Comment by PaulHoule
3 months ago
There's the strange phenomenon that people like to say "bright red" as much as it is an oxymoron.
#ff0000 is, in terms of brightness, pretty dark compared to #ffffff yet there is a way it seems to "pop out" psychology. It is unusual for something red to really be the brightest color in a natural scene unless the red is something self-luminous like an LED in a dark night.
> It is unusual for something red to really be the brightest color in a natural scene unless the red is something self-luminous like an LED in a dark night.
Right. Just the extremely common cases where humans deliberately use red lights because of the fact that they are perceived as being very bright. Stop lights, brake lights, tail lights, emergency vehicle lights, aviation obstruction lighting, emergency flairs, emergency exit lights, etc.
> Just the extremely common cases where humans deliberately use red lights because of the fact that they are perceived as being very bright. Stop lights, brake lights, tail lights, emergency vehicle lights, aviation obstruction lighting, emergency flairs, emergency exit lights, etc.
Green lights have the greatest perceived brightness, and green is used as the go signal in traffic lights for that reason. Red light (1) has a common cultural association with danger stemming from its association with natural fire, (2) has the least impact on night vision because of the relative insensitivity of human eyes to it; the former is the reason it is used or things like stop/warning/etc. lights that might be used in any background lighting conditions, and the latter is the reason it is used for emergency guide lighting and signage that are likely to be used in dark background conditions especially where people would be at substantial likelihood of transitioning the illuminated area to an even darker environment (such as one without or with nonfunctional emergency lighting.)
... have you ever checked if you might be colorblind? Speaking as someone with protanomaly who used to think "bright red" wasn't bright until he got functioning colorblindness-correcting lenses (as I explained in a comment elsewhere in this discussion).
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42737700
> There's the strange phenomenon that people like to say "bright red" as much as it is an oxymoron.
It's not. Reds can be dark or bright relative to other reds, and "bright red" -- as you would expect from the way that adjectives work -- refers to a red that is bright relative to other reds.