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FAX: 703-550-3755
EMAIL: contact@bluedoorpainters.com
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“The replastering job I had done by Blue Dor Painters is outstanding as well; we had chunks of plaster hanging down from the ceiling in our bathroom and now you would never even know it was repaired. The office was also very easy to deal with. Would hire them again in a second (and plan [...]
Vienna, VA
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Managing Snow Removal
Winter storms can be absolutely beautiful. Overnight, your neighborhood is transformed from a mundane grid of streets lined with houses to an ethereal, inhuman landscape of delicate white and silver. All the children are outside laughing, and you see more of your neighbors than at any other time (except for maybe the beginning of Spring barbecue season!), as they emerge from their homes to inspect the drifts in their driveways and icicles hanging down off the power lines.
Unfortunately, winter storms can also be one of life’s greatest hassles. Because at some point, as much as you might want to prolong the moments where you get to play in the snow and sit by the fire drinking cocoa, your regular life’s responsibilities demand you return your attention to them. Groceries need to be purchased, you need to get back to work, the kids need to be reminded that they need to get their project done because school won’t be closed forever. And when you do start plugging back in, the snow that initially protected you from having to deal with life’s responsibilities now becomes an extremely tedious obstacle that makes all of those responsibilities infinitely more complicated.
So it’s a good idea to have a plan for dealing with large volumes of snow in place before that snow actually hits. Thinking about all of the things you’re going to need, and how you plan to get them if the roads are blocked and the power goes out, makes the transition from winter wonderland to real life go much more smoothly.
Blue Door Painters Suggestions for a Winter Weather Plan:
1. Decide where you are going to leave your car, and park it there before the storm hits. Leaving your car on the side of the road makes it harder for the snowplows to get through, and it also makes it so that your car gets buried under a tough, compressed wall of plowed snow. Park your car in a driveway if you have one, or up on the sidewalk. If you’re particularly clever, you’ll find a place to park your car on a more major road that is within walking distance of your house, because that road will probably get plowed before yours will.
2. Pick your route through your yard, and prepare to keep it cleared. Outdoor landscaping features, like decks and patios, should suffer no harm from being covered with snow – but it is important to have a safe, clear route from your door to your sidewalk, and to keep that route clear. Once you decide on your route, shovel it (and your sidewalk!) regularly as the snow is falling, and treat it with environmentally friendly ice-melting chemicals so that your shoveling job never gets too burdensome, and your route isn’t too slippery.
3. Hire a snow removal company. Blue Door Painters, as well as many other snow removal companies in the Washington, DC area, can offer you a contract at the beginning of the winter to come by your house and shovel you out whenever there is a major storm. The benefit of contracting at the beginning of the winter is that you don’t have to wait until a storm actually hits – when your phones might be down, and you without power – to call somebody up.
4. Get your interior ready. If you lose power, how are you going to stay warm? How are you going to see at night? How are you going to communicate with the outside world? For warmth, whether your solution is a fireplace, a generator, or a whole bunch of blankets, you want to make sure that you are stocked, and you know where everything is, before the storm hits. For light, you want to make sure that your flashlights have fresh batteries and are handy, and that you know where your candles and lanterns are, so you aren’t fumbling for them in the dark. And for communication, you should make sure your mobile devices are fully charged before the storm hits, and keep them off when not in use so that you can keep the charge. It is also sensible to fill your car(s) with gas prior to a storm hitting, as cars can be used both for heat (though make sure the exhaust pipe is clear of snow!) and for power (if you have a car charger), provided they are full of gas. Finally, hit the grocery store before the crowds do, and focus on things you can make even if the power goes out and you lose the use of your microwave.
5. Communicate your plans. You want to tell anyone who matters what you plan to do if you’re snowed in; your boss, your lunch date, etc., so that you don’t have to spend a lot of time scrambling around to reach them if the power goes out and correspondence becomes difficult.
Where Can I Buy Paint?
