Or, if you weren’t fooled, you didn’t
listen to me and instead left the lights on
so you could see the color against the blackness
of your screen.
You cheater.
To see brown as brown, we need to be seeing
brighter things around it.
And that’s why you can’t ever make a light
source like this tape light appear brown.
It produces its own light, so it will always
be brighter than its surroundings.
You can’t use light to take brightness away.
However, in the case of a monitor or a television,
you can control the amount of light each portion
of it makes.
So, if you need to see a brown thing, so long
as there are brighter objects on the screen
to give you context, you’ll see that dimly
lit orange as brown.
Also of note is that, with lights on in the
room, the monitor is of course darker than
its surroundings already.
This is one of the reasons this demonstration
might not have worked.
The black space around the orange square gives
you the context you need to know that it’s
not very bright at all, so it’s brown.
In fact, this is precisely the reason why
your display needs to be a black void when
it’s not displaying anything.
In order to see a full range of colors, you
need to be able to produce darkness and lightness
at the same time.
The only way to do that with light by itself
is to make sure the starting point is very dark.
So, modern displays absorb most of the light
that falls on them so they will appear black
even in a well-lit space.
This is also why projection systems need to
be in very dark rooms.
Otherwise the screen is illuminated by incidental
lighting, so the darkest color it can produce
will be a grey, and the image is washed-out.
The thing is, to make brown, you need to take
light away.
If you wanted to make brown using pigments,
you’d start with orange and add black.
And in fact you can even see this going on
in the color wheel.
While this is of course representing color
in the context of light, you can also think
of this as the result of mixing paints together.
Up here is purely white paint.
Down here is purely black paint.
And over to the right is a paint of perfect
hue.
Mix them together and you get what’s going
on inside the triangle.
Objects in the real world that are brown are
like an orange mixed with black.
The light they reflect into your eyes is similar
in wavelength to an orange, but there’s
not a lot of that light.
It’s pretty dark.
And we just happen to call that resulting
color "brown".
Side-note; brown is also fascinating to me
because it’s arguably a human construct.
Perhaps you’ve heard about how languages
evolved to describe color in categories.
Some languages have fewer categories of color
than others, and anthropologists have discovered
that as languages evolved they tended to build
upon these categorizations
in the same predictable order.
For instance, languages with only three categories
of color would almost always contain
white,
black
(or their stand-ins light and dark)
and red.
In these languages, things like blue, green,
yellow - they just don’t have words for
them, and they’re not distinct.
Languages with six categories, like Mandarin
Chinese, contain white, black, red, yellow,
green and blue.
Side-side-note;
When we were learning colors, as you do, we
learned
bái sè,
hēi sè,
hóng sè,
huáng sè,
lǜ sè, and
lán sè.
Then our teacher asked us, 
"what do you think brown is?"
And I just blurted out because I was a smart
ass and thought it would be clever, what,
is it kā fēi sè?
And my teacher eyes lit up delighted because it is!
Now, to be fair, that technically means
“the color of coffee”
and there is a separate word for brown,
zōng sè.
However, we used kā fēi sè more frequently
in class at least so, there you go.
I can now officially say that I have used
my very, very, rudimentary knowledge of Chinese
in my professional life.
Huzzah!
Anyway, to get us back on target, the point
I’m making here is that we only recognize
colors as distinct after we’ve decided
that’s a distinct color!
and we give it a name.
Even in English orange didn’t become a color
until we stole that word from the fruit.
Prior to then it was either yellow or red.
Or yellow-red.
Or maybe red-yellow.
Rellow?
And I think brown is definitely one of these
late colors.
Why?
Well, let’s hop on board the color wheel
one more time.
Right here is a nice sturdy brown.
Clearly.
That’s brown.
Mmm.
But look what happens when I change the hue.
As we head into yellow that becomes, oh I
don’t know a puky green?
Maybe tan?
We move into green and that’s… just a
dark green.
As we move into cyan we get what you might
call a teal, but everything from there on
out is just dark whatever.
Dark blue, dark purple, dark red...
but when
we get back to orange that’s not dark orange.
It’s brown!
The color is clearly its own color.
But why?
Why isn’t it a dark orange?
Well, because we’ve named it brown.
And the mere act of doing that causes it to
become a distinct color in our mind’s eye.
That’s pretty neat and weird stuff, isn’t
it?
Brown serves as a fantastic example of the
difference between creating color with pigments
and creating color with light.
Objects in the real world are lit by the sun,
or maybe a light bulb, and what we see is
the light reflected off of them.
If they reflect a lot of that light, they’ll
appear white.
If they absorb a lot of that light, they’ll
appear black.
And if they absorb only some frequencies of
light and reflect others, they’ll appear
as whatever color they reflect the most.
But describing it that way is incomplete.
It’s not just the prevailing wavelength
that creates the color.
That defines the hue.
Again, that’s the circle.
Hue is only one third of color.
Hue, saturation, and brightness all work together
to create the colors we see.
In the realm of pigment, or real-world objects,
brightness describes how much light is reflected
back, hue describes which (if any) wavelengths
stand out to give it color.
