Comment by doe_eyes

I got hue 174 as my threshold and really I just wanted to say "neither, this is turquoise/teal" for most of the questions. But blue/green was the only option.

I'd love a last step in the test where you're presented with the gradient, but before showing the distribution and the user's score. Allow the user to select where they consider their threshold, then display the final results.

> The most interesting thing for me is that while cyan (#00ffff) is nominally halfway between blue and green, most people's thresholds, averaged over monitor calibrations, imply that cyan is classified as blue.

Perceptually (that is, in CIE-LCh color space, for example), the hue component of #00ffff is a lot cloer to #00ff00 than it is to #0000ff. But the website doesn't ask which color is closer, it asks if it's "green" or "blue". And how we use those words has more to do with culture than with perception. We also call the color of a clear afternoon sky "blue", even though that is perceptually extremely far away from #0000ff.

> while cyan (#00ffff) is nominally halfway between blue and green, most people's thresholds, averaged over monitor calibrations, imply that cyan is classified as blue

Yes, because (at least for me) the thought went "well that's cyan, it's not really blue but if forced to pick, cyan is more like blue so I'll click that". It's like rounding up at 0.5.

In USA:

Primary Additive Colors: Red, Green, Blue

Primary Subtractive Colors: Cyan, Magenta, Yellow

But, before digital color displays became popular, the average person had, by far, mostly exposure to subtractive (paint) colors.

US school children are taught from birth that the primary subtractive colors are red, yellow, and blue, simply because those words are easier to pronounce, and so magenta is a weird "red" and cyan is a weird "blue" , until the children discover on their own, or in specialized print/paint schools, red and blue are not primary subtractive colors.

Humans are terrible at naming things.

And to bring it back to Current Thing: Google AI cites this source for its red/yellow/blue claim, even though explicitly this source says that Google gives the wrong answer.

https://science.howstuffworks.com/primary-colors.htm#:~:text....

Will GenAI's aggressive ignorance kill sarcasm and nuance in writing? Or will people learn to ignore AI input like they ignore banner ads?

I refuse to call cyan either blue or green. It’s clearly in between.

Just like I would never call orange yellow or red.

By the way, "cyan" is a very poor name to use for #00ffff. The term "cyan" refers to the kind of slightly greenish blue used in 4-color printing (CMYK), and was just a Greek word for "blue" chosen to be a jargon word to avoid confusion with the English color name. It has a totally different color than the equal mixture of typical G and B primaries in a computer display.

Similarly, "magenta" is a poor name to use for #ff00ff. The term "magenta" is a jargon word for the slightly purplish printer's red, which was chosen to avoid confusion with the English word "red". It has a completely different than the equal mix of RGB R and B primaries.

("Red", "green", and "blue" are also very poor names for the RGB primaries, which are substantially orangish red, yellowish green, and purplish blue.)

I'd check whether there are biases depending on which color you start with / which colors you present when.

OP have you considered doing a version for this to test contemporary Greek native speakers, vs others ("control" group),

for differentiation of blues?

I remember reading that modern Greek has two color-names for sky- and dark- blue (not sure what the prototypes are for each nor if they have hue components, maybe the "sky" blue is green-shifted?)... always been fascinated by the discussion of "weak Sapir-Whorf" around this and would be quite interested to see if there are any differences in discrimination...

The classic cognitive/perceptual psyche data to gather would be time-to-discriminate, with the prediction being that Greek speakers make faster judgement because they have higher/faster discrimination, than others.

Not sure how you'd pose the question to non-Greek speakers tho :)

I checked in at hue 174, the median, which is interesting to me as I know that my wife will test to a very different hue as we have occasional disagreements on whether something is 'blue' or 'green' :)

It is interesting to test people at just one device.

I used my phone on a mount, and completed the test with my wife, children and myself - I was interested (though not surprised) what an outlier I was, as I am colour blind in various combinations, but though my wife scored 'bang in the middle' - it was interesting that wasn't common.

My kids were both to the left of the scale fwiw - I was further right than 98% of people.

> 2. If you average over large populations, you can estimate population thresholds, marginalizing over monitor calibrations.

This might be one case where it might make sense to cluster between the reported operating system. At the moment I only have a family of Macs to test, but I can imagine that Windows users with their different default gamma get back different results.

> I was not expecting that the median threshold (hue 174) would be so deep into the greens.

You're not asking gender of the test taker. Your results will be skewed because you're probably getting more men than women. Women in general have more ability to detect green vs blue.

Not that surprising. To most people, pure RGB-blue looks a bit violet. People are used to ink (subtractive) blue more than light (additive) blue. People call the sky blue and water blue; both are closer to cyan. Most people think of a neutral blue as something like #0080ff.

I classified cyan as green because, well, it's greener than pure blue, and it's also the most greener you can get than blue, in RGB space, without losing any blue :)

I think you're paying more attention to the mathematics than the social usage.

The ocean at a tropical beach is often actually cyan but never referred to as green.

>most people's thresholds, averaged over monitor calibrations, imply that cyan is classified as blue.

I think that's just to your test forcing people to pick either blue or green even though cyan is both, they are just going to pick blue because it's the first option and more likely to be picked randomly.

Another variable is the name of the website. If the page were called "is my green your green" perhaps you'd get the opposite result...

I did this test with tinted sunglasses, could be another factor (boundary at hue 172)

Wouldn’t this then be best for calibrating VR headsets most?

This test is useless or of very limited value.

I kept pressing green until the end because you had no 'cyan' button to press when clearly many colors were actually cyan. Cyan is not blue.

Incidentally, my color vision is perfect on all Ishihara tests.

Digital cameras also do automatic white balance (between yellow and blue) to mimic the automatic white balance of our eye/brain. If cameras didn't do white balance, outdoor photos with sunlight during noon would look extremely blueish, or indoor photos with artificial light would look extremely yellowish.

I like this illustration of how strong our natural white balance is:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_dress#/media/File%3AWikipe...

> AIUI that's the rationale behind Apple's True Tone thingy, aiming to compensate for that.

No idea what "AUIU" is, but yes, generally displays should do automatic white balance like iPhones do. I don't know why most Android phones don't seem to do it (pretty sure mine doesn't), and generally TVs/monitors also don't do it. (The required color temperature sensor can't be that expensive?)

  > Ambient light will also affect the result.

Also deliberate software blue light filters. Mine is always on, both on the desktop and on the phone. Many people may forget that they are even using one.

>> These sorts of tests also need to be done in controlled background lighting. Whether people are doing this in a dark room, in a sunny kitchen, or under green led lighting would be a greater factor than anything being tested.

Whether its a dark room or sunny kitchen, i'm not sure whether Turquoise is ever going to be blue or green. The entire question seems more like wordplay.

I don't think that's necessary for an informal test. Human color perception is extremely good at compensating for that and modern screens are relatively uniform and uniform besides. Cultural differences like the person downthread saying they consider anything with the slightest hint of green to be "green" seem far more impactful.

A bit like "is this hotdog overpriced" amd trying to binary search the exact cent where it became overpriced.

That might be a language issue. In Danish it's common to use "turkis blå", i.e. turquoise blue. Then again, you can also use "turkis grøn", turquoise green.

But with green/blue there is certain opinion that I have at least.

Nah turquoise is green.

Turquoise is dark cyan, no? So equal parts green and blue.

the real question is whether orange is red or yellow

I only realized after seeing your comment. As usual, when I turned it off to compare, the hue it shifted to looked super unnatural and I had to re-enable it.

I always forget how much white-balancing my vision does.

CMYK is generally even more limited in the colorness to the end of gamut.