Tips for purchasing paint and painting supplies from a Washington, DC/Northern Virginia area Contracting Company
Navigating the coatings industry (“coating” = paint, stain, sealant, wallpaper, etc) can be a little overwhelming for the beginner. This is mostly because what seems like a simple product to the uninformed consumer (aka, paint), is actually an intricately engineered concoction, and the variety of different mixtures on the market is actually pretty wide. What kind of store you go to determines what kinds of products you will be offered, and what kind of product you select will go a long way toward determining the quality of your final paint job.
Paint can typically be purchased either from a general home improvement store, like Home Depot, or from a specialized paint store, like Sherwin Williams or Benjamin Moore. While they have obvious overlap, these two types of store have different primary goals, which translates to a different selection of paint products.
The purpose of a store like Home Depot is to provide a one-stop-shop for homeowners who want to do home improvement projects themselves. Typically speaking, do-it-yourselfers have a lower budget, less expertise, and less equipment than professional contractors. With this target audience in mind, generalized home improvement stores tend to provide cheap to medium-luxury brands of paint, a comprehensive collection of equipment, and simpler, more straightforward tools. Most signature brands of paint that are sold in specialty paint stores are not offered in general home improvement stores, because they are proprietary. So stores like Home Depot carry the more generic, widely distributed brands of paint. While these brands of paint will do the job, they do not have the extra care taken into the engineering that you will find at a specialty store. They will also likely not cost as much.
The purpose of a specialty paint store is to sell paint, period. Paint stores sell specific brands, which have been engineered to excel in various arenas. High durability or opacity, waterproofing or flameproofing, mildew-resistance, low-VOC content, bold color retention, high clean ability, and custom finishes are all examples of the special purposes for which designer paints can be engineered. Paint stores also sometimes sell a type of paint known as “contractor grade”. Contractor grade paint, ironically enough, is actually extremely low – quality, intended for covering large areas in new construction. Since specialty paint stores sell to contractors as well as homeowners (and that includes general contractors working with new construction as well as high-craftsmanship refinishing contractors like Blue Door Painters), the types of paint offered are focused on very specific goals, from the cheap new-construction paints to the extremely reliable designer paints that a refinishing contractor can stake his reputation on.
So when you are shopping for paint, you should consider the level of quality you are looking for, as well as your budget and whether you are going to have help in the execution. Understanding what kind of paint is sold where is a solid first step toward navigating the complicated world of paint products.
Dirty Decks: Pressure-Washing Winter Debris
Many things about the winter actually protect your deck from the kind of beating it gets in the summer. There isn’t the same exposure to the beating sun (in fact, when it snows the deck actually gets a welcome break from the sun altogether), and there isn’t as much human traffic on the deck, which is another leading cause of wear. Your deck gets to lie dormant for a season, just like the deciduous trees who lose their leaves – a welcome break. But what does get to your deck in the winter is that very dormancy. Planters, lawn furniture, grills – they all sit out there unmoving all season long, as the snow and rain comes and goes, creating stains on the deck’s surface. The extreme cold temperatures, combined with the moisture of snowmelt, can also cause warping or splintering in an unsealed deck, due to the freeze/thaw cycle.
When the earth turns and it starts to get warm, you may start getting the urge to spend time on your deck again. You might want to pull the tarp off the grill and brush the gunk out of the corners of your deck furniture, and rearrange the planters (and maybe have peek at what’s inside them, now that landscaping season has begun anew). You also might want to consider pressure-washing your deck, and possibly even re-staining and sealing it in anticipation of spring rains and summer sun.
The difference in a deck before and after a pressure-washing job is vivid. Unlike any other method of deck cleaning, pressure-washing actually penetrates into the outer layers of the decking, removing contaminants that have entered the wood’s pores. Since wood is a porous, absorbent substance, cleaning methods that only reach the surface are not going to reach most of the contaminants accumulated over the winter, and are therefore not going to successfully make the deck look cleaner. A pressure-washer (also known as a power-washer) uses water, and sometimes also a light detergent, forced out of a narrow nozzle at high pressure to penetrate deeply into the wood’s pores. The mechanical force of the pressure digs into the wood, removing anything lodged there, and the continuous spray of water washes it harmlessly away. Most pressure washers have adjustable nozzles that allow you to vary both the pressure and the volume of water, so that you can maximize the effect of your power-washer.
