Hello. This video will be exploring the color brown. Viewer discretion is advised. Red. Green. Blue. These three colors are almost like magic. Theyâre able to fool our eyes into thinking
weâre seeing almost any color you can think of. And yet⌠they canât. Theyâre actually very limited. But at the same time, theyâre nearly limitless. What do I mean? Well, brown. Brown. Feast your eyes on the delightful world of
brown. There are so many good browns out there! The bark of a majestic tree. The amazing woodgrain of your favorite videocassette
recorder. Fresh coffee beans, delicious chocolate, really, brown is the color of some awesome stuff! Yeah, there are also some less⌠appealing brown substances out there but on the whole brownâs a nice color, and underappreciated! But the funny thing about brown is that itâs
a color that doesn't really exist. OK, it does, but it also kinda doesnât. It literally depends on how you see things. So, weâre gonna be talking a bit about RGB
lighting again, so in a sense this video is a continuation of âthe weird world in RGBâ. If you havenât seen that video you might
want to check it out. Hereâs a card: [excessive straining] [incessant coughing]. Now [cough] that⌠[cough] [cough]
that, that, that doesnât always work... so thereâs a link down below if you need it. Have you ever seen a brown light? This may seem like a rather silly question
but itâs pretty much the entire point of this video. So yeah. Now, youâve probably seen like a sign for
a UPS store which is lit up and contains brown, but thereâs a weird thing going on with
that sign. Itâs not actually brown. Itâs orange. But darker. Brown is an amazing color because it highlights
how we perceive and describe the world. Our eyes are just fancy light detectors, barely
able to see three colors, but our brains; theyâre pretty good at interpreting what
the output from those light detectors means. And the fascinating thing about brown is that
itâs a color that exists due to context, not wavelength. Take a look at a rainbow. Rainbows are super helpful because they break
out the visible light spectrum and show us the limits of what we can see. Theyâre also super interesting because they
exist only to humans. Well, they exist only to organisms that see
in visible light. And they also kinda donât exist at all. Rainbows arenât physical objects, theyâre
just the result of weird things that happen when electromagnetic radiation gets diffracted
and reflected through water droplets and observed from one location in space. Anyway, the important thing about rainbows
is that they contain the color spectrum. Thatâs our friend Mr. Biv, Roy G. These are all the wavelengths of light that
we can detect with our eyes and thus⌠see. Now, you may notice that brownâs not in here. I suppose thatâs not too surprising, whenâs
the last time you had a brown Skittle? M&Mâs though... *taste the brown* The fact that brown does not appear in the
rainbow tells us that there is no such thing as brown light. Donât believe me? Well, I donât blame you. The screen youâre looking at is showing
you brown, with light. So how can there be no such thing as brown
light when youâre looking right at it? Well, in fact, this isnât brown. Itâs orange, with context. Letâs play around with some RGB lights,
shall we? Iâve gone with some LED tape light this
time because I have more precise control over it. So, quick refresher, the colors red green
and blue work together to create virtually all colors of light because they roughly correspond
to the long, medium, and short cone cells in your eyes. Mix the ratios up between these three colors
and you can trick your brain into thinking itâs seeing just about any color at all. Red alone⌠well it, itâs red. As we add green light it shifts to orange,
then yellow. Now as we take away the red, it becomes a
yellow-green, and finally itâs solidly... green. Then we add blue and now itâs shifting towards
a blue-green, and now a cyan, before we start taking away the green and it heads into solid
blue territory. Start to add red to this and you get a purplish
color. Keep going and we get magenta. And finally, as we take the blue away, we
start back at red. The only thing weâve been messing with here
is the hue, not the Dewey or Louie. And hue exists on a circle. Well, sometimes, thereâs a bunch of ways
to represent color, but here; Let me show you my play button. The outer ring contains all of the pure colors
of light that we can produce in an RGB space. Youâll notice that it follows the color
spectrum, though violet is replaced with magenta, and it bleeds back into red. In case you forgot, magenta is a weird color
that our brains made up! It comes from an object emitting both high and low frequencies of light, so near-blue and near-red, but few middle frequencies like green. Magenta doesnât exist in the rainbow, yet there it is. Anyway, back to the tape light. These lights can make any sort of RGB combination
you like, just as the sub pixels in your monitor can. But they canât make brown. Why not? Because again; Brown light doesnât exist. There is only brown. Uh, well, here. How does one make brown in the RGB space? Surely itâs possible. I mean. Look at all the brown. Well, notice whatâs going on inside the
triangle. This triangle represents the relationship
