Why are black and white often not counted as colors?
In: Physics
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.
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