Power-washing your deck for the spring is a good way to make it an enticing place to hang out. You can hire a service like Blue Door Painters to come take care of it for you, or do it yourself, renting a power-washer from a local hardware store or Home Depot. Once your deck is clean, you might also want to consider staining and sealing it in anticipation of the spring and summer. Staining and sealing protects the wood of your deck from sun, rain, and even the scuffing of human traffic – all of which, now that you have made it such a great place to hang out, it can expect to look forward to in the coming warm months. It can also make your deck glow, extending that good-as-new look you get right after your deck is pressure-washed. A good deck is a strong asset to any exterior; make suer to give yours the love and TLC that it truly deserves.
Challenges and Benefits of Remodeling in the Winter
There are many reasons not to remodel in the winter. The harsher the elements, the more environmental challenges are posed to an exterior job. Exposure to extreme winter elements makes new coatings and other work so vulnerable to failure that most contractors (Blue Door Painters included) postpone exterior projects until mid-March, when temperatures become more stable. Interior projects, though protected from the elements by climate control, require you to give up some of your indoor space – and in the winter, when the outdoors isn’t a nice place to be, losing access to a portion of your interior space can be extra stressful. Added risk, added inconvenience: the challenges of remodeling in the winter provide such a clear and obvious deterrent that it is no surprise that very few people take on a remodeling project during this season.
So what are the benefits? In a nutshell, the benefit is that very few people take on a remodeling project during this season.
What this means for your project, is that you will get more attention – and more opportunity for savings – from everyone involved, all along the supply chain. The stores selling supplies will be doing less business, and may be running slow seasonal sales. The contractor working on your project will undoubtedly be running fewer jobs, and will be available to focus only on you, therefore ensuring that you get maximal attention. For remodeling projects that involve complex supplies, there is likely to be a much shorter wait time to order the necessary parts in the winter versus in the other three seasons (when everyone else is remodeling). Finally, many contractors, Blue Door Painters included, offer special discount incentives for customers willing to offer work during the slow season.
In addition to saving money and benefitting from the special care that comes from being the center of attention, you will have your space all ready to enjoy when the warm weather finally hits. While it is certainly a trade-off, since you have to spend some time being less comfortable indoors during the winter (when you can’t go anywhere else), when the warm weather hits and you want to start focusing on other things (like throwing barbecues and going camping), you won’t have your remodeling project hanging over your shoulder anymore. It will be all over and done with – with extra care and at a fraction of the cost – for you and your guests to enjoy. Which is enough of a reason to balance all the downsides.
How Can I Tell if My Wall is Insulated?
An example of the many areas insulation is used when sealing a typical building hallway.
How to Check for Insulation In Exterior Walls From Washington, DC Area Drywall Experts
It’s February 8. It took a while to get cold this winter – back in November, it was balmy enough that you started to wonder if maybe there was something to the whole global warming theory. But by February 8, it has officially been cold for over a month and a half. You haven’t spent much time in either of your downstairs bedrooms for about as long. Never mind that the larger of the two bedrooms is supposed to be your office; you’ve been finding yourself curled up on the couch in the living room with your laptop on your days to work from home. The other bedroom – a guest room with beautiful windows that you like to read in during the summer – is basically a glorified closet at this point, the bed piled with extra toilet paper from the Costco sale and unwanted Christmas gifts that you haven’t found happy homes for yet.
The problem is that those two rooms are just impossible to get warm. Never mind that your gas bill is over $200, and the upper floor of your cape cod is unbearably hot unless you dress like you’re at the beach; those two bedrooms linger in the low 60s/high 50s no matter how hard you crank the heat.
