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Comment by ianbicking | Hacker News Reader

My personal complaint with color pickers is that they make it hard to find many normal environmental colors. Where is brown? I've learned to find it around red, a little toward orange, and a dark saturation. It's not intuitive, and I don't feel like I just pick _some_ brown because I can't easily explore the space of browns through beige and tan. Flesh tones are similarly difficult.

I'm not sure what the solution is. A purely algorithmic color picker probably isn't the answer because it's not just our color perception that matters, but also the way colors are formed in our environment (which is what gives us so many browns).

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Brown is weird [1]. It's basically dark orange. Flesh tones fall into that same category - people are orange-hued [2]. Oranges/reds are mostly produced by various unsaturated molecules, such as carotenes, lignins, phenols, and tars, and browns are just dark collections of many kinds red-orange pigments. It does not map well to any of the common color spaces because its inherently heterogeneous.

The solution would probably be pallettes that let you pick arbitrary axes to move through color space.

1 - https://youtu.be/wh4aWZRtTwU

2 - According to Neil Harbisson, the guy with the color-sensing antenna, in-person conversation, but you can also verify with photoshop.

I don’t understand that video. Can’t all colours be described differentially to another colour? And don’t we have lots of names for different shades? Why does this make brown unusual?

In English, pink and brown are very specific colors which the brains of native speakers might not associate with their true hue values.

That's why the original commenter was having difficulty finding brown, because we do not necessarily associate it with a dark orange or flesh color with de-saturated red or orange.

But if we were trying to paint something like dark teal water. The brain would immediately go straight to blues/greens.

These "color categories" that we form in our brains can be different in every culture or language. That is issue with what was suggested.

> That's why you were having difficulty finding brown

Not sure if you’re replying to the right person? I didn’t say anything about finding brown being difficult.

I don't even know what that would mean for it to be difficult to find a colour?

> because you do not necessarily associate it with a dark orange

That’s what brown is - a dark orange. The same way navy is a dark blue. But nobody makes videos claiming that navy is a weird colour because it’s actually dark blue.

It sounds like the brown-orange link is intuitively obvious to you. But I think the claim being made is that for most native English-speakers, the link between orange and brown is significantly less obvious than that between X and dark X, for most colours X. FWIW that is true in my case.

(Not that I deny the link exists; but when I look at e.g. an orange next to a dark brown tree branch, I don't see them as versions of the same colour in the way I do with, say, a lime and a dark green leaf. That's not a great example but hopefully you see what I'm getting at.)

This seems like a simple case of different people finding different things unintuitive.

My theory is that many people have a mental model of colors that maps roughly to the hue and value in HSV, so for example terms like "dark orange" is a value followed by a hue. Now suppose you understand brown as a "dark beige", that's suddenly confusing because beige introduces saturation and you cannot map beige back to orange without thinking about saturation.

> Now suppose you understand brown as a "dark beige"

I think my point is brown is dark beige, and beige is light brown. Neither is canonical. Is orange canonical? Maybe it's high frequency red? Or low frequency yellow? That's what Newton thought! It's all relative.

I think what makes brown unique in this regard is its ubiquity in nature, partial desaturation, and lack of obvious mapping to a saturated color.

Emergence of names of colors in languages usually goes black, white, red, yellow, grue, then blue forks from blue, brown, orange, then "specialty" colors like pink, purple, indigo, teal. It's the only partially saturated shade that gets a name before its saturated variant (orange). Being able to name things brown is more important than orange, so that mental link is weaker. Hence why we have "dark blue" but brown is not "dark orange." (though I think some languages call it "dark red"? I'm a bit hazy on that detail)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_term

> lack of obvious mapping to a saturated color

30 degrees hue, 50% value, 100% saturated, looks exactly brown to me?

> brown is not "dark orange."

I think it is. In fact, take my 30 degrees hue, 50% value, 100% saturated, then gradually increase the value and see where you get to!

I don't think the other commenter is disagreeing with you on those things -- they're talking about human perceptions, and saying that although brown is in fact dark orange, that's not how we name it or how we tend to see it.

Just out of curiosity, what if you go to a significantly darker brown, say 30/100/20 h/s/v. Unfortunately these subjective tests will vary from monitor to monitor, but assuming that's still clearly brown rather than black to you (to me it's a more archetypal brown than the brighter version you initially named, which I might call orange-brown) -- what do you perceive when you keep the saturation and value fixed, and vary the hue? Would you agree that many or most of the other hues give you a colour more obviously 'dark X', where X is the 100%-value counterpart, than hue 30 does? For me it's much more obvious at the green-blue-purple segment of the spectrum than the red-orange-yellow segment.

This isn't meant as a trick question or anything -- if I'm getting at anything specific, it's that maybe part of the reason the orange-brown link seems more obvious to you than to me is that when you think of a central example of brown, you think of something brighter (and thus more obviously orange) than I do.

> Would you agree that many or most of the other hues give you a colour more obviously 'dark X'

Hmm not really. But we're not going to resolve what seems like a subjective question!

Oh don't worry, I wasn't planning on trying to argue the point! Just genuinely curious about the extent to which our difference is perceptual/conceptual/other. If we disagree on the 'dark X' thing, it makes me think there's a real perceptual difference and/or a pretty deep conceptual one (in terms of how we divide up the colour spectrum), though of course it doesn't prove anything.

Some color pickers allow you to load a palette of names and they locate those names and values in the color picker interface.

You can load common name sets (e.g. X11 color names, CSS names, Munsell names, Behr) and they map their values into your color pickers.

This works well especially with paint pigments as every manufacturer has their exotic names that they hype for that year. "Oh, 'Ice Blue' is really just a slightly blueish white."

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