A man preserving endangered colours
bbc.com
bbc.com
Very poetic. But is there any truth to this or is it just poor journalism?
2) there is a spiritually satisfying element to recreating something in the original or natural way when a more complex way may be easier
3) it is important to preserve the heritage of human innovation. These techniques and recipes ought to be preserved for historical and sociological reasons, as well as in the event that shit goes to pot one day, we may still have some people that know how to make dyes from scratch.
Also relevant, his piece on "The Library of Rare Colors" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rApTzWboLrA&t=6s
My thinking is this could affect visual cues for e.g. training.
Visualization of this: https://imgr.search.brave.com/OsaL9Hps1NYNjbK4zhGnStZmlMNT3t...
Human sight reduces all visible light down to the three red/green/blue buckets. Other species will have different buckets, and can easily see colors we perceive as identical as completely different.
I believe we have better color vision that most animals though, so the opposite is usually the case.
EDIT: Here's the reported anecdote I was remembering:
> "I have always had polite disagreements with people about shades of colours," she says. When clothes shopping for instance, she often finds that apparently matching tops and skirts seem to be a different shade to her, clashing horribly--even though no one else seems to notice it. Her sensitivity can sometimes be baffling to those around: when helping to restore a house, she once rejected 32 paint samples before settling on the right shade. "The beiges were too yellow and not blue enough, not cool enough; some of the almonds were too orangey," she says--distinctions that were much to the confusion of her building contractor.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20140905-the-women-with-s...
Another species could have the exact same "buckets" configuration and perceive color differently if the ganglionic layer is connected differently to those buckets.
Synthetic and natural dye will degrade or "patina" in different ways, over time and over the course of exposure to weathering, UV light, etc.
In many cases the synthetic dye does not degrade at all, which for many use cases can be undesirable.
I can see how that would actually make it look better/different in non full spectrum light!
But I don't get how pre tech dye experts would pick such colors?
Perhaps we also need a dual index that measures how well a pigment retains the same appearance under various light sources.
But if you look at infrared photos of flowers or "how bees see them", they show the same flowers with landing strips for the bees.
Sure, I like indigo, woad and maybe carrots or beets for Easter eggs but that doesn’t mean they are better. There may be preferences, yes. Better? That depends on use.
For a more concrete example, no matter how nice your camera and printer are, the colors which can be reproduced are currently always restricted compared to the source material (reality), and not just in a matter of there being some small error, there are colors your eyes can see in nature which can't be printed with state of the art tech.
Especially with textiles, the colorspaces available with normal technology are quite a bit smaller than in nature.
Whether "natural" or "synthetic" (the distinction can be a bit silly) a substance will react to light in its own unique way. The number of different substances with different responses is obviously very large in nature, technology tries to recreate a full spectrum of color with only a few substances in combination, the result is naturally not as rich.
As an example see sRGB, Adobe RGB, ProtoPhoto RGB, Rec. 2020/2100, etc:
See for example the splash that a 'new blue' made recently:
* "The first blue pigment discovered in 200 years is now commercially available", https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25807199
* "YInMn, the First New Blue Pigment in Two Centuries", https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25963292
The set of synthetic dyes we have does a pretty fantastic job at covering all the colors seen in the natural world, plus a whole lot more. We go way beyond the natural world, in fact, when you look at the bright/fluorescent colors you see in an athletic clothing store, as I mentioned in another comment.
What makes that 'new blue' you refer to special has nothing to do with how we perceive it directly -- it's trivial to recreate that hue. It's useful for the very specific use case of mixing colors while oil painting. It's for artists trying to blend colors.
Long answer: there are mainly three factors that contribute to inaccurate color reproduction.
The first is limited color gamut. That's not really a factor in dying fibers though -- we have plenty of synthetic dyes for things like bright orange, fluorescent green, etc. Just visit any athletic clothing store. And while yes nature has all sorts of shiny bright iridescence caused by diffraction etc., those properties are destroyed as soon as the material is smushed. You can't turn gorgeous insect wings into dye.
