2023.12.25 04:22
collecting colors
I once thought that it could be a hobby to collect various interesting colors. When walking around the world, if you see an interesting color, you could measure it with some kind of color meter and add it to your collection with a short note. Or - very similar - collect color palettes. For example, a palette of five main colors from a wild strawberry bush in the forest.
Maybe it could be done quite easily - you could take a photo with your phone and then at home on the computer read the color from the... hmm, pixel? But a pixel to the left, a pixel to the right and it's already a different color? So you could probably take a small circle and average it.
But there's a more serious thing to think about: what do I mean when I talk about the color I want to remember? Do I mean:
1. How much red, green, and blue would be in the light reflected by this object when it is illuminated by the light that is currently in that place?
2. What is the spectrum (in the visible range) of the light reflected by this object when it is illuminated by the light that is currently in that place?
3. What is the spectrum (in the visible range) of the light reflected by this object when it is illuminated by white light?
4. How much red, green, and blue is in the light reflected by this object when it is illuminated by white light?
Option 1 is interesting because it is quite easy to do. And it tells how that thing looked just when I saw it - for example, how the wild strawberry bush looked at sunrise. Although, to know how that thing looked seen by my eye, I would also need to have recorded what the spectrum (at least: how much red, green, and blue) of the light illuminating it was, because our vision does automatic white balance. But that would probably be quite easy: when photographing, you would place some white object next to the item and then measure the r, g, and b of some pixel from that white object in the photo.
Option 2 probably wouldn't give much more than option 1. I mean, of course, it would give much more information, but from an artistic-aesthetic point of view, it probably wouldn't add anything.
And options 3 and 4 are interesting because they tell how the object looks when illuminated by any light. And for that, option 4 is probably sufficient, no need for option 3.
Things would look different (but simpler) if I were collecting not the color of the reflected light, but the color of the emitted light - for example, a palette of colors from the rising sun.
In any case, it doesn't matter because I wouldn't want to do it anyway.
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