I've always wondered by violet looks purple. Thanks for that.
So, to be clear, it's just a hardware detail with our red cones? They fire in the presence of photons in the red band, but also happen to fire in the super-blue band? It's just an artifact of how they're constructed, either by chance or evolution?
> I'd love to see an experiment where people are shown both true violet and purple mixed from red and blue in proportions that make it register as the exact same purple as violet does.
Isn't this basically exactly what the computer color violet does? E.g. there are photographs of violet at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violet_(color), which presumably look close to reality, but the hex color is #7F00FF, which has a lot of red in it.
Is that red not there to simulate our perception of violet, if I've understood you right?
Yeah, the computer merely simulates violet by mixing a kind of purple that looks just like violet.
As far as I understand (I'm no expert, I just read this somewhere), red cones also fire for extremely blue (violet) photons. No idea why. Maybe it's blue light of exactly double the frequency of red light?
My guess would be it's accidental, but I truly don't know. It might be interesting to test if animals with different kinds of cones (like butterflies) also have a similar effect for some of their cones. Though of course we'll never be able to imagine the colors they see. We're colorblind compared to them.
So, to be clear, it's just a hardware detail with our red cones? They fire in the presence of photons in the red band, but also happen to fire in the super-blue band? It's just an artifact of how they're constructed, either by chance or evolution?
> I'd love to see an experiment where people are shown both true violet and purple mixed from red and blue in proportions that make it register as the exact same purple as violet does.
Isn't this basically exactly what the computer color violet does? E.g. there are photographs of violet at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violet_(color), which presumably look close to reality, but the hex color is #7F00FF, which has a lot of red in it.
Is that red not there to simulate our perception of violet, if I've understood you right?