The second is that while our eyes perceive only RGB in response to a wide spectrum, there are an infinite number of spectral patterns that we ultimately perceive as e.g. a certain orange. An orange dye from one source (natural or synthetic) will have a different source spectrum from pretty much any other orange dye (natural or synthetic). BUT it's pretty easy to match the color we perceive perfectly for a single lighting condition, e.g. sunlight. But this brings us to:
The third factor, which is the spectrum of lighting. The spectra of sunlight, of fluorescent light, of LED light, is all different. The color we perceive is essentially the spectrum of the light source multiplied by the spectrum of the dye. Therefore when we change the lighting spectrum, this can change the ultimate RGB color we perceive -- so that two orange dyes that appeared literally identical in sunlight now appear subtly different under a fluorescent light.
So it is true that different dyes behave slightly differently under different lighting conditions. But there's no better or worse here, and there's absolutely no "peach ripened by a tree" or "how it's supposed to be". That's complete and utter nonsense.
The solution for good color matching isn't dyes from natural sources -- it's balanced, full-spectrum white lighting.
Seems like a great technological opportunity for someone to figure out.
Recently I advised someone not to buy granite countertops sight unseen, since the way they look in person is so different from the way they look in a photo - a photo completely misses the reflections, iridescence and other three-dimensional aspects of the actual product.
I didn't mention them since they have nothing to do with synthetic vs natural dyes though -- they're properties of whatever materials the dyes become part of.
That's actually a significant part of why "accurately" photographing clothing for online shopping is so hard. Getting an accurate hue is usually fairly easy with good lighting and proper white balance, and gray cards let you calibrate brightness. But the reflective properties of fibers mean that e.g. a shirt can look significantly different depending on what angle the light sources are at.
I guess that is what I'm getting at, that today's conception of what a "dye" is, is that it is a substance which is added to a material not changing the reflective, translucent etc properties of that material (which is itself probably a simplification - I can't imagine dying a fabric doesn't change these at least a little bit).
What I'm suggesting as an advancement is perhaps not called a "dye", but nevertheless would be a new way to not only change the color of the target object, but also the translucence, iridescence, reflectivity, etc.
I know there is already stuff in this area - there was some laptop case I saw recently that had some kind of micro-texture on it (the opposite of a polish, I guess) in order to make the black color of it more matte (if I recall correctly). Likewise, anti-reflective coatings and privacy screens seem like a ubiquitous, primitive example of what I'm talking about. I'm sure there are others.
If in one collection, one has different mixes of 4 fixed dyes or pigments which each respond to the light in a particular way, then, the way the result responds to different light sources should be in a particular 4d space, while more generally pigments could have the lighting->appearance function be a point in a larger space which that 4D space is a subset of, right?
I don’t particularly know what I’m talking about in this comment, but it seems to me like it should be right..
Though, even if what I said is right, there’s still the question of whether a person could reasonably learn to recognize whether such a response function (“response function” is not some technical term that I know. If it is a technical term, it is likely I’m using it wrong. I’m just using it as a description of the function from lighting to apparent color.) is from such a 4D subspace or not.
Based on a video I saw, I suspect that in some cases, yes, but in general idk. How often would the function be very close to something that is in the 4d subspace but isn’t quite?
I imagine a machine could do it easily.
Assuming you have a cheap way of producing light of a variable wavelength? Do we have such a thing? I think electron vibrating lasers (Idr the proper name for them) have a tunable wavelength, but I imagine those are expensive, and also probably something that isn’t a laser would be preferable.
However, as you say, a pigment colour has high dimensional properties - the spectral response. As others have mentioned this determines how it impacts on the observed/perceived colour, depending in the spectral response of the light it reflects.
I've come to realize this recently. I've been doing a lot of flower gardening.
Digital music is similar.
1% substance and 99% mindgame