If you live in an older home, your problem may very well be that the exterior walls aren’t insulated. Ideally, in between the exterior particleboard and the interior drywall, you should have a layer of insulation. It could be batts of fiberglass (the fluffy pink stuff) or rock wool, or it could be loose fill – a kind of confetti of paper, fiberglass, or rock wool that fills up all the cavities in between the “bread” of the interior and exterior boarding – or it could be sprayed-in foam. With something other than dead air in between the layers of wall, your rooms should hold their heat even against the coldest weather. Without such a buffering layer, however, your rooms are probably doomed to stay chilly until the earth circles around its orbit far enough to make the warm weather come back.
How can you tell if your walls have insulation in them? The way your room holds heat can give you a strong clue (i.e., if it doesn’t hold its heat, it’s probably not insulated), but if you want to know for sure, the only way is to open the drywall and take a look. Ideally, you want to remove drywall in a space where it will do the least damage to the look of the room; around a piece of window trim or a light fixture. If you remove only a small amount of drywall, it will be tricky to get a good look, but if you remove a larger piece, you will need to have it replaced. Obviously, only the exterior walls need to be checked; there is no purpose to insulating the interior walls, unless you are concerned about soundproofing. If the insulation is in there, you will be able to see it.
And if it isn’t? You might want to consider adding insulation. It can be blown or sprayed in through small cracks cut in your drywall, or your drywall can be removed completely so that batting insulation can be installed. It all depends on how much of a procedure you are willing to go through, and how efficient you want your newly insulated walls to be – batting insulation tends to be more efficient, but it costs more and takes longer to install. The crew you hire to install your new insulation should be certified and trained to work with both insulation and drywall, and should be able to advise you on your options. And when your new insulation is finally installed (or when you cut a hole in your drywall and find that there’s already some in there, and that your room is cold because there’s something wrong with your HVAC), and you decide you need some patching up and a new paint job, give Blue Door Painters a call. That freezing cold bedroom could turn into your new favorite winter den.
How Can I Protect My Deck From Snow?
Protect your deck and beware of rime ice!
Tips for winter deck care from Washington, DC / Northern Virginia area painting and deck staining contractor.
Early in the morning, you peak out the window to behold a winter wonderland. Your front lawn is a pristine sea of sparkling white. Your sidewalk is a pristine sea of sparkling white. Your back deck is a pristine sea of sparkling white….
Wait a minute: Is that okay?
Without protection, decks take a beating from the elements. Heat and cold, sun and rain, will all weather your deck at an accelerated rate. All four seasons bring unique challenges to exposed wood: summer brings heat and sun, spring brings excessive rain and drastic temperature changes, and fall brings the tannins of all the fallen leaves. Winter brings frosty cold – and with it, the great array of cold-weather precipitation: snow, ice, and sleet.
Of these, ice rime is the only one that you really need to worry about. Snow and sleet will add moisture to the deck, and cold temperatures will take their toll, but nothing acute will go wrong during a snowstorm, no matter how many inches of snow you get. Decks are very strong, and can survive even a serious blizzard. Ice rime is a different creature, however. Without proper finish to the wood, a solid layer of ice can work its way into cracks and pores in the wood, and the expansion and contraction that comes with freezing and thawing can lead to splintering. A good deck sealing job in the fall can go a long way to protect against this situation. If sealing or resealing your deck is a job that you put off for the spring, however, and you look out your window and want to clear a layer of ice from your deck, (or if you would like to be able to safely traverse it), you should follow these tips:
1. Do not chop ice with a shovel; the blade of the shovel can damage the wood
2. Melt the ice with rock salt, calcium chloride, or an environmentally friendly alternative
3. Shovel any snow, slush, or other wintry debris with a plastic shovel, using strokes that move along the boards, not cutting across them (the edge of the shovel may catch on the edges of the boards and damage them)
Generally speaking, unless you get a large tree trunk coming down, a single winter weather event will not be sufficient to damage your deck, so if you want to leave it as a pristine winter wonderland, go ahead. It is the cumulative effect of all four seasons that wears out a deck that hasn’t been properly stained and sealed. If this is something you find yourself worrying about this winter, why not consider staining it when the weather gets better in the spring? It might do wonders for your deck’s beauty and durability – and, next winter, for your peace of mind.
