why does yellow seem “brighter” than other colors?
In: Biology
A couple reasons. It is lighter in value (which is the measure of lightness and darkness). Which basically means that it has more “light” and less “dark”.
Second reason being that yellow is a more intense wavelength. As things burn hotter, they progress from red to orange to yellow to eventually white.
I don’t find that to be true. Yellow crayon/marker or digital text is _light_, but not what I would call _bright_; it’s pretty hard to see at all unless the substrate is dark, which is not as true about green or red. (Unless you’re colorblind?)
It think it is just because we associate red and blue with more neutral shades of that color. Pink and light blue are more on par with what we associate yellow with. I have always thought buses are yellow not orange and that is a dull/not bright shade of yellow.
The answer to your question isn’t simple since color theory and the human physiological response to the light spectrum can be somewhat complex.
Yellow is often perceived as brighter as the brightness (dark or light) and the saturation (intensity or purity) of yellow are often much higher than other primary colours.
In terms of printed yellow, yellow pigments are often less dense than other pigments meaning they often appear brighter.
In terms of displays like a TV, producing yellow uses a green and red light but this requires high brightness values so may appear brighter even if not significant in terms of actual brightness.
Also individual physiology plays a huge part as all people are more sensitive to certain colours than others, nobody sees colours as accurately as everyone else so some might see yellow more bright than others as the eyes and/or brain process this colour easier or better.
Two reasons.
One, the choice of colours, hues, and saturation we pick as the “real” colour is sort of arbitrary. There are darker yellows, you might call them gold or something.
Secondly, if we’re talking pure wavelength of equal intensity right off the rainbow (ie ignoring the previous point), yellow (and green) light actually do excite your eye more than red and especially blue and violet. The human eye has three types of cone cells, that is cells that respond to light of a certain band. They can loosely be called blue cone cells, red come cells, and green cone cells. Hence, blue, red and green being the best (simple) primary colours for anything emitting light, like a TV. They aren’t perfect, a TV can’t display every colour you can see with its red, green, and blue (RGB) setup.
And their opposites, yellow (absord blue), cyan (absord red), and magenta (absorb green) being the among the best primary colour choices for pigments that absord light. Like the ink in your printer. Yellow and cyan ink make green because they absorb blues and greens leaving reds.
However, the cells don’t line up perfectly nor do they all respond the same to equal intensities of those colours. Their response look like [this](https://qph.fs.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-cc538f9d6e126b50b64b7dab9476ae84). As you can see, all three cones have a wide area and overlap. The green and red comes are much closer together. The blue cone is far less sensitive. The green is most sensitive. And the green and red overlap a lot as their peaks are very close. And the red come has a little peak in the blue region.
This explains most of the human colour phenomenon. Violet (very blue end of a rainbow) and purple (red and blue mix) looks similar because red cones have a little spike of sensitivity in the very blue region. Green and yellow our eyes are most sensitive too, so they look bright. Blue and violet are eyes are not very sensitive to at all, so they look dark. The green and yellow region has a lot of overlap, so there’s a wide region of hard to distinguish greens.
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