Popular pages report

We – Community Tech – are happy to announce that the Popular pages bot is back up-and-running (after a one year hiatus)! You're receiving this message because your WikiProject or task force is signed up to receive the popular pages report. Every month, Community Tech bot will post at Wikipedia:WikiProject Color/Archive 9/Popular pages with a list of the most-viewed pages over the previous month that are within the scope of WikiProject Color.

We've made some enhancements to the original report. Here's what's new:

We're grateful to Mr.Z-man for his original Mr.Z-bot, and we wish his bot a happy robot retirement. Just as before, we hope the popular pages reports will aid you in understanding the reach of WikiProject Color, and what articles may be deserving of more attention. If you have any questions or concerns please contact us at m:User talk:Community Tech bot.

Warm regards, the Community Tech Team 17:16, 17 May 2017 (UTC)

Talk:White

Not sure who is watching this page but more opinions about the lead of white would be good....Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 23:33, 5 October 2017 (UTC)

Primary color

There are some discussions and contested edits that could benefit from more knowledgeable eyes. Please see recent sections at Talk:Primary color if you can help. Dicklyon (talk) 04:01, 14 October 2017 (UTC)

WikiProject X Newsletter • Issue 11

Newsletter • February 2018

Check out this month's issue of the WikiProject X newsletter, with plans to renew work with a followup grant proposal to support finalising the deployment of CollaborationKit!

-— Isarra 21:26, 14 February 2018 (UTC)

Candy apple red (color) listed at Requested moves

A requested move discussion has been initiated for Candy apple red (color) to be moved to Candy apple red. This page is of interest to this WikiProject and interested members may want to participate in the discussion here. —RMCD bot 19:30, 6 March 2018 (UTC)

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WikiProject collaboration notice from the Portals WikiProject

The reason I am contacting you is because there are one or more portals that fall under this subject, and the Portals WikiProject is currently undertaking a major drive to automate portals that may affect them.

Portals are being redesigned.

The new design features are being applied to existing portals.

At present, we are gearing up for a maintenance pass of portals in which the introduction section will be upgraded to no longer need a subpage. In place of static copied and pasted excerpts will be self-updating excerpts displayed through selective transclusion, using the template ((Transclude lead excerpt)).

The discussion about this can be found here.

Maintainers of specific portals are encouraged to sign up as project members here, noting the portals they maintain, so that those portals are skipped by the maintenance pass. Currently, we are interested in upgrading neglected and abandoned portals. There will be opportunity for maintained portals to opt-in later, or the portal maintainers can handle upgrading (the portals they maintain) personally at any time.

Background

On April 8th, 2018, an RfC ("Request for comment") proposal was made to eliminate all portals and the portal namespace. On April 17th, the Portals WikiProject was rebooted to handle the revitalization of the portal system. On May 12th, the RfC was closed with the result to keep portals, by a margin of about 2 to 1 in favor of keeping portals.

There's an article in the current edition of the Signpost interviewing project members about the RfC and the Portals WikiProject.

Since the reboot, the Portals WikiProject has been busy building tools and components to upgrade portals.

So far, 84 editors have joined.

If you would like to keep abreast of what is happening with portals, see the newsletter archive.

If you have any questions about what is happening with portals or the Portals WikiProject, please post them on the WikiProject's talk page.

Thank you.    — The Transhumanist   07:29, 30 May 2018 (UTC)

Request for an article..

Does anyone here have the expertise to provide a full list of RGB approximations to the FS595 standard, as a Wikipedia table?

ShakespeareFan00 (talk) 21:01, 20 June 2018 (UTC)

CIE 1931 color space listed at Requested moves

A requested move discussion has been initiated for CIE 1931 color space to be moved to CIE 1931 color spaces. This page is of interest to this WikiProject and interested members may want to participate in the discussion here. —RMCD bot 23:15, 11 August 2018 (UTC)

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HSL saturation vs other saturations?

In the article Colorfulness, I wanted to add the following: Quote: "Saturation is one of three coordinates in the HSL and HSV color spaces. However, in these color spaces "saturation" exists independently of lightness. E.g. in HSL and HSV a very light color can also be heavily saturated." Am I correct in that "saturation" as it is used in HSL and HSV has a different meaning than "saturation" as it is defined in Colorfulness? For instance, in the graphic at right, there are several highly saturated dark colors, but all of the light colors have very low saturation. It's a little confusing. Thanks. SharkD  ☎  06:50, 12 August 2018 (UTC)

Pruning initiative

I'm working on an initiative for these three related articles:

The initiative is outlined here:

and being carried out here:

Given that thousands of editors have edited those articles, I anticipated a little bit more involvement. So far, only a couple of editors have commented. I can continue mostly on my own, but I only have a surface knowledge of color issues, and I had hoped there would be editors with interest and expertise in the subject to might want to be involved. I'm posting here on the chance that there are some people watching this page that aren't aware of my initiative.--S Philbrick(Talk) 19:59, 16 August 2018 (UTC)

WikiProject X Newsletter • Issue 12

Newsletter • August 2018

This month: WikiProject X: The resumption

Work has resumed on WikiProject X and CollaborationKit, backed by a successfully funded Project Grant. For more information on the current status and planned work, please see this month's issue of the newsletter!

-— Isarra 22:24, 30 August 2018 (UTC)

Color Templates

I will be organizing the templates based on their hue and lightness because I think there's too much overlap between some templates especially magenta and pink, when in reality those two colors are not very similar. I consider doing it like this based on their hues (I am also taking into account how humans would perceive and distinguish colors - eg. chartreuse (hue 90) looks closer to green (hue 120) than yellow (hue 60)):

Disagreement about shades of green

Hi there. I wanted to ask if any Wikiproject participants could provide outside opinion on a disagreement I am having with another editor about the shade of green to use on a colour template. It's for a public transit provider in Canada's Greater Toronto Area , GO Transit, and how to represent the shade of green they use on Wikipedia. While a primary colour is identified in an official manual, it is a Pantone value, and the other editor has raised points about representing pantone values digitally, and what's actively used on GO Transit's website. Please refer to the talk page for the full debate and the points raised, and provide comment. It would be appreciated to have some outsider opinion from Wikipedians engaged in colour issues. Thanks! --Natural RX 19:41, 29 November 2018 (UTC)

WikiProject X Newsletter • Issue 13

Newsletter • December 2018

This month: A general update.