Winter Decoration
Full-spectrum lights mimic sunlight, covering the electromagnetic spectrum from infrared to near-ultraviolet.
Environmental psychologists and Feng Sui practitioners, coming from two extremely different intellectual traditions, tend to agree on two things:
1) the winter is the most challenging season for human psychology, and
2) the way that an interior is designed can play a strong role in mitigating the impact of this difficult season.
What makes the winter so hard? Two factors seem to contribute: first, that special brand of claustrophobia known as “stir-crazy”; and second, the lack of sunlight. It’s not the cold that truly unsettles us, according to recent medical research – it’s the darkness. The human tendency to get depressed and lethargic in the winter has been studied extensively under the diagnostic name Seasonal Affect Disorder (SAD), and psychologists have had some success in treating SAD with prolonged exposure to full-spectrum light. At the same time, practitioners of the ancient Chinese art of Feng Shui, which is the careful arrangement of interior environments to maximize personal success and fulfillment, have developed techniques to bring what they call yang energy (warm, lively energy) into an interior to balance out the surplus of yin energy (cool, introspective energy) that occurs during the winter. Using the combined wisdom of these two traditions, Blue Door Painters has assembled some simple decorative tips for weathering the winter.
1. Change your interior decor to match the season. Both practically and aesthetically (not to mention energetically, if you’re a Feng Shui enthusiast), arrangements that are designed for the summer -harmonizing with the intense light, warmth, openness, and activity of the long days and sticky heat – will clash with the needs of the winter. In the summer, you want coolness to balance the warmth; in the winter, you want the opposite, and if you keep the exact same decor all year round, you will feel the tension. Even if you only make minor changes in your interior decor to acknowledge the changing seasons, you will benefit psychologically.
2. Maximize light. Now is the time to bring out a few more lamps and mirrors, and to mix in some light-valued colors that will capture and enhance the visible light in your interior spaces. Focus on full-spectrum lights for your primary illumination, because they interact differently with your body’s physiology and protect you more thoroughly against SAD. For corners and nooks in your home that tend to stay in shadows, now is a good time to bring out small lamps, candles, and mirrors, so that the whole of your interior can come alive with light. And never underestimate the power of a skillfully placed mirror, or light-colored, lively painting or wall hanging: direct light sources aren’t the only way to spread light around a room. If you are considering a repaint in the winter, focus on the light-valued colors that will capture and hold whatever natural light the room collects.
3. Maximize warmth. Adding warm-colored accents helps the yang energy circulate in your interior, which is a good antidote to winter’s lethargy. Red, orange, yellow, tan, and brown (provided the brown has more red than blue mixed in) have all been demonstrated to give a psychological impression of warmth, regardless of their actual, physical temperature. Pillows, rugs, draperies, bedcovers, artwork, and even wall and window trim in warm colors can bring life into a room in the heavy winter months.
4. Make it cozy. While you want to maximize light, you also want to make the home feel secure and protected against winter’s cold. This might mean adding some extra layers between your interior and the outside world; heavier draperies, thicker rugs, comforters draped over couches and loveseats, can all enhance the impression of warmth and protection. Having a window open while the sun is shining enhances the light in the room, but having it framed in thick, warm-colored curtains, which can be drawn shut when the light outside grows weak and starts to fade, creates a subtle sense of security.
5. Incorporate nature. We miss the outdoor world when we’re stuck inside, even if we aren’t big outdoor enthusiasts. A few extra houseplants, or skillfully placed paintings or photographs of natural settings, can help us feel more connected to nature and to the coming activity of spring. If the pictures depict winter landscapes, all the better; that way the beauty of winter can be celebrated from the warmth of the indoors.
