Why are black and white often not counted as colors?
In: Physics
It’s an interesting question this. It seems to be a kind of overcorrection based on the idea that “colour” refers to a position on the spectrum of light. White isn’t a colour here and neither is black, one being a mix of visible wavelengths, the other an absence of light.
It’s a strange position to take to me. Why should mixing all colours equal no colour? We talk about “black and white” images, but not “black and white and colour” images. If someone asked “what colour pen do you want?” you wouldn’t go “I want the no colour pen.”
Black is often considered the total lack of colour and white is often considered a combination of ‘all’ the colours (blue+red+yellow light makes white light)
Black is the absence of colour whilst white is the accumulation of every colour, or atleast that is my understanding.
It depends on what the word colour means. Sometimes we use it scientifically to refer to specific wavelengths of light thet are visible to us. This would mean black doesn’t count (as there is no light present that we can see) or white doesn’t count (as it is not a specific wavelength but may stacked together).
However, it isn’t wrong to say they are colours if your meaning is about what we can perceive. This is why colour in an artistic (which is a field more concerned about what we perceived than say physics) sense can simply be made up of hue, saturation and brightness and can include white and black. Look at the image below.
https://forum.affinity.serif.com/uploads/monthly_2018_01/001.png.7ec3ddf13ee95dd102708d45b35aba30.png
Here the wheel represents the hue, the length from the left flat side of the triangle to the point on the right is the saturation and the distance from the top to the bottom is the brightness. So white and black are parts of this system and could count as colours. White and black are simply the extremes of brightness for any hue that has no saturation.
So look at a rainbow. You see colors like red, blue, green. These are colors. What you don’t see is white. That’s because white is all the colors at once. So if it’s all the colors, is it really just *a* color? Same with black. Hope this helps.
I don’t see a clear answer for ELI5 here so…
Because black and white are not on the visible light spectrum (ROYGBIV), they are not considered to be colors by some (first Google result calls them “shades”). It’s a purely semantic argument at that point though, as for most people “color” means the name on the crayon, period. Others may mean hue.
For the non-spectrum people, there are the often neglected “colors” of browns and pinks too. They aren’t on the spectrum either (brown is a toned down–black added–orange, pink is tinted–white added–red), but can be names on crayons.
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