The current status of the project is as follows:

Until next time,

-— Isarra 22:44, 20 December 2018 (UTC)


tx4 site and the NBS/ISCC Color System

Hi all, new to this project after I've notices some inconsistencies and wanted to clarify before I made edits to some colors. I've noticed that several colors have their "source" as ISCC-NBS (example) and all of these links seem to be broken, leading to "http://tx4.us/nbs/nbs-c.htm". If you track down the real ISCC-NBS list, you rarely find a matching color name. This appears to be a complete source of color names for the ISCC-NBS system [1] and I suggest the links to the tx4 site be updated in all cases. It seems this source has been used to give a ballpark estimate of a color when a solid reference can't be found, has this project decided if this reference qualifies anymore? It seems like anybody could just make up a color name and could add it using this as a reference. Some colors do reference the ISCC-NBS that have a correct name but are not properly referenced, for example Taupe is classified as 'brownish gray' and references the ISCC-NBS system as its source but when you search for brownish gray in the system you find a color that has a different hex value as the color box on the wiki page. This is all pretty inconsistent. Some colors on the ISCC-NBS system are also not on wikipedia for example 'moderate pink' is HEX#dea5a4 according to the color system but can't be found on wikipedia but is a known and referenced color [2].

I look forward to helping out, let me know the game plan Jhmadden (talk) 23:14, 25 January 2019 (UTC)

Color separation

Wikidata and en.Wikipedia have a problem. Look at d:Q1412048 – the English link is grey component replacement which is some obscure trick of tertiary importance, whereas in German and Russian the entity links to color separation (German: Farbseparation). Suggestions? Incnis Mrsi (talk) 08:47, 2 February 2019 (UTC)

Gray component replacement is a basic part of the CMYK color separation process. It is one of the parameters that one specifies in setting up a color separation conversion from RGB to CMYK. It could be that the English link has an article, whereas the concept has no such article in the German and Russian wikipedias. Based on Google Translate, the corresponding article might be German: Graubalance. --((u|Mark viking)) {Talk} 09:31, 2 February 2019 (UTC)
Thanks. If nobody objects, then I move the grey stuff to d:Q1421299 whereas Q1412048 has to serve color separation as a whole. Incnis Mrsi (talk) 09:39, 2 February 2019 (UTC)

CMYK color model listed at Requested moves

A requested move discussion has been initiated for CMYK color model to be moved to CMY color model. This page is of interest to this WikiProject and interested members may want to participate in the discussion here. —RMCD bot 08:59, 5 February 2019 (UTC)

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Nomination of Portal:Color for deletion

A discussion is taking place as to whether Portal:Color is suitable for inclusion in Wikipedia according to Wikipedia's policies and guidelines or whether it should be deleted.

The page will be discussed at Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Color until a consensus is reached, and anyone is welcome to contribute to the discussion. The nomination will explain the policies and guidelines which are of concern. The discussion focuses on high-quality evidence and our policies and guidelines.

Users may edit the page during the discussion, including to improve the page to address concerns raised in the discussion. However, do not remove the deletion notice from the top of the page. North America1000 22:30, 26 May 2019 (UTC)

Color science help needed at Talk:LMS color space#Not objectively defined?

If anyone knows enough about color science, please join and help us with a good third opinion. Dicklyon (talk) 22:33, 12 June 2019 (UTC)

There is no hard Mind–body problem, it’s all just a color problem

I think it’s great that we have created a Wikipedia:WikiProject Color. But has anyone noticed that there is no information anywhere in wikipedia that tells us what color anything really is? If you think you already know what is and isn’t red, consider how many experts agree how naive direct realism is. In the next few paragraphs, I will propose a scientific method to falsify direct realism and objectively find out what color things really are.

The perception of color process is a long chain of causal events, starting when a ripe strawberry reflects red light. If the target of perception is the ripeness quality of a strawberry, our brain can take advantage of the fact that ripe strawberries reflect red light. Like all objective information, this light is nothing like the strawberry, so our brain needs to properly interpret this light, so we have knowledge that properly represents the target of our perception.

Inverted qualia

If we invert the red/green signal anywhere in this chain, this will of course change the quality of our knowledge of the strawberry. It is easiest to do this in the light stage of the chain like when we look at a red/green inverted negative picture of a strawberry. For example see the green one in the image to the right. But again, the only way that negative image you are looking at over there is really green, is if Naïve realism is true.

Nobody seems to notice what should be an obvious fact, which is that you can do a similar red/green signal inversion anywhere in this chain between the target of perception and our physical knowledge of the same. For example, you could move this negative picture inversion of the signal, from the light section, downstream to after the eye, in the optic nerve. In this case, red light would be landing on our eyes, but we would still have the same inverted knowledge of what would appear to be a green strawberry. Direct realism falsified.

If we are consciousnessly aware of something, there must be something physical that instantiates that knowledge. Physical knowledge is the final result of perception. We are directly aware of the causal physical qualities of our knowledge. It must be that it is our physical knowledge, which has these redness and greenness qualities, which cause us to say: “That is red.”

Red is used as a label for lots of different things, including the strawberry, the reflected light, and all the diverse physics in different heads that react to this. Obviously, defining the word “red” like this doesn’t tell us the quality of any of these things. We at least use light as some kind of physical reference, but this is only because light is the last point in the chain of perception that is easily inverted before the chain enters the body. Could it be that your brain represents what we all call “red” with something physically different than anyone else?

In order to talk about causal physical qualities, we need to use multiple words as labels for different physical things. For example, in the Canonizer camp on “Representational Qualia Theory”, we define the word “red” to be anything that reflects or emits “red” light. We use the different word “redness” as a label for whatever it is, in our brain, that has the redness physical quality. Anyone that only uses one word, like “red,” when talking about the physics of perception is blind to actual physical qualities. In other words, they are “qualia blind”. All of the information in Wikipedia is qualia blind in this way.

If we don’t know the actual color of the strawberry, what about the color of something in our brain, like the neurotransmitter glutamate? We know everything about how glutamate behaves in a synapse. But shouldn’t we be asking what that glutamate behavior is qualitatively like? Is it not a hypothetical possibility that it is glutamate that has the redness quality we can be directly aware of and that the following two names are labels for the same thing.