How Much Color Do You Want in an Interior?
This amazing color wheel was created by Moses Harris (1731-1785)
Tips from expert color consultants on interior design in the Washington, DC area
There are six basic strategies for using the color wheel to develop harmonious color palettes. We’ve listed them below, in order from the most conservative to the most daring. All you need is a basic subtractive color wheel (3 primary colors, 3 secondary colors, and 3 tertiary colors), and you are ready to get started trying out combinations. When deciding which strategy to use, you will need to consider what kind of visual and emotional impact you want your space to have.
SIX COLOR PICKING STRATEGIES
- Monotonal: Take one small slice of the wheel, and pick three our four shades that are both close together, and similar in value (light vs dark) and chroma (bright vs dull), and you have a monotonal color scheme. Monotonal color schemes are ideal for settings where you want the decor to fade into the background, perhaps as a setting for brightly colored art or furniture. If you intend to use monotonal furnishings and decorations as well, you should be careful that the color concentration doesn’t become overwhelming.
- Monochromatic: Monochromatic color schemes involve a similarly small slice of the color wheel (i.e., all blue, or all yellow) – but cast the net wider to include a variety of values and chromes. So a monochromatic blue scheme, for example, might include a pastel baby blue, a grayish slate-blue, a deep navy, and a bright cornflower blue for accents. The strength of monochromatic schemes is that they usually do come out looking harmonious, and they can maintain a consistent mood, but they allow for enough contrast to give the decor some texture.
- Analogous: For an analogous color scheme, you get to carve out a slightly larger slice of the wheel, collecting several base hues clustered on the same side. Blue and green, for example, or blue, green, and violet, could be combined to create an analogous color scheme. Analogous color schemes provide for a greater variety, while still maintaining a constant color ‘temperature’ (meaning the psychological impression of temperature, not the actual physical temperature) and offering a good chance of coming out harmonious.
- Complementary: Moving into the more daring color combinations; complementary color schemes involve jumping across the wheel. First you pick a favorite color, and then you jump across the wheel and also collect its opposite. The contrast you get from complementary color schemes is vivid, but they tend to look good together because colors that are directly opposite each other on the wheel develop good aesthetic balance.
- Split-Complementary/Double-Complementary: A more sophisticated strategy involves splitting each hue in a complementary color scheme into two. Each pair of hues should be equally offset from the original central hue, and the variation should be slight, so that the color wheel balance is still achieved. You can balance one color against one pair, or create two pairs opposite each other on the wheel. Complementary color schemes offer a high degree of intricacy, and can create a pleasant combination, but you need to take care at this level of complexity that your colors do not start to clash.
- Triad/Tetrad: Finally, you can usually create a harmonious scheme using the triad or tetrad color picking strategy. For this technique, you pick three colors that are evenly distributed around the wheel (like red, yellow, and blue, for example) – or four colors that are evenly distributed. Once you pick the colors, you can play with the value and chroma to create a complex arrangement that is pleasing to the eye.
How Are Colors Classified?
A few examples of changes in hue.
Artists and poets have fallen in love with color for as long as there has been human culture, and there are a million beautiful color names that have been invented to describe the rich palettes that fill our world. However, in an attempt to standardize a language of color for optimal communication, and to bring color analysis into the realm of science, several color classification systems have been developed. The Munsell Color System, created by Albert H. Munsell in the early 1900s, is an example of a good, comprehensive classification system for organizing colors and analyzing the relationships between them.
Albert Munsell observed that the colors we see actually have three different dimensions, which vary independently of each other. Two of these dimensions come from the two types of photoreceptive cells in our eyes, and the third is a combination of the two working together.
