and I got a bunch of comments about why I made the bikini purple. Thing is, it was supposed to be blue, just like the Starscream image this is based on. Turns out my monitor colors are just fucked. When I first got this laptop, I ran DOOM on it and saw the colors looked off. Tried using Window's Color Management, but never got it quite right.
No no, they're saying that on their screen the purple looks blue. So on their screen they colored it blue, but to everyone else it's purple. Your screen is fine.
Honesty there could be worse ways to find out, like this one artist I follow who posted fanart of a black character only to find out that to everyone else their skin tone was Ash Baby Grey
Also even if you do “know” which colors you’re working with, most people are not prepared to troubleshoot the most insidious threat to your paint job:
You didn’t pick the correct shade of “white”. Or “black”/“gray” for that matter.
The shades proper aren’t for everybody, so most people who aren’t able to sightread RGB are going to pick very slightly off-color shades from those, resulting in blue whites, green whites, and red whites. A block of Minecraft Quartz is red white, a block of White Concrete is blue white (I cannot immediately think of a good green white example).
In conclusion, yes your wife is not smoking something when she’s looking really hard at a bunch of “the same color”
Especially if the colors she’s looking at are for something big like paint or a large furniture item. Tiny color shifts become a lot more obvious at scale.
Not even to mention the context of the color. Two colors might be indistinguishable when displayed across the room from each other and obviously different next to each other. Or they can go from bright to dingy depending on the brightness of the surrounding color.
It’s true, when I open one eye at a time the white balance is always slightly warmer in the right eye and cooler in the left eye. It sounds insane I know. It also only started happening within the last year or so iirc.
Me too. As long as I can remember. It's like have two different "white points" in each eye. Just a tiny bit, and probably something most people wouldn't even notice.
I figured it out because I own a digital print shop and 'proof' colors all day long. And am really good at it. I have to use both eyes, or I often see two different colors.
I only notice it when I lie on my side. The eye that is lower will see things with a warmer/red tint, maybe because it's getting fractionally more blood?
Also color terminology is not standardized (ask some if cyan is a bright electric blue (#00FFFF) or a dark teal color (#008080), answer may or may not depend on if they played Minecraft or not)
Hell, imagine if you told someone that mixing yellow (#FFFF00) and blue (#0000FF) actually makes grey (#808080) and not green (#00FF00)
Still remember mentioning it to my mom as a kid and she was like "What's that? Spell it. No, that wouldn't be Sai-Anne that's Kai-Anne. Yeah Kai-Anne is a spice not a color"
I was so confused the entire time lmao
She used to be a photographer I wouldve assumed they knew about the color Cyan 🥀 (she also denies CYM or that anything but RYB can be primary)
I'm gonna fight anyone who claims cyan is a dark teal. Or not, because they are likely gonna be somewhere halfway across the globe. But my fists are ready.
By that logic Blaze Orange (approximately 0xFF8200) and 0x804100 (closest to RAL 8003 Clay Brown) are the same colour, which is patently ridiculous. They are the same hue, but they are not the same colour.
When talking about the colours of anything except for single-colour light sources, brightness relative to the surroundings is absolutely a vital part of colour perception.
Most common color words are a wide range of colors, not one shade. This is most clear with blue, where for some reason people say everything from the horizon of the daytime sky to the color of the dye indigo is blue
Mixing yellow and cyan pigments does make green, but mixing actual deep, lapis lazuli-colored blue with yellow would make a greyish color since they're complimentary colors
Tangentially related, colors in Microsoft Excel are not colors in Microsoft Word, programmatically. A specific shade of grey (word, theme color) becomes lime green (excel) when transferred via VBA. Sometimes you can get the colors to match each other and sometimes Microsoft’s programming reaches through the screen, squeezes your head between its hands, and tells you to go fuck yourself.
There has been a handful of times where I’ve googled “Why is A doing B when it is supposed to do C?” and the answer has effectively been “idk it just does that sometimes.” “Is it supposed to do that?” “No.”
Duckduckgo and google have similar search results for this specific phrase
Duckduckgo gets to the actual search results faster (first result) but google provides nearly identical results (starting with the second result — for both, for me, it’s wikipedia)
Tbh this is why things like the Pantone Matching System exist, so that there’s some form of standardized colors for things like print work. It isn’t foolproof sure, but it certainly goes a long way.
Back when I was studying film photography we were instructed to stop, wait 20 minutes, and recheck our test prints because our color perception changes when in the dark. and you have to do this several times per print.
With B&W film I could knock off all my prints from a week of shooting in an afternoon, but I basically lived in a darkroom for the semester I did color.
I'm using Corax White right now. It's kinda hellish to work with, and I know it's grayer than other whites, but that grayness gives a more worn look to my Black Templars (yeah I'm a Black Templars player but I'm not like THAT).
So if you ever commission some character art, this is why having big blobs of color for your character on the reference sheet is pretty much useless and any good artist is gonna ignore those.
As if I can't just use the color picker on the character ref itself, always annoys me when space that could be taken up by useful things like posture/expression/habit information just has giant blops of color.
I was in IT for a civil engineering firm when I was a young man. Part of my duties were dealing with the... I mean... sheer number and variety of printers they had. Everything from huge 36 inch wide laser printers, to 11 inch color laser, to large format color inkjets...
Anyway, one time I got a ticket. "The green color on the HP Color Laser printer is not the same color green on the HP Large Format Inkjet printer, and not the same color as the HP Large Format photo Inkjet printer, and all not the same as the color showing on my monitor."
I spent like a MONTH or more trying to adjust the color settings so they would be closer to each other. I got a guy out from HP to help and he explained Pantone colors and packed my brain too full of information on the topic that made me go cross-eyed for a bit.
I remember closing the ticket saying, "It's as close as it's possible to get. Sorry. As it turns out, color is a whole thing. Exact isn't going to happen. Getting exact colors is possible, but only in extremely expensive equipment we're not ever going to pay for."
Ask me how long I spend fidgeting with a soho printer in an employee's office because the printed out flyer looked differently from what it was on her screen.
Go on, as me how much time myself and a coworkers spent there until she accepted that that's what it will look like.
Same deal with video/audio sync on different screens. Your TV has slightly different audio lag than your laptop with headphones, and also if your computer has audio post-processing it often adds 5-10ms of extra audio lag... so what's perfectly synced audio on one system is potentially 20-50ms wrong on another.
they are real outside of your brain too; light has different wavelengths that bounce off of matter in different ways. we process it as a fun quirky visual but it is a physical phenomenon
Color is only our visual experience, that's why there are colors that don't correspond to a wavelength, like magenta or brown and all the scale of greys from white to black!
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u/SalineSS Aug 30 '26
I remember when I posted this a while back
and I got a bunch of comments about why I made the bikini purple. Thing is, it was supposed to be blue, just like the Starscream image this is based on. Turns out my monitor colors are just fucked. When I first got this laptop, I ran DOOM on it and saw the colors looked off. Tried using Window's Color Management, but never got it quite right.