Various “knowledge arguments” such as “Mary's room” and “Inverted Spectrum” seem to be framed as “arguments against physicalism” or that “qualia are non physical”. Qualia tend to be framed as changing, while the physics stays the same. We also use terminology that separates qualia from physics like “generates”, “causes”, “correlates with”, “arises from” or “supervenes on”. All this kind of separation seems to be contributing to our qualia blindness. Maybe we should instead just realize that we don’t yet know what color anything is, and start using experimental methods that can tell us what color things like glutamate really are. Mind–body problem” solved.


To date, qualia theories have remained ineffable, or not objectively falsifiable. This has freed people to believe in a diverse set of non-falsified theories, many of which are represented in supporting sub camps to Representational Qualia Theory. This lack of consensus results in many edit wars all over Wikipedia. Representational Qualia Theory is finally a method to start falsifying theories and possibly forging a scientific consensus. This process has started, as can be seen by such facts as Dennett’s Predictive Bayesian Coding Theory is now in a supporting sub camp position to Representational Qualia Theory. Despite all this, it remains difficult to get any of this information accepted for publication in established journals. So any help by people who understand this, by joining or supporting camps, even if you disagree, will help move things forward in this field. Supporting Representational Qualia Theory or any of its sub camps, is like signing a petition, increasing completeness, credibility, and amplification of the wisdom of the crowd. Brent.Allsop (talk) 17:38, 12 July 2019 (UTC)

Too long; didn't read. Do you have a point? Is there something we should do differently to improve the coverage of color? Dicklyon (talk) 19:08, 12 July 2019 (UTC)
OK, Short answer. Good idea. There is no hard Mind–body problem, it’s all just a color problem. Everything in wikipedia on color is based on naive assumptions like the strawberry is red. In reality, it is our knowledge of the strawberry that is red. So, all articles on color should start distinguishing between reality, and knowledge of reality, so we can finally find out what it is that is red. Now philosophers can start doing theoretical work by making falsifiable predictions about what is and isn't red.
You must admit that this, and the few paragraphs above are far shorter than books like Consciousness Explained. Brent.Allsop (talk) 20:54, 12 July 2019 (UTC)
I do freely and heartily admit that! Dicklyon (talk) 02:20, 13 July 2019 (UTC)
As do I! But it doesn't matter. The coverage of color seems to be in line with accepted scientific knowledge of the perception of color. The question of qualia is interesting but strictly philosophy. Besides, "what color is something really" can have many answers, and I think anyone interested in having an exact and quantitative answer only needs to measure the reflectance spectrum of an object. TDcolor (talk) 15:30, 30 December 2020 (UTC)

List of colors (compact)

Didn't know this project existed till just now, while looking at the above article. It is imho, a disgrace of an article, unencyclopedic and unsourced. There are clearly colour experts around, and I wondered what others here in particular think of my opinion? -Roxy, the dog. wooF 20:48, 7 September 2019 (UTC)

It is basically a list-class article and an alternatively-formatted summary of other color list-class articles. Most entries point to their articles. Per WP:CLN, what's the problem? --((u|Mark viking)) {Talk} 02:14, 8 September 2019 (UTC)
Probably that I am totally unfamiliar with WP:CLN so I'll have to read it. But the problem as it appeared to me that the article is unsourced, and secondly that it isn't a list of colours but a list of random colour names, and there are not even any hints as to how the list is constituted. Perhaps CLN will explain! -Roxy, the dog. wooF 06:03, 9 September 2019 (UTC)
Sorry to foist the CLN jargon on you. The basic idea is that list-based articles like this, with entries being other articles or sections, are effectively navigation aids. Even for such articles, one may want sources to establish inclusion criteria. But in this case, the parent lists, List of colors: A–F, List of colors: G–M, and List of colors: N–Z, as explained in the lede, have been used to construct this list. The parents have already established criteria and S Philbrick has recently performed a pretty thorough vetting of their entries for verifiability. Insofar that this list is a compact reformatted version of the parent lists, additional inclusion criteria don't seem needed. It's possible that this article is out of sync with the parent articles; I have not checked. If so, some editing is in order. It does seem as a list of colors to me, as every entry is a rendered color bar followed by it's (linked) name.--((u|Mark viking)) {Talk} 09:30, 9 September 2019 (UTC)
I'm still of the opinion that this article is crap, and totally unencyclopeadic. It has nothing in it of any value. Words representing colours are valueless for our project. As this appears to be sourced from the longer articles alphabetically, should I perhaps look at those instead, as the only source for this? -Roxy, the dog. wooF 07:02, 4 October 2019 (UTC)

Request for information on WP1.0 web tool

Hello and greetings from the maintainers of the WP 1.0 Bot! As you may or may not know, we are currently involved in an overhaul of the bot, in order to make it more modern and maintainable. As part of this process, we will be rewriting the web tool that is part of the project. You might have noticed this tool if you click through the links on the project assessment summary tables.

We'd like to collect information on how the current tool is used by....you! How do you yourself and the other maintainers of your project use the web tool? Which of its features do you need? How frequently do you use these features? And what features is the tool missing that would be useful to you? We have collected all of these questions at this Google form where you can leave your response. Walkerma (talk) 04:24, 27 October 2019 (UTC)

Is there a list of proposed articles / where should one go if there isn't one already?

I've started a rough to-do list of pages which I think should exist but do not. Is there an official one which already exists? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Da5nsy#Proposals_for_future_color_vision_pages Da5nsy (talk) 17:40, 12 November 2019 (UTC)

Welcome! As far as I know, there is no WikiProject Color list of proposed articles. Generally folks work on articles and topics they are interested in and post here if they are looking for comments or collaboration. If you have an article you want to start and have some reliable sources to work from, go for it and be bold! FWIW, your list of articles looks lile they could be a useful and interesting addition to the encyclopedia. We do have Deane B. Judd. --((u|Mark viking)) {Talk} 18:22, 12 November 2019 (UTC)

List of people with color blindness listed at Requested moves

A requested move discussion has been initiated for List of people with color blindness to be moved to List of colorblind people. This page is of interest to this WikiProject and interested members may want to participate in the discussion here. —RMCD bot 20:17, 29 January 2020 (UTC)

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Animals that can change color listed at Requested moves

A requested move discussion has been initiated for Animals that can change color to be moved to List of animals that can change color. This page is of interest to this WikiProject and interested members may want to participate in the discussion here. —RMCD bot 19:52, 12 August 2020 (UTC)

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Sherwin-Williams article updates

Hi, my name is Mira and I am the employee representative for Sherwin-Williams here on Wikipedia. I posted a request on the Sherwin-Williams talk page to hopefully work with editors to make improvements to the article while following the site's guidelines for editors like me with a conflict of interest. As an employee, I will refrain from editing the article and related articles directly. I won't list my full request here, but you may review it on the Sherwin-Williams talk page.

