I've been thinking a lot lately about how we visualize color. Ever since Newton, scientists and artists alike have thought of color as being arranged in a color wheel. But a simple color wheel has its limitations.

In the 18th century Moses Harris, for instance, tried to create a color wheel that captured not only pure colors, but shades of those colors as well.

In the early 19th century, Philipp Runge first thought of organizing color into a three-dimensional sphere.

Runge's sphere was the predecessor to a modern hue, saturation, value model, which is represented in the shape of a cone.

Which of these models is most similar to how you think of color? (I just wrote a blog post on visualizing color that covers this idea in more detail.)

You know, I don't really think about it in a 2d or even 3d way at all honestly, for me it's more like a quantum particle field where any one color is connected to all other colors.

I mean the relationships that are used to make these kind of models (HSL, complimentary, RGB, cone, cube, etc) are just a few out of potentially unlimited relationships, so they all seem pretty restrictive to me.

After seeing the cone model, I suppose I visualize color more in that way... But somewhat echoing manekineko, color is light, you really can't confine it in any geometric shape.

I weird myself out thinking of how other types of eyes perceive color. There are animals which can see into infrared and ultraviolet spectrums. Some animal's eyes can perceive heat. We attempt to look at these spectrums through special films and filters, but we're seeing it post-processed. It's been flattened and taken into a range that our eyes can see. How do these color ranges appear to the eyes that actually perceive the world in these different spectrums?

Light is a trip, man...

I honestly have no idea...I don't visualise colour in a system like that, but more in a system of things. I can visualise colour in a paint colour fandeck. I can see this huge rainbow of watercolour in the typical rainbow sequence.

I love those images you posted, though. ^^ The old yellowed paper and all that delicate inkwork, and of course the COLOUR!

i have always wondered if everyone sees color in a different way, just depending on how our eyes are made up. not in a colour blind way, where colours are completely different, but just slight. say grey is grey but its lightly different for everyone.

I have wondered that about taste too....apple pie may taste different to everyone slightly just no one would ever know...

i like to think about things :)

manekineko wrote:

You know, I don't really think about it in a 2d or even 3d way at all honestly, for me it's more like a quantum particle field where any one color is connected to all other colors.

I mean the relationships that are used to make these kind of models (HSL, complimentary, RGB, cone, cube, etc) are just a few out of potentially unlimited relationships, so they all seem pretty restrictive to me.

Im not agree with you, in an ordenated quantum field you have the same relations of the others 3D spacial representations. When you try to have a field with certain amount of disorder, like happens with the light in the reality, you can't have a fixed value. At least if you are not a potential cientist who can calculate the entropy of a color xD
When the people use the 3d spacial representation dont limit his choice to the surface, they are lines crossing the space in all directions. Thats because you can have the violet wich is not in the visible face.

By the way, i obviously think like you in a kind of representation where one color is conected to all the others.

Good answer Francoe :)

Turns out the guy who started this thread was just some dude spamming his blog but interesting subject still.

I guess what I was trying to say before is that the 3d and 2d representations seem to put artificial emphasis on the spatial relationship between the colors. Red is not really opposite of blue for for example, there is not really any 'space' or transitional colors between any 2 other colors.