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.