This WikiProject is listed on the Paint article, so I thought it would be a good idea to reach out to see if there were any interested editors here.

Please let me know if this is the preferred way for a conflict of interest editor like myself to best collaborate with editors! I welcome your questions and feedback if they arise. Thanks in advance! MiraSherwin-Williams (talk) 21:56, 17 September 2020 (UTC)

Hello again, I'm just closing the loop here to say that I received assistance with my initial suggestions for improving the Sherwin-Williams article. I also learned new tricks for requesting future help. Other interested editors here are welcome to join the conversation at the Talk:Sherwin-Willams page and assist with future requests. I will continue to suggest edits to the article, while refraining to edit the content myself, due to my conflict of interest. Thanks again! MiraSherwin-Williams (talk) 21:13, 28 September 2020 (UTC)

Description regarding differences in skin among individuals

Thoughts are needed on the following: Talk:Human skin color#Description regarding differences in skin among individuals. A permalink for it is here. Flyer22 Frozen (talk) 04:54, 18 October 2020 (UTC)

The Color Barnstar



Introducing the Color Barnstar. Jerm (talk) 07:22, 31 October 2020 (UTC)

What's the name for a one-to-one color "filter" function?

I am looking to start an article about all the transformations to single colors people do in computers (inversion in different color spaces,[1] hue-shifting, all these shenanigans) but I cannot figure out a good term to search for. Having such an article can come in handy with things like Light-on-dark color scheme, since it is worth talking about how much computer color spaces matter when inverting IMO. The concept should also apply to color blending and nicely bring out some of the recent CSS Color 4 changes.

In other words, what's the term that best fills in the blank here? "BLANK is a function that maps (transforms) one color to another. Unlike color mapping, it does not need to take into account any context. Unlike color transformation in color management, it is generally intended to change the color for artistic effect, not retain it." (And no, it's not a color matrix, since it can be nonlinear too.)--Artoria2e5 🌉

I think color mapping is an appropriate term. In scientific visualization and GIS, color mapping refers to assigning data values to colors. The data may be anything you want to visualize, even other colors. There is no context restriction here, the data can be real, ordinal, categorical, scalar or multidimensional. --((u|Mark viking)) {Talk} 18:38, 5 March 2021 (UTC)

References

Nomination of List of colors: N–R for deletion

A discussion is taking place as to whether the article List of colors: N–R is suitable for inclusion in Wikipedia according to Wikipedia's policies and guidelines or whether it should be deleted.

The article will be discussed at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of colors: N–R until a consensus is reached, and anyone, including you, is welcome to contribute to the discussion. The nomination will explain the policies and guidelines which are of concern. The discussion focuses on high-quality evidence and our policies and guidelines.

Users may edit the article during the discussion, including to improve the article to address concerns raised in the discussion. However, do not remove the article-for-deletion notice from the top of the article.

-DePiep (talk) 20:41, 12 January 2021 (UTC)

Saffron (color) listed at Requested moves

A requested move discussion has been initiated for Saffron (color) to be moved to Saffron (colour). This page is of interest to this WikiProject and interested members may want to participate in the discussion here. —RMCD bot 15:18, 22 April 2021 (UTC)

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Colorfulness listed at Requested moves

A requested move discussion has been initiated for Colorfulness to be moved to Colorfulness, chroma, and saturation. This page is of interest to this WikiProject and interested members may want to participate in the discussion here. —RMCD bot 15:47, 12 May 2021 (UTC)

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Most viewed stub in this Wikiproject

ROYGBIV 35,851 1,195 Stub--Coin945 (talk) 14:11, 30 May 2021 (UTC)

Gendered associations of pink and blue

Newly released stub article Gendered associations of pink and blue needs your help in expanding it. Can you lend a hand? Thanks, Mathglot (talk) 20:02, 3 June 2021 (UTC)

Scope, organization, and naming of pages related to Wide dynamic range

This is a notification to 6 relevant wikiprojects. Most of the talk page Talk:High dynamic range, though it seems like a long-running discussion, is only the last day or two since I discovered the renaming and other things going on there, much of which I reverted pending discussion. Please see and comment if this area interests you. Dicklyon (talk) 02:03, 11 June 2021 (UTC)

Red, yellow, blue primaries

If anyone is still active on this project, we could use some opinions at Talk:Primary color/GA1#The RYB POV problem, re how to treat the "traditional" or "painters'" RYB primaries in the article Primary color. An editor has done his best to deprecate, demote, remove, and criticize RYB as primaries, and took the article to good-article review in that form; I'm trying to fix it back to a more useful and neutral treatment. Dicklyon (talk) 22:26, 12 June 2021 (UTC)


Color coding technology for visualization listed at Requested moves

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Color code listed at Requested moves

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Formula for saturation in Munsell system?

Existing image
File:Munsell saturation 7.5PB.svg
File:Munsell saturation 10BG.svg
Suggested alternative

Is there a formula used to determine the saturation of a color in the Munsell system? This article states the lines of equal saturation radiate from "near the black point". However, it also states that saturation is the “colourfulness of an area judged in proportion to its brightness”. Logically, this should imply implies that lines of uniform saturation should radiate *exactly* from the black point, not just *near* the black point. ➧datumizer  ☎  04:04, 6 June 2019 (UTC)

I added some images to this post to clarify what I mean. ➧datumizer  ☎  00:35, 31 October 2019 (UTC)
Unfortunately the Munsell system does not have closed form calculations. Each munsell sample is placed in its position by experimentation. TDcolor (talk) 15:32, 30 December 2020 (UTC)
@TDcolor: @Djcbriggs: So the red lines in the illustration are guesswork? Why were they placed where they were placed? Would it be okay to recreate the illustrations with the red lines emanating from the black point (versus below it)? Please ping me when responding. ➧datumizer  ☎  19:12, 12 May 2021 (UTC)
@Datumizer: They are illustrating the idea that constant saturation is not the same as constant chroma. One is relative to the colors own apparent brightness and the other is relative to the brightness of a white object in the same scene. See the CIE definitions of chroma and saturation. The exact lines in this plot are either just interpretation or estimation from the contributor, or use an unknown appearance model to produce the approximate lines. TDcolor (talk) 22:44, 17 August 2021 (UTC)

RGB color space listed at Requested moves

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High-dynamic-range video listed at Requested moves

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Color analysis (art) listed at Requested moves

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Split the color articles?

