If things are a certain color because they absorb all color waves except the certain wave length they reflect, then we are seeing a reflected color and not the actual color right?
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“Color” is (roughly) the name we give to “what wavelengths of visible light an object reflects, as filtered through human visual processing”. It doesn’t make sense to ask what color they are “aside from reflected light”, it’s like asking “what is sound if you don’t count vibrations”.
Color is a subjective human experience. It’s dependent on what light hits our eyes and how our brain chooses to interpret that. Check out “the dress” from a few years back.
Beyond that, no “actual color” exists.
There’s an absorption spectrum, and that’s the closest objects come to having a “real color”. It’s the spectrum of light frequencies that is absorbed by something. Any light not absorbed must escape, and that light is what reaches our eyes to become “color”.
Color isn’t really a real thing.
It is only something that exist in our minds.
The idea of color broadly correlates with concepts of wavelengths of light.
But not really. Magenta for example is not a color that has a wavelength of light associated with it. It is an idea our brains come up with to describe the sort of effect you get when the receptors for both the high and the low end of the visible spectrum register something but not the ones in the middle.
The physical world has colors on a linear spectrum but our brain has twisted that into a wheel and invented colors that don’t exist in real life as photons of light.
Objects can both reflect and emit light.
If you were to ignore the light reflected of objects and only the one that they give off themselves, most would appear black because the light they give of is outside the visible spectrum.
If you ask what color natural objects are really, you could argue that they all are infra-red. But that isn’t a color you can see.
If you heat up stuff the light they give of will eventually start shift into the visible spectrum and appear red hot and than white hot.
But these things are only that color at that temperature.
Without reflection or heating them up enough to glow visibly most objects around you simply don’t send any photons to your eyes that correspond to any color you brain knows.
So one answer to your question is that things are mostly black.
Yep. Color is super subjective. Depends on the what kind of eyes the observer has. Replicants and Cortana like AIs ‘see’ much more than humans cuz they have different photreceptors. Animals too have different photreceptors. Basically if you the same undamaged set of photoreceptors, you see the same thing. Otherwise different colours and possibly more wavelengths. You could see radiation if your eyes were the same as an iPhone camera.
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