between hue, saturation, and brightness in a 2D space. If fully saturated, and fully bright, we find
ourselves in the right corner. All monochromatic, or spectral, light sources
exist here. If brightness stays the same but saturation
falls, we head towards the top corner, and white. In an RGB space, this is accomplished by adding
both blue and green to red, pushing the composite color towards white. Of note is that brightness is technically
increasing since we are adding more light, but youâll see why we donât say that shortly. As brightness decreases, we head towards the
bottom corner, and black. In RGB, this is done simply by producing less
light. As you approach no light at all, you approach
black. This can be a little confusing to conceptualize
because the axes are weird. You might think saturation exists on the X
axis, going left to right, but in fact saturation remains at 100% all along this edge of the
triangle - only brightness varies. On the opposite edge, brightness remains at
100% as saturation changes. And on the left edge, saturation stays at
zero but brightness changes, and in fact thatâs why this edge is simply black to white. The axes are really here, with this being
the saturation axis and this being the brightness axis. It isnât really important to the point
here, but it is interesting. Now this is just one of the ways we can show
a color palette. There are plenty of other options, like this
one where the box contains hue and saturation, and brightness is controlled via the slider
on the right. Or thereâs also YouTubeâs favorite, the
Hue Cube. But for what weâre talking about here the
color wheel is best. So, how do we get brown out of the color wheel? Well, weâre gonna put our hue at something
like 30 degrees, and drop the brightness. That, my friends, is brown. Brown is just orange. But darker. Now, Iâm sure many of you already knew this,
but I am routinely fascinated by this. Because again. Ya canât make brown light. Here, letâs go back to the tape light. We know that to make brown we need to make
orange, and darken it. So, weâll make a nice orange color. Now decrease the brightness. Thatâs⌠still orange. This is not brown. At all. Oh, but it is! We just donât have any context to suggest
that this should be brown. Because you cannot create that context with
a light source on its own. Here. Iâm gonna leave you in the dark for a moment. Weâre gonna stay here for a brief period
so your eyes get used to the darkness. Yes. This sure is dark. Not a lot to see here, thatâs for sure. Now, this demonstration is only really gonna
work if you can be in a completely dark room so⌠maybe try and do that? Iâll give you a second. Are you there yet? Are you in your dark place? OK. Cool. So, *fart noise* I have brought to you a square of orange. This is a very pretty orange square, isnât
it? Now, itâs not the brightest orange square
out there, in fact Iâve yet to see one of those, but it sure is orange. But is it? Letâs fade from black and into white. Oh no! It was brown the whole time! How could I have been fooled?! ⍠smarmy slow jazz ⍠Those words on the screen up there? They're important. Don't bother reading these words.
They won't do you any good. Yes. Yes it is. Well, you were fooled because you didnât
have any context to tell you that this color was brown. Or, if you werenât fooled, you didnât
listen to me and instead left the lights on so you could see the color against the blackness
of your screen. You cheater. To see brown as brown, we need to be seeing
brighter things around it. And thatâs why you canât ever make a light
source like this tape light appear brown. It produces its own light, so it will always
be brighter than its surroundings. You canât use light to take brightness away. However, in the case of a monitor or a television,
you can control the amount of light each portion of it makes. So, if you need to see a brown thing, so long
as there are brighter objects on the screen to give you context, youâll see that dimly
lit orange as brown. Also of note is that, with lights on in the
room, the monitor is of course darker than its surroundings already. This is one of the reasons this demonstration
might not have worked. The black space around the orange square gives
you the context you need to know that itâs not very bright at all, so itâs brown. In fact, this is precisely the reason why
your display needs to be a black void when itâs not displaying anything. In order to see a full range of colors, you
need to be able to produce darkness and lightness at the same time. The only way to do that with light by itself
is to make sure the starting point is very dark. So, modern displays absorb most of the light
that falls on them so they will appear black even in a well-lit space. This is also why projection systems need to
be in very dark rooms. Otherwise the screen is illuminated by incidental
lighting, so the darkest color it can produce will be a grey, and the image is washed-out. The thing is, to make brown, you need to take
light away. If you wanted to make brown using pigments,
youâd start with orange and add black. And in fact you can even see this going on
in the color wheel. While this is of course representing color
in the context of light, you can also think of this as the result of mixing paints together. Up here is purely white paint. Down here is purely black paint. And over to the right is a paint of perfect