Not sure if this project is still active, but here goes.

The color articles (at least the primary and secondary colors) have lots of great content but are so sprawling that they defy editing and, I think, inhibit reading. My tentative suggestion is that we split them into technical vs cultural aspects. Both sides of the split would mention highlights of the other. Technical would include spectral/optical phenomena, colorants, and natural occurrence. Cultural would include art, military, sport, etc. --Smokefoot (talk) 13:02, 22 June 2022 (UTC)

Update: see Color blue in culture and check out the newly streamlined blue.--Smokefoot (talk) 15:00, 23 June 2022 (UTC)

Web colors listed at Requested moves

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Opinions on primary colors?

See the discussion at Talk:Primary color/Archive 4#Linking pigments and primary colors. Some more opinions would be welcome there. Dicklyon (talk) 05:46, 19 December 2020 (UTC)

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rewrite / source effort at dominant wavelength

Hi friendly Wikiproject color folks. Koavf (talk · contribs) is insisting on deleting most of the article dominant wavelength unless someone can provide sources for it ASAP. Does anyone have the bandwidth to go do some research about that today or soon? I don’t have the time/energy right away, but will try to get around to it when possible if nobody else steps up. –jacobolus (t) 18:28, 12 September 2022 (UTC)

Thanks for posting to get more feedback, Jacobolus. Relevant policies here are WP:V and WP:OR, which prohibit the inclusion of unsourced material or original research on Wikipedia. ―Justin (koavf)TCM 18:30, 12 September 2022 (UTC)
Folks may want to start from https://archive.org/details/0518-pdf-colorimetry/page/65/jacobolus (t) 19:20, 12 September 2022 (UTC)
@Jacobolus after reading the article, it's in pretty bad shape, references or not. The tone is way too conversational and there are quite a few concepts that are conflated. I can give it some attention in the next few days, but it'll probably end up being half the length it is now anyway. Curran919 (talk) 21:01, 15 September 2022 (UTC)
@Jacobolus... Alright, hopefully I brought it up to snuff! Please give it a read-through. Curran919 (talk) 09:23, 16 September 2022 (UTC)
Thanks! I’ll take a closer look when I get a chance to see if anything relevant is still missing, but that looks like a big improvement. –jacobolus (t) 18:20, 16 September 2022 (UTC)

Color wheel icon rasterized

If you look closely, you may have noticed that the icon for this WikiProject has been de-aliased by replacement with a raster image. The copies at Color wheel and HSL and HSV have been replaced for the same reason. At small sizes, the old SVG version has noticeable aliasing, especially in the purple and red sectors, due to the way it is constructed; see c:Commons:Graphic_Lab/Illustration_workshop#File:Color_circle_(RGB).svg for more details. Any ideas on how to make an accurate SVG color wheel that does not have these antialiasing problems?

LaundryPizza03 (d) 00:40, 12 October 2022 (UTC)

Seems fine, though I don’t much like the logo with or without visual artifacts :). YMMV. –jacobolus (t) 02:34, 12 October 2022 (UTC)
The fundamental problem is that SVG has only a very limited ability to produce gradients. It has no ability to produce a gradient following a curved path (in this case a circle would be required). I have looked for solutions to this problem before (I was looking for gradients on curved pipes and wires and such) and all the solutions I found involved creating multiple copies of similar objects. This will inevitably lead to aliasing. The small objects in this case are very thin circle sectors to mimic the circular gradient. Plus, this image requires gradients in two different directions simultaneously (radially and circularly) which again, SVG is entirely incapable of doing directly even if the requirement was reduced to just linear gradients. My only suggestion is to give up on trying to mimic a circular gradient and make the sectors much wider so it looks more like a traditional colour wheel with visible sectors. By the way, I agree with jacobulus; the aliasing is not a big problem. I didn't notice it until it was pointed out, and even then I had to look carefully for it. SpinningSpark 08:14, 12 October 2022 (UTC)
Also, something that is intended to only ever be used as a logo (ie small) is not really problematic to have as a PNG image. SpinningSpark 08:25, 12 October 2022 (UTC)
One more suggestion; it might be worth asking at Wikipedia:Graphics Lab for more ideas. SpinningSpark 08:27, 12 October 2022 (UTC)

Input on a few color vision articles

I've been hitting the color vision and color blindness articles pretty hard recently. A few major edits/merges/splits that I want to get some input on. I keep track of these on my user page, but I'll copy the current list here. If you could weigh in, that'd be great.

Curran919 (talk) 22:07, 19 September 2022 (UTC)

@Dicklyon, Jacobolus, Koavf, SpinningSpark, Uli Zappe, Da5nsy, North8000, and TDcolor: If any of you have any opinions on any of the above topics, that'd be handy! Curran919 (talk) Curran919 (talk) 19:51, 25 September 2022 (UTC)
I commented on one and the colorblindness thread is archived, so I don't want to post there, but I would support a split, since there are a lot of sources for this topic. ―Justin (koavf)TCM 20:14, 25 September 2022 (UTC)
I unarchived those two bits (and edited the links above), and commented there and a few other places. Dicklyon (talk) 21:31, 25 September 2022 (UTC)

Thanks for the ping. I'm buried in the real world right now and giving intelligent answers on those would take a lot of thorough work which I'm not able to do right now. Thanks again. Sincerely, North8000 (talk) 18:25, 26 September 2022 (UTC)

@Curran919: Seems like a great set of changes. There is a lot of research today about spectral / physiological variation in otherwise color normal observers that should be covered in this topic list. For example, color normal observers have been found to have 1:2 L:M cone ratio, as well as 1:19 IIRC. These kinds of extreme variations still resulting in "normal color" is very exciting!! As well as the variation in sensitivity curves (Yuta Asano, Mark Fairchild). The variation in "unique hues" which demonstrate that two people can be color normal but disagree about what pure yellow (ex.) is, yet both of them can be correct in that their answers are consistent and can produce well aligned sets of experimental data. Wish I had time to contribute on that! TDcolor (talk) 16:10, 16 October 2022 (UTC)

I've implemented 3 of them already, so I'm glad you like 'em! Variability in color normal vision is indeed a very interesting topic that maybe could afford to be added to color vision or color blindness. The FM-100hue's classifications of below average, average and superior color vision (all "normal") exemplifies it. Curran919 (talk) 17:41, 16 October 2022 (UTC)

"Shades of" articles

Discussion 1

@Spinningspark, TartarTorte, Ljleppan, Jay, and ThunderBrine: A lot of "shades of green"-related redirects have been brought up for discussion recently and a broader pattern has become evident. There should probably be a broader discussion about what to do about this situation somewhere, so I've started one here.

