There are two major theories that explain and guide research on colour vision: the trichromatic theory also known as the Young-Helmholtz theory, and the opponent-process theory. These two theories are complementary and explain processes that operate at different levels of the visual system.

Color perception involves a processing stream that includes opsin-containing cones in the retina, color-opponent responses in the retinal ganglion cells, computations of color contrast in striate cortex, and a network of temporal areas that underlie the emergence of a stable color percept.

Understanding How We See Color The opponent process theory of color vision suggests that our ability to perceive color is controlled by three receptor complexes with opposing actions. These three receptor complexes are the red-green complex, the blue-yellow complex, and the black-white complex.

Color perception is a part of the larger visual system and is mediated by a complex process between neurons that begins with differential stimulation of different types of photoreceptors by light entering the eye.

The perception of color is formed in our brain by the superposition of the neural signals from three different kinds of photoreceptors which are distributed over the human eye’s retina. Scotopic (night) vision is caused by photoreceptors called rods, which are much more sensitive than cones.

Seeing with your brain But it’s not just our eyes that see – it’s our brains. We say we see different colours because of how our brains learn to link the signals they get from the eyes with the names of different colours.

Although you may be tempted to write off this difference as a consequence of cultural conditioning, the true root is physiological. Women have larger color vocabularies than men, but scientists say that women are actually seeing more color gradations than men.

He said we are able to recognise different colours because our cone cells, that are responsible for colour vision, are sensitive to certain lights. As we get older, our perception of colour can also start to fail. Macular degeneration happens because there are fewer light-sensitive cells on our retina.

Red-green and yellow-blue are the so-called “forbidden colors.” Composed of pairs of hues whose light frequencies automatically cancel each other out in the human eye, they’re supposed to be impossible to see simultaneously.

green

If color is solely the way physics describes it, the visible spectrum of light waves, then black and white are outcasts and don’t count as true, physical colors. Colors like white and pink are not present in the spectrum because they are the result of our eyes’ mixing wavelengths of light.

Magenta

Scientifically, purple is not a color because there is no beam of pure light that looks purple. There is no light wavelength that corresponds to purple. We see purple because the human eye can’t tell what’s really going on.

Since most of the yellow light we see in nature is a mixture of red to green wavelengths, one could actually argue that this broadband yellow is “real “yellow, and that the single-wavelength yellow of the spectrum is “fake” yellow.

Yellow is the color between orange and green on the spectrum of visible light. It is evoked by light with a dominant wavelength of roughly 570–590 nm. It is a primary color in subtractive color systems, used in painting or color printing.

Short answer: Yellow can be produced by light of a single wavelength. Pink is produced when the light is made up of many wavelengths with more of it in the red wavelength than any other colour. yellow does not ‘exist on the spectrum’ any more than pink does. colors are entirely a perceptual phenomenon.

The wavelength of yellow light falls between the wavelength of GREEN and RED, so the cones for red and green are slightly activated and your brain says: “that’s what happens when something is YELLOW, so it must be Yellow.”

Blue. Blue is the opposite of yellow.

On one hand yellow stands for freshness, happiness, positivity, clarity, energy, optimism, enlightenment, remembrance, intellect, honor, loyalty, and joy, but on the other, it represents cowardice and deceit. A dull or dingy yellow may represent caution, sickness, and jealousy.

Violet is the color of light at the short wavelength end of the visible spectrum, between blue and invisible ultraviolet. The color’s name is derived from the violet flower. In the RGB color model used in computer and television screens, violet is produced by mixing red and blue light, with more blue than red.

Blue

Is purple a “girl color” or “boy color?” Purple is traditionally a “girl” color. In fact, women often pick purple as their favorite color while only a tiny percentage of men do.

The red sensing rods also detect light in the deep blue. A response that is both red and blue is seen as a combination of red and blue. Our eyes cannot differentiate between a mixture of two colors and deep blue. Both look violet.

The Earth curves about 8 inches per mile. As a result, on a flat surface with your eyes 5 feet or so off the ground, the farthest edge that you can see is about 3 miles away.

Violet Eyes This color is most often found in people with albinism. It is said that you cannot truly have violet eyes without albinism. Mix a lack of pigment with the red from light reflecting off of blood vessels in the eyes, and you get this beautiful violet!

How many colours can we see? A healthy human eye has three types of cone cells, each of which can register about 100 different colour shades, therefore most researchers ballpark the number of colours we can distinguish at around a million.

First of all, scientists have determined that in the lab we can see about 1,000 levels of dark-light and about 100 levels each of red-green and yellow-blue. So that’s about 10 million colors right there.

cMost humans cannot see ultraviolet light because it has a shorter wavelength than violet light, putting it outside of the visible spectrum.

The entire rainbow of radiation observable to the human eye only makes up a tiny portion of the electromagnetic spectrum – about 0.0035 percent. This range of wavelengths is known as visible light.