What is it about the color yellow exactly that makes it subjectively less visible against a white background than say, blue or red?
In: 53
Yellow is much closer to white in the cielab color space.
This color space is made to be visually uniform. So the distance between 2 colors at which a given person distinguish the 2 colors is the same everywhere in the space.
So if you go from white to pure yellow and count the distinguishable shades of yellow for a given person, there are less than for any other hues.
Violet is the father away from white. So there are more shades of violet than any other colors.
The reason for that is that the S cone is overrepresented in color detection and not used at all for the feeling of brightness, while the M and L cones are mostly used for brightness and are underused for color distinction compared to the S cone.
The S cone peaks in blue, but the color for which the S cone dominates the most compared to the other cone is violet.
The M cone peaks in yellowisg green and that’s the color it dominates the most.
The L cone peaks in yellow, but it’s in red that it dominates the most compared to the other cones.
https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Color_space_CIE_1976_(LUV)%2B(Lab)%2BcolorTemp.png
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