Much of the current situation was created by ThunderBrine (talk · contribs) during early 2021. They also made extensive changes to many other colour-related articles (shades of red, orange, azure, cyan) over the course of the same year. I don't know if these changes were discussed anywhere, but they have resulted in many entries being placed in counter-intuitive places (like "olive" being listed as a shade of yellow rather than a shade of green) as well as the creation of some oddly specific "shades of" lists like Shades of chartreuse and the current list at Spring green. Additionally, these lists have been desynchronised with their respective templates. (eg. ((Shades of green)))

These issues were noted recently at several redirects for discussion. (See eg. Army green at August 12, Asparagus at August 11, Avocado at August 5.) – Scyrme (talk) 16:21, 12 August 2022 (UTC)

Some more prior discussions, not exhaustive:
PaleAqua (talk) 20:24, 12 August 2022 (UTC)
Looking at the template discussions, it seems Keraunos (talk · contribs) made similar arguments to ThunderBrine back in 2010, although the former stopped being active in 2013. It looks like one the motivators driving these oddly specific templates/lists is a desire for completeness, reflected in trying to fill out 'missing' articles and templates for all the tertiary colours.
  1. One problem with this the tertiary colours don't actually have well-established names in English. I've far more often heard "lime" or simply "yellow-green" than "chartreuse", for example. Who decided that the colour between green and yellow is "chartreuse"? And who decided that the other colours between yellow and green are shades of chartreuse? Why, of all the named colours between yellow and green, is "chartreuse" at the top of the hierarchy? Why not have "chartreuse" be a shade of "lime"? Why is this arbitrary terminology being pushed as a norm or standard? There is nothing objective, normal, or standard about this nomenclature as far as I can tell. Is this original research? I'm not really sure how you would go about establishing the common names here.
  2. Another problem is the assumptions about tertiary colours are faulty. The tertiary colours end up the same whether you use favour additive RGB or subtractive CYM, but what if you use the traditional subtractive RYB model? The working assumption seems to be that RYB is objectively obsolete and should therefore be ignored, but it's still a widely used model especially among artists and it's widely taught to children (for various reasons). Additionally, the opponent-process model challenges the assumption that there are only three primary colours. The number of tertiary colours and which colours they happen to be depends on your choice of colour model; there is no objectively correct approach even when setting aside the problem of terminology.
tl;dr - Even ignoring the problem of exact colour coordinates and hue angles, the number of basic colours that should have "shades of" articles, their hierarchy, and their names can all be disputed. The working assumptions behind the current situation are fundamentally faulty. – Scyrme (talk) 21:47, 12 August 2022 (UTC)
colour wheel 1708 – Verd Jaunatre (yellowish green)
I too was struck by chartreuse but I let it pass as other colour names in mapping schemes, magenta for instance, are not often found in common speech but clearly have some provenance. In the case of chartreuse, however, that is not so clear. Our color wheel article has numerous examples of historical colour wheels going as far back as the 18th century. Every one of these names the colour as green-yellow or yellowish green (or the equivalent in another language). I'm getting similar results in gbooks. Chartreuse is not seen in our article images until we get to the Wikipedia generated colour wheels. That is beginning to look like a Wikipedia invention, or at least something quite rare. Books on art and design do describe chartreuse and where it is on the colour wheel, but it is usually described as a pastel or darkened colour rather than a fully saturated colour eg [3][4]. SpinningSpark 08:53, 13 August 2022 (UTC)
  • I broadly agree, but being charitable, the hue angle approach has the benefit of being unambiguous (assuming you can quantify the hue in question). If we decide to put things where people actually intuitively put them, that raises the issue of whose intuitions to follow. The references won't necessarily agree on whether a particular shade is yellow or green. Problems may arise with editors adding redundant or duplicated material, or moving material arbitrarily between articles to "correct" the placement in line with their preferred sources (or their own intuitions). – Scyrme (talk) 22:16, 12 August 2022 (UTC)
  • I don't agree with that. WP:V and WP:NPOV will prevent you from writing an extensive description of Murphy's law in the Scientific law article. Plainly, mainstream reliable sources do not classify Murphy's law as a scientific law. That remains true even if you can find, as you probably can, some sort of source somewhere that does so make the claim. But it's perfectly acceptable to talk about Murphy in adage. WP:UNDUE explicitly addresses such issues. Likewise, army green should not have an extensive description in shades of yellow if sources generally call it a shade of green. If mainstream sources disagree, then WP:BALANCE comes into play. SpinningSpark 11:06, 13 August 2022 (UTC)