hue. Mix them together and you get whatâs going
on inside the triangle. Objects in the real world that are brown are
like an orange mixed with black. The light they reflect into your eyes is similar
in wavelength to an orange, but thereâs not a lot of that light. Itâs pretty dark. And we just happen to call that resulting
color "brown". Side-note; brown is also fascinating to me
because itâs arguably a human construct. Perhaps youâve heard about how languages
evolved to describe color in categories. Some languages have fewer categories of color
than others, and anthropologists have discovered that as languages evolved they tended to build
upon these categorizations in the same predictable order. For instance, languages with only three categories
of color would almost always contain white, black (or their stand-ins light and dark) and red. In these languages, things like blue, green,
yellow - they just donât have words for them, and theyâre not distinct. Languages with six categories, like Mandarin
Chinese, contain white, black, red, yellow, green and blue. Side-side-note; When we were learning colors, as you do, we
learned bĂĄi sè, hÄi sè, hĂłng sè, huĂĄng sè, lÇ sè, and lĂĄn sè. Then our teacher asked us,
"what do you think brown is?" And I just blurted out because I was a smart
ass and thought it would be clever, what, is it kÄ fÄi sè? And my teacher eyes lit up delighted because it is! Now, to be fair, that technically means âthe color of coffeeâ and there is a separate word for brown, zĹng sè. However, we used kÄ fÄi sè more frequently
in class at least so, there you go. I can now officially say that I have used
my very, very, rudimentary knowledge of Chinese in my professional life. Huzzah! Anyway, to get us back on target, the point
Iâm making here is that we only recognize colors as distinct after weâve decided thatâs a distinct color! and we give it a name. Even in English orange didnât become a color
until we stole that word from the fruit. Prior to then it was either yellow or red. Or yellow-red. Or maybe red-yellow. Rellow? And I think brown is definitely one of these
late colors. Why? Well, letâs hop on board the color wheel
one more time. Right here is a nice sturdy brown. Clearly. Thatâs brown. Mmm. But look what happens when I change the hue. As we head into yellow that becomes, oh I
donât know a puky green? Maybe tan? We move into green and thatâs⌠just a
dark green. As we move into cyan we get what you might
call a teal, but everything from there on out is just dark whatever. Dark blue, dark purple, dark red... but when
we get back to orange thatâs not dark orange. Itâs brown! The color is clearly its own color. But why? Why isnât it a dark orange? Well, because weâve named it brown. And the mere act of doing that causes it to
become a distinct color in our mindâs eye. Thatâs pretty neat and weird stuff, isnât
it? Brown serves as a fantastic example of the
difference between creating color with pigments and creating color with light. Objects in the real world are lit by the sun,
or maybe a light bulb, and what we see is the light reflected off of them. If they reflect a lot of that light, theyâll
appear white. If they absorb a lot of that light, theyâll
appear black. And if they absorb only some frequencies of
light and reflect others, theyâll appear as whatever color they reflect the most. But describing it that way is incomplete. Itâs not just the prevailing wavelength
that creates the color. That defines the hue. Again, thatâs the circle. Hue is only one third of color. Hue, saturation, and brightness all work together
to create the colors we see. In the realm of pigment, or real-world objects,
brightness describes how much light is reflected back, hue describes which (if any) wavelengths
stand out to give it color. And saturation describes how much that wavelength
stands out, or how intense the color appears. And the thing is, in the real world, we always
start with light and the objects around us take it away. This is called subtractive color. If we use paints, well a white paint reflects
pretty much all of the light that hits it back, and roughly equally. A black paint absorbs most of the light that
hits it, again equally. And a colored paint absorbs most light, but
not certain wavelengths. In the case of red paint, it reflects red
quite well. In this scenario, the red paint is our hue. Red paint alone is fully saturated, and fully
bright. Add some white paint to it and you decrease
the saturation because now the reflected light is not purely red. Other wavelengths are now visible, though
red remains prominent. Mixing in black paint with red decreases the
brightness because it lowers the overall amount of light being reflected back. However, because black paint absorbs all wavelengths
roughly equally, the light being reflected back is still purely red. Thereâs just less of it. So this mixture is fully saturated, but less
bright. You can create any brightness and saturation
combo you like simply by altering the ratio of white, red, and black paint. The hue, however, will always remain red. Or roughly zero degrees on the hue circle. But when we use light to create an image,
this is sorta turned on its head. A display creates its own light (usually)