The Three Characteristics of Any Color
1. Hue – the particular wavelength in the rainbow or color wheel (detected by the cones in the eye)
2. Value – the lightness or darkness of the color, measured by the amount of black and white mixed in (detected by the rods in the eye)
3. Chroma (Sometimes called “intensity” or “saturation”) – the degree of pure color versus neutral tones (black/white/gray) in the mixture (detected by the rods and the cones together)
When you discuss color for the purposes of architectural decorating, all three of these characteristics are important, and all of them have a distinct impact on the color scheme that they create. The hue, for example, determines the warmth or coolness of the color, and also plays a role in its psychological impact (we will discuss the basic psychological impact of all of the basic rainbow colors in another installment). The value determines how much light the color reflects, which plays a role in “color contouring“, or using color to affect the perceived dimensions of a space. Lighter colors make an area look lighter and more spacious, while darker colors make an area look heavier and more enclosed. Finally, the chroma of a color plays a strong role in how aggressively the color grabs your attention. If you want your decor to fade into the background, you want to use colors of a lower chroma than if you want your decor to attract attention.
When deciding on a color scheme, consider the hue, value, and chroma of all of your colors carefully, and watch how you mix and match – there is an infinite variety of beautiful color schemes out there.
What Is Color?
Discussion of Color Relevant to Painting and Refinishing in the Washington, DC Area
What, exactly, is color? It is such a pervasive aspect of our lives that the question almost sounds absurd. Color is color, and there isn’t anything else to it. However, a deeper understanding of the physics and biology that create our experience of color can shed light on some of the intricacies of picking color for an interior or exterior painting project.
Human perception of color results from sensitive tissues in our eyes registering visible light of differing wavelengths and intensities. Red light has the longest wavelength, shrinking as we proceed down the rainbow all the way to violet light, which has the shortest wavelength of the visible range. Having visual sensitivity to this specific range of the electromagnetic spectrum (ie, being able to see in color) has been evolutionarily critical for human beings, because color is such a helpful cue in navigating our environment. Important objects in our environment – like plants, water, and other animals – are more easily identified by their characteristic colors.
The path from a beam of light to our mental perception of color, however, has multiple steps involved. First, light comes into our eye, both directly from a light source (such as when you look straight at a neon light), and also reflected off of the objects around us. When reflected off of the objects in our environment, that light gives us critical information about our surroundings. To formulate our visual field, and help us navigate, our eyes collect two kinds of information; the color’s value and the color’s hue, and there is a specialized type of photoreceptive cell in our retina (the area on the back of the eyeball that receives light) for each.
First, the rods in our retina collect information about how much (or little) light is being reflected off of each surface, we see giving us a visual field full of bright spots and shadows. The amount of reflected light coming off of an object is sometimes called its color “value”, and it can be depicted on a grayscale. Perceiving color values in our environment is critical for depth perception; our brain analyzes the lights and darks to figure out what is in the foreground, what is in the background, and what direction the light is coming from.
Unless you are black-white color blind, there is also a second set of photoreceptive cells in your retina, called the cones, which are oblivious to the amount of light coming in, but instead react to the wavelength, “color”, or “hue”, of that light. In perceiving wavelength, the cones offer your brain a whole new set of inputs with which to make sense of the visual field. While seeing in black and white is sufficient to detect depth, motion, and all of the fundamental attributes necessary to go about your daily life without bumping into things, color gives you critical information about the state of the objects in the world. A leaf’s color, for example, can tell you if it is alive or dead; a fruit’s if it is green or ripe, an insect’s if it is poisonous or harmless, the sky’s if it is going to stay fair or rain. In nature, many creatures use color as a language to communicate across species lines: the flower encourages insects to pollinate using bright colors, while the bright red frog warns predators that it is poisonous. Perception of hue also lends a finer degree of detail to our sense of space and light; being able to tell that a shadow has a bluish tinge gives us a subtly different understanding than simply sensing how dark it is; perhaps the sun is setting, and the extra orange in the light is giving the shadow its complimentary tinge.
Finally, the information collected from the rods and cones in the eye has to be sent up to the brain in order to turn into a perception. It is here that the brain taps into all the personal associations that you have formed with that particular color, and forms a unique experience of that color for you. So as you can see, color perception is a complicated process, and one that allows for a wide variety of color perception between individuals.