Discussion 2

On the "glorification" of orange, research has shown that orange appears very early as a named colour across all cultures and languages. It's at no.5 according to this paper. The peak wavelength in humans of the L cone (red) and M cone (green) are very close together compared to the S cone (blue). Colours between these two peaks (yellows and oranges) are thus much easier to distinguish in the same way that frequencies of audible tones are easier to distinguish in regions where auditory hair cells are closer together. it is thus not so surprising that we view orange as a distinct colour. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Spinningspark (talkcontribs) 10:11, 14 August 2022 (UTC)
The Shades of... articles were clearly never meant to conform to a technical definition. A shade (color) is a different brightness of a given hue. It does not include variations in hue and saturation, but all our Shades of... articles explicitly say that they do so include them. Pink is not technically a shade of red, it is desaturated red which is a different thing altogether. It is being bull-headed to impose technical restrictions on articles that are based on perception. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Spinningspark (talkcontribs) 10:11, 14 August 2022 (UTC)
PS, see the discussion that decided to rename these articles as shades of... in the first place. I argued against it for exactly the reason of this confusion. SpinningSpark 13:55, 15 August 2022 (UTC)
See also Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Color/Archive 4#Various proposals pertaining to the Shades of ..._templates & categories, which has a bunch of summary on older discussions on shades vs variations vs tones vs hues of etc. And is also part of why various "shades of " articles got split out of some of the larger color articles. In hindsight I wonder if something that side stepped the different definitions of "shade" such as "Red colors", "List of red colors", or "Colors that are red" might have been a better choice. PaleAqua (talk) 14:56, 15 August 2022 (UTC)
It was originally called Variations of red which was a perfectly fine title for its contents as far as I'm concerned. The change was not for the better. SpinningSpark 16:42, 15 August 2022 (UTC)
Looking at the past discussions linked above, I don't see a good reason given for favouring "shade". I don't agree with the arguments made that "variations" is in some way more peculiar than "shades"; they are just as natural as each other, and if you do an online search you'll find plenty of pages using both interchangeably on the same page. Neither would be unrecognisable in vernacular discussion. It was noted in the discussion that "shades of" is more common phrasing but those statistics can't distinguish different senses of the same word; this is especially relevant when questioning common vs technical use.
When the use of a word varies in the precision of its meaning, it's usually better to go with an alternative which doesn't as that makes the scope of the article clearer, and prevents content in the article being misunderstood or becoming contradictory due to mixing up definitions (which is made more likely when a variety of references is used). "Variations" or "varieties" would be practically better titles for these reasons.
In one of the earlier discussion linked it was suggested that "varieties" better emphasises that the article concerns a cluster of associated colours rather than produced by modifying or varying some definite, basic, or ideal colour (or hue). Given the current situation has been based in part on assuming the latter interpretation, that might be worth considering if we agree that the scope of these articles should instead be the former interpretation.
"List of [adjective] colours" may better suggest a cluster of associated colours than either "variations" or "varieties" since it explicitly refers to "colours" in plural. However, "[adjective] colours" is comparatively less common phrasing than the other options. – Scyrme (talk) 21:15, 17 August 2022 (UTC)
Our lightness article has something to say that may be very relevant to the classification of olive. Because of the shape of the cone response S-curve, when the luminance of a colour is reduced, even if its spectral composition remains the same, the different cone responses don't quite change at the same rate with respect to each other. It is plausible therefore that the perceived hue and saturation will change at low luminance levels. This is sourced to [5] and may provide an objective reason why the perception of olive is distinct from yellow. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Spinningspark (talkcontribs) 10:11, 14 August 2022 (UTC)

Proposal

Proposal - Most of us seem to agree that the "shades of" articles (regardless of title) should exist for well-established basic colours in the English language rather than on some systematic effort to cover all the primary, secondary, and tertiary hues.

The best case for creating niche lists is that the main lists can get long and cluttered, which impairs easy navigation. To remedy this, I suggest:

Redirects would be retargeted or deleted accordingly after the content has been moved to its appropriate place. – Scyrme (talk) 22:14, 17 August 2022 (UTC)

[cyan and magenta] are the most commonly used jargon by any professional working with printed color – yes this is my point, these are not generic color terms, but refer specifically to printer inks. those values displayed currently as “web magenta” or “web cyan” are the same colorsno, these are nowhere close to the same colors. I made an image a few years ago, shown at right, showing the difference in Munsell space. The RGB colors #F00, #0F0, #00F, #FF0, #F0F, #0FF are shown as triangles, while the CMY primaries in a few common CMYK printing profiles are shown as other shapes. You can see that these are nowhere close to each other. Printer’s cyan is a slightly greenish blue (nowhere close to “teal”), whereas the RGB color #0FF is bright blue–green. Printer’s magenta is a purplish red, whereas #F0F is barely on the red side of purple. What HTML calls “cyan” and “magenta” bear nearly no resemblance to their namesakes (they are perceptually about as far apart in hue as “orange” from “red”), and naming them by the same names is an incredibly confusing mess. To the extent possible any reputable source should try to avoid perpetuating / exaggerating the confusion. This is not the same situation as the color “orange” which is now pervasively used throughout English-speaking society to indicate hues about halfway between unique red and unique yellow. –jacobolus (t) 04:08, 13 October 2022 (UTC)
Realistically we’re both just pushing our POV on how people “should” think about color, but as I said, Wikipedia’s chosen system doesn’t have to reflect RGB or CMYK. Colloquial understandings of color are fine. There’s no reason to act like cyan and magenta just aren’t colors because you don’t like them though. No, RGB and CMYK spaces don’t typically represent them exactly the same; RGB green doesn’t look like CMYK green either if we’re being that picky though. (NB: not an argument against green… nor was I suggesting that orange should be dropped… nor was I suggesting that cyan == teal...)
I could post a CIE based graph in response to your graph, but we both just have our favored map projections (maybe you like Mercator and I like Kavrayskiy). All I’m pointing out is that cyan and magenta do in fact exist, and are used by probably the majority of the world’s population who work with color (*gestures vaguely at a made up statistic*), and it would be silly to pretend they… don’t exist. — HTGS (talk) 04:45, 14 October 2022 (UTC)
To save folks here from clicking through, here are the basic ISCC–NBS categories:

With secondary categories:

  • reddish orange (rO)
  • orange yellow (OY)
  • greenish yellow (gY)
  • yellowish green (yG)
  • bluish green (bG)
  • greenish blue (gB)
  • purplish blue (pB)
  • violet (V)
  • reddish purple (rP)
  • purplish red (pR)
  • purplish pink (pPk)
  • yellowish pink (yPk)
  • reddish brown (rBr)
  • yellowish brown (yBr)
  • olive brown (OlBr)
  • olive green (OlGr)
jacobolus (t) 14:07, 9 October 2022 (UTC)
I largely support this idea for two reasons. Firstly, it gels with my own views on how most people perceive colour categorisation. Secondly, it is based on a recognised classification scheme. My only note of caution is that I am not sure how widely used this scheme is. In particular, is there a danger that we could be accused of being US-centric? Is it even widely used in the US? That is not clear from the article and I'm only seeing limited independent references to it, mostly 1960s or earlier. SpinningSpark 07:41, 10 October 2022 (UTC)
The only very widely used name-based systems are stuff like paint company category schemes or Pantone PMS spot colors, which are idiosyncratic, arbitrary, proprietary, and don’t really try to make themselves useful for generic communication. As far as useful and widespread systems go, the Munsell color system on which the ISCC-NBS system is based is pretty good, but is organized as numerical coordinates rather than discrete categories. From what I can tell, the ISCC–NBS system, despite some original buy-in from color experts in industry and the US national bureau of standards, never really became super widely used, but nor has any other comparable system: for internal industry use, people largely stick to numerical coordinates of one sort or another, and for public communication the prevailing practice continues to be making up random names, often contradictory or nonsensical. Laypeople for the most part don’t use any system at all – but of course do use a variety of loosely defined color names, and if more specificity is desired will add qualifiers, “banana yellow”, “blood red”, “robin egg blue”, “clover green”, or whatever. I think the ISCC–NBS system would still be better than the current practice on Wikipedia pages which is based on arbitrary editors’ personal feelings, both as a useful system per se and also for avoiding “original research”. –jacobolus (t) 17:20, 10 October 2022 (UTC)
One final advantage of the ISCC–NBS color name dictionary etc. is that as works of the US government they are all in the public domain, so can be freely used however anyone likes. For anyone who wants to look, here is a freely available scan of the 1976 version at the internet archive, and here is a scan of the 1955 version. –jacobolus (t) 17:25, 10 October 2022 (UTC)
I should add here, that while not used ubiquitously, it’s also not like the ISCC–NBS system has been completely forgotten or never gets used today. E.g. a google scholar search turns up more than 2000 references in the academic literature since 2000, more than 1000 of which have been since 2015 (for comparison, "pantone" has 10x more mentions). jacobolus (t) 17:54, 10 October 2022 (UTC)
L Looking at Pantone is not very useful here. It's true that it's widely recognised and used (I've used it myself to specify colours of products in my professional life) but it's not a categorisation system, which is what we need here. SpinningSpark 20:02, 10 October 2022 (UTC)
I agree, we could use the ISCC-NBS scheme, which is well-demarcated and hence satisfies WP:CALC without creating duplication of entries due to crosslisting. We would begin with the 13 Level 1 descriptors, sectioned according to the Level 2 and Level 3 categories, of which there sre respectively 29 and 267. But how would we handle RS which describe a color differently than ISCC-NBS does, and placement of closely related colors that fall into different categories? For example,   Olive Drab is described in various terms in its section of Olive (color); the ISCC-NBS classifcation is strong yellow green. Two colors based on newer US Army standards,   Olive Drab Camouflage and   Olive Drab #7, also appear in the same section, with respective ISCC-NBS descriptors grayish olive and dark olive. –LaundryPizza03 (d) 07:34, 11 October 2022 (UTC)
If we are going to use the ISCC-NBS classification, we should stick rigidly to it and make that clear in each article lead. This issue with olive drab being used as a name for different colours in different places is the very thing a standard categorisation scheme is meant to solve. The colour should go in the article or section that corresponds to its ISCC-NBS block. Both grayish olive and dark olive will live on the Olive (color) page so there is no big problem there. If we want to feature someone else's version of olive drab that does not belong on the Olive page, then a see also from that page is the way to handle it. And there certainly are other versions of olive drab. The British Army paints much of its equipment to British Standard 381c colour   #298 Olive Drab. I once came across a company (naming no names) making equipment for the British Army, but inexperienced in that field, who assumed that Olive Drab meant the RAL color, a standard widely used in Europe,   RAL 6022, which our article calls "Brown olive", but on many English language RAL charts, eg [6], is described as "Olive Drab". There are so many colour names out there that any attempt to group variations by names disparate organisations and manufacturers have used would be bound to throw up anomalies. There is a fundamental policy reason why we should not group by name. That principle is WP:NOTDICTIONARY. SpinningSpark
The Color Names Dictionary has various colors (from miscellaneous industry catalogs etc.) named “olive drab” listed under the following ISCC–NBS categories: moderate olive brown, dark olive brown, dark olive, grayish olive, olive gray, moderate yellow green (this one is "drab olive"). There is clearly no precise single idea of what color “olive drab” should mean. But if you want some definition, the X11 and HTML lists are pretty terrible sources in my opinion. pages 55–59jacobolus (t) 18:08, 11 October 2022 (UTC)
"cyan" as a color term appears to predate the the four color process that would eventually become CMYK. References I checked gave 1879 for "cyan blue" and a little later for "cyan" by itself but couldn't find the use that the referenced back to. I checked contemporary dictionaries, such as the 1886 Webster's (see page 328), which while not yet including "cyan" or "cyan blue" have "cyanean" and "cyanometer". Speaking of magenta seems like https://ojsspdc.ulpgc.es/ojs/index.php/LFE/article/view/121 might be a good source for that article. PaleAqua (talk) 12:51, 14 October 2022 (UTC)
Being able to find cyan as a colour term in the 19th century is beside the point. The real question is was it being used as a basic colour category rather than a particular colour? I can find references to banana as a colour [7] (apparently it was a new tint in 1891 fashion) but that does not mean we should use it as a basic category. SpinningSpark 13:45, 14 October 2022 (UTC)
I was responding to comments that they were not generic color terms and only defined in relation to CMYK. I agree neither cyan nor magenta should be used as basic color categories. Many of the sources I'v seen have "cyan" as a "blue" color, and "magenta" as a "red" color. As for ISCC-NBS, I agree it one of the better the option we have for categorizing color terms. Having a clear reliable source based approach continues to be my preference. PaleAqua (talk) 14:19, 14 October 2022 (UTC)
The word cyan (κύανος) is an Ancient Greek word for “blue”. I am not suggesting that it was never before used as a color name in English, but as far as I can tell though, neither “cyan” nor “magenta” was in common currency in the 19th century as a generic color word. They were picked out as jargon alternatives to “blue” and “red” to describe these kinds of printer inks because calling them “red” and “blue” would be confusing, since these are noticeably different from the unique hues red and blue. (Similarly, it was in my opinion a mistake to call RGB display primaries “red”, “green”, and “blue”, because this also causes significant confusion as these colors are also not all that close to the unique hues red, green, blue. Using ISCC-NBS categories as clear descriptive names, these primaries are R = “orangish red”, G = “yellowish green”, and B = “purplish blue”, but I think it would have been better to find/invent jargon names for them.) Wikipedia trying to turn those ink colors into generic color categories is at least approaching “original research” / violating a “neutral point of view”. –jacobolus (t) 16:16, 14 October 2022 (UTC)