and this is why the primary colors are red, green and blue. We sometimes call this additive color. Weâre starting with no light, and need to
add light to create what is seen. And in the weird world of RGB, creating colors
anywhere below this line requires lowering brightness, or taking away light. But we canât actually take away light. We can only produce less of it. And thatâs whatâs so interesting about
brown. Even here on the color wheel, with orange
selected, itâs kinda hard (at least to me) to see the space in the triangle as containing
brown. It just looks like a whole bunch of different
shades of orange. But indeed, those darker shades are very much
what we call brown. Itâs an orange-ish wavelength of light,
but not a lot of it. With something like an LED tape light, or
really any RGB light source on its own, you canât produce a color that looks like brown
because any attempt to do so will just end up looking like orange. And the reason why is pretty simple; all light
sources brighten whatâs around them. There is no equivalent of a black pigment
in the realm of light. Thereâs just⌠less light. And in order for that to be perceived as a
dark color, you need to have some sort of context. You get gobs of that when looking at an image
produced on a display⌠but you get none at all from a simple light source existing in the real world. With an RGB light, youâre limited to colors
that exist on this line. You can either be a pure hue, which incidentally
is why your RGB gaming rig tends to just cycle between blue, cyan, green, yellow, red, magenta,
and blue again, or you can decrease saturation and approach white. But you canât venture away from this line. I mean, you can, but a dimmer light without
context is still just a light. And our brains simply wonât see that as
in the center of the triangle unless we have other, brighter things to see, too. I hope you enjoyed this look into the color
brown. Brown is, and I am not kidding you, my favorite
color. Sometimes I wish we could just get a â70s
appreciation movement going because boy was that a good time to be a fan of brown! Nowadays nobody seems to like the color brown. Sad face. Now, to be fair, the worldâs ugliest color
- thatâs Pantone 448 C - is a brown. But, I mean, thatâs not fair to brown. Not all browns are that gross looking. They... they can be, just slide the hue over here
and youâre getting a good bit of yellow in there, which somehow seems to make the
brown look almost greenish. But, just look at all these other great browns! Those are some good browns. Are you wondering why Iâve made a video
on brown? Well, the more good sounding answer is that
I wanted to share with you more of the weirdness that is our human color perception, but the
more true answer is that I wanted to see if I could make a good video out of something
as mundane as a color. I hope to make this a sort of periodic challenge
for me, and I hope you think Iâve done a good job today! By the way, and this is a totally random suggestion,
you should consider checking out the channel âAging Wheelsâ on YouTube. If you like hilarious shenanigans involving
weird and interesting bits of automotive history, including bizarre electric cars, well then
that is a channel for you. Iâve been told I look a lot like Robert,
but frankly I donât see the resemblance. Well. Thanks for watching! And seriously. Go check out Aging Wheels. Itâs great. I even made a playlist for you of my favorite
videos. Go watch. âKay bye. ⍠contextually smooth jazz ⍠Thereâs a card down below if you need it. Link! Ahh⌠They tended to build upon these categora⌠categorizations. This is⌠ooh boy! Thatâs the first time I read this line and
I know itâs gonna go poorly. I suppose thatâs not too surprising, whenâs
the last time you had a brown skittle? That went well, except what was this? So weâre gonna be talking a bit about RGB
colored light⌠lighting again. Itâs, itâs going too slow... Iâm sorry.... But when we use light to create an image⌠I need to back it up once more. I need to restart it because it stopped. Hereâs a mmmMMMMMMM. (laughing) You know Iâm not⌠youâre not gonna use the footage from that, so what does it matter? [Probably not] Oh, but I did! I did use the footage from that! Also, yes. I totally forgot to add the text elements that I usually do on the endscreen. I'm just gonna pretend that I meant to do that because I am promoting Robert's channel. Ya know, 'cause it's different? TASTE THE BROWN
I've only just recently discovered this guy's channel, it's great.
Been subbed to this chap for a year and his content is amazing. The rice cooker video is a good one.
I love this channel. Been subbed for a while now and his quirky humor really sells it. He obviously knows what heâs talking about.
This is pretty great
This is awesome. Thanks dude
I always think of this image https://www.sibleyguides.com/wp-content/uploads/Cube_color_illusion1.jpg but his explanation adds a lot to it and itâs a great video. Iâm a painter so itâs quite fascinating seeing this stuff from your own hand and being bemused by what your brain distinguishes due to âcontextâ
[Mr. Regular intensifies]
A really fascinating video! But, could probably have been 5-10 minutes shorter.
Subbed a few weeks ago. This guy has great content.
I fucking love this guy