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SYMMETRIC BEING: Color
LINKS Crayola Crayons . Wikipedia Color . Wiki RYB Color . Wiki RGB Color
Color is one thing that
must be re-thought when we think about a universe founded on perfect
balance and opposition. Color (as with all life) results from what could have remained nothingness (basically grayness) tearing
itself into all being in equal directions. Our consciousness only
exists because of an equal consciousness we're tearing off of (we see
opposition all around us, war and peace, love and hate, why wouldn't
the ultimate opposition exist?). If we can understand this
perfect opposition and hence everything inbetween through the microcosm
of color, we can better understand the spectrum of complex emotion and
life all around us.
To start understanding our perfect inverse, we'll begin with the
horrifically deceptively simple task of trying to invert a simple
digital image. Here's Joe. Joe has a happy life being a
black stick figure with a yellow smiley face, on green grass, blue sky,
and white clouds, and he is allowed to exist (as we are) only because
there exists a perfect un-Joe. Let's give him a good name, since
he's a living being just like Joe is; we'll call him 'Eoj' ('Joe'
reversed). What does Eoj see and look like? All we have to
do is invert the picture; sounds easy, right? Not really.
We'll try two major color systems (note that I'm not commenting on
the science and general workings of these systems, but only examining
whether and how they help us understand what a pure "visual inversion"
of our inverse consciousness looks like). We have
Red-Yellow-Blue, the mixing wheel, the one we're
used to from gradeschool, where you mix red and yellow paint and get
orange, and so forth, observing the color wheel below to the left,
where red is
green's opposite, etc. So it seems a simple task to just invert
each pixil, but I'm still looking for a program that can do this.
Most programs opertate under the Red-Green-Blue monitor, which invert
differently, as seen here.
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| Color Wheel |
RYB Inverse |
RGB Inverse |
From intuition, I think that white is black's pure visual inversion, so
there's no argument there, and the systems agree. But how do I
know what a perfect inverse color looks like? I have no way of
testing this experimentally, and only my intuition to go on, and two of
our main scientifically-based color systems seem to disagree with eachother. I
really can't have much idea initially whether they might both be
flawed, they both sort of look inverted to me, but they're all we have
to go on, so let's examine them.
Here's one thing that casts a lot of doubt on the RGB model: when we
see a wider color spectrum inverted, we see that a whole entire side of
the RYB color wheel has turned mostly blue. This certainly can't be
correct, I can clearly see that there are a variety of original colors,
so the inverse colors that Eoj sees should be equally spectrumed.
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| Color Wheel |
RYB Inverse |
RGB Inverse |
So maybe we're leaning towards trusting our RYB instincts if
anything. But
MS-Paint, Adobe, Jasc, and Gimp, all invert based on RGB, so we can't
even do the should-be-utterly-simple task of doing this
automatically. We'll have to invert RYB manually for these
simple pictures (i.e. selecting the proper color using the fill bucket
in paint and filling in the areas ourselves, which we clearly could not
do to a 10,000-pixiled complex image) until somebody tells me how the
hell to invert a RYB
picture. Here's our first look at Eoj in each system.
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| Joe |
Eoj - RGB inv |
Eoj - RYB inv |
Notice
that in the original, the sky seems lighter than the grass, so
it should be darker than the grass in the inversion. But in the
RGB the sky looks lighter, and in the RYB, they still look about the
same. Also, the colors in the RYB
look very similar; we've lost the sharp contrast between bright
blue and dark green in the original; at least the RGB version maintains
a big contrast between sky and grass. What's gone wrong? Let's take a look at the black and white images:
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| Joe |
Joe desaturated
(RYB or RGB) |
Eoj desaturated
(RYB or RGB) |
This
looks like an accurate desaturation of Joe. Except his face seems
to blend in more with the sky, and his feet seem to blend in just a bit
more with the grass. This is partly because the color helped tell
them apart (yellow on blue, vs gray on gray), but in particular the
face has blended in because yellow is actually a brighter color than
blue, and looks brighter even though they're the same luminosity, as
you see in Joe's black & white. This is actually our whole
problem with the grass not looking dark enough in either color invert
above. Yellow again is a bright color, so it looks brighter than
the magenta grass, even though the grass is the lighter shade you see
in Eoj's desaturate, and the light red grass looks similar shade and
color to the orange, because orange is a brighter color than red (light
red is more similar to orange than dark green is to blue).
Perhaps to truly desaturate properly, a program should take into
account the brighter or darker hues!
For a quick fix to the orange/red problem, we'll just darken the orange
a little and lighten the red to give us an idea. Also, since we
still don't know really whether if either of the RYB or RGB inversions
are correct, let's average the two results to see what they look like.
So here are our best guesses at what Eoj looks like:
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| Joe |
Eoj - RYB inv fix |
Eoj - RYB/RGB inv |
Now
we could further explore Joe and his inverses by experimenting with
different colors (since different colors seem to
invert differently in the two systems), and using darker or
lighter hues (of the same luminosity), which might give us different
results. But let us move on to actual pictures. Remember
the only way we have to invert any kind of picture is the straight
RGB invert of paint, adobe, etc, so we have no choice but to use this.
While it may be incorrect, it can still give us a general idea of
what inverted photographs might look like. After all, it still
turns black to white and vice versa.
Here's Joe's friend Kyle.
Kyle is a little more real than Joe because he's a full fictional
character in a cool show coming back in 2009 if there's anyone besides
me who cares, but he's still fictional at least, so Joe still likes
him. On Kyle's belly button (Kyle's not supposed to have a belly
button, so we gave him one) we've put the half of the color spectrum
that turns blue when we invert with RGB. Now all the sky, grass,
logo, surrounding Kyle, which are all blue-ish, all turn red-ish, and red and blue for all
we've been through are opposites in neither color scheme.
Stranger, Kyle's skin pigment (orangish) all falls to blue, its proper
opposite in either color scheme!
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>> |
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Kyle w/ color
square belly button |
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Standard PC RGB Invert |
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The blue shift is explained by cyan being the opposite of red in RGB,
where the logo is very cyan and the dark blue in the sky is not blue at
all but dark cyan, otherwise the sky would be yellow (blue's RGB
opposite). It's like
everything around Kyle goes into him and the tiny dot of red on his
belly button floods the entire sky around. And while this
seems pretty ridiculous in our search for our pure visual inverse
(variety in one picture should parallel a variety in the inverse), we
can still see that the picture looks pretty darn inverted. Kyle's
hair is white and his face totally alien to us, and there's glowing
light where there should be black shadow. You can invert any
picture this way just by pressing ctrl-i in ms-paint or adobe (even if
the simple RYB inverse is bizzarely unavailable).
This is just some beginning thoughts on color. As this short
draft becomes longer, I'll discuss the applications of this one color polar
extreme to complex emotions, discuss how the whole spectrum of being is
related to these two polar necessary extremes (for instance, relating
the transitioning from one state of consciousness to another using
color to color shifts as an example), and try to apply areas of my
other discussions to this as far as it's not redundant.
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