And saturation describes how much that wavelength
stands out, or how intense the color appears.
And the thing is, in the real world, we always
start with light and the objects around us
take it away.
This is called subtractive color.
If we use paints, well a white paint reflects
pretty much all of the light that hits it back,
and roughly equally.
A black paint absorbs most of the light that
hits it, again equally.
And a colored paint absorbs most light, but
not certain wavelengths.
In the case of red paint, it reflects red
quite well.
In this scenario, the red paint is our hue.
Red paint alone is fully saturated, and fully
bright.
Add some white paint to it and you decrease
the saturation because now the reflected light
is not purely red.
Other wavelengths are now visible, though
red remains prominent.
Mixing in black paint with red decreases the
brightness because it lowers the overall amount
of light being reflected back.
However, because black paint absorbs all wavelengths
roughly equally, the light being reflected
back is still purely red.
There’s just less of it.
So this mixture is fully saturated, but less
bright.
You can create any brightness and saturation
combo you like simply by altering the ratio
of white, red, and black paint.
The hue, however, will always remain red.
Or roughly zero degrees on the hue circle.
But when we use light to create an image,
this is sorta turned on its head.
A display creates its own light (usually)
and this is why the primary colors are red,
green and blue.
We sometimes call this additive color.
We’re starting with no light, and need to
add light to create what is seen.
And in the weird world of RGB, creating colors
anywhere below this line requires lowering
brightness, or taking away light.
But we can’t actually take away light.
We can only produce less of it.
And that’s what’s so interesting about
brown.
Even here on the color wheel, with orange
selected, it’s kinda hard (at least to me)
to see the space in the triangle as containing
brown.
It just looks like a whole bunch of different
shades of orange.
But indeed, those darker shades are very much
what we call brown.
It’s an orange-ish wavelength of light,
but not a lot of it.
With something like an LED tape light, or
really any RGB light source on its own, you
can’t produce a color that looks like brown
because any attempt to do so will just end
up looking like orange.
And the reason why is pretty simple; all light
sources brighten what’s around them.
There is no equivalent of a black pigment
in the realm of light.
There’s just… less light.
And in order for that to be perceived as a
dark color, you need to have some sort of context.
You get gobs of that when looking at an image
produced on a display…
but you get none at all from a simple light source existing in the real world.
With an RGB light, you’re limited to colors
that exist on this line.
You can either be a pure hue, which incidentally
is why your RGB gaming rig tends to just cycle
between blue, cyan, green, yellow, red, magenta,
and blue again, or you can decrease saturation
and approach white.
But you can’t venture away from this line.
I mean, you can, but a dimmer light without
context is still just a light.
And our brains simply won’t see that as
in the center of the triangle unless we have
other, brighter things to see, too.
I hope you enjoyed this look into the color
brown.
Brown is, and I am not kidding you, my favorite
color.
Sometimes I wish we could just get a ‘70s
appreciation movement going because boy was
that a good time to be a fan of brown!
Nowadays nobody seems to like the color brown.
Sad face.
Now, to be fair, the world’s ugliest color
- that’s Pantone 448 C - is a brown.
But, I mean, that’s not fair to brown.
Not all browns are that gross looking.
They... they can be, just slide the hue over here
and you’re getting a good bit of yellow
in there, which somehow seems to make the
brown look almost greenish.
But, just look at all these other great browns!
Those are some good browns.
Are you wondering why I’ve made a video
on
brown?
Well, the more good sounding answer is that
I wanted to share with you more of the weirdness
that is our human color perception, but the
more true answer is that I wanted to see if
I could make a good video out of something
as mundane as a color.
I hope to make this a sort of periodic challenge
for me, and I hope you think I’ve done a
good job today!
By the way, and this is a totally random suggestion,
you should consider checking out the channel
“Aging Wheels” on YouTube.
If you like hilarious shenanigans involving
weird and interesting bits of automotive history,
including bizarre electric cars, well then
that is a channel for you.
I’ve been told I look a lot like Robert,
but frankly I don’t see the resemblance.
Well.
Thanks for watching!
And seriously.
Go check out Aging Wheels.
It’s great.
I even made a playlist for you of my favorite
videos.
Go watch.
‘Kay bye.
♫ contextually smooth jazz ♫
There’s a card down below if you need it.
Link!
Ahh…
They tended to build upon these categora…
categorizations.
This is… ooh boy!
That’s the first time I read this line and
I know it’s gonna go poorly.
I suppose that’s not too surprising, when’s
the last time you had a brown skittle?
That went well, except what was this?
So we’re gonna be talking a bit about RGB
colored light… lighting again.
It’s, it’s going too slow...
I’m sorry....
But when we use light to create an image…
I need to back it up once more.
I need to restart it because it stopped.
Here’s a
mmmMMMMMMM.
(laughing)
You know I’m not…
you’re not gonna use the footage from that, so what does it matter?
[Probably not]
Oh, but I did!
I did use the footage from that!
Also, yes. I totally forgot to add the text elements that I usually do on the endscreen.
I'm just gonna pretend that I meant to do that because I am promoting Robert's channel.
Ya know, 'cause it's different?
TASTE THE BROWN
