Image: Dale Purves Duke University
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Colors Out of Space slide show
It was just a colour out of space—a frightful messenger from unformed realms of infinity beyond all Nature as we know it; from realms whose mere existence stuns the brain and numbs us with the black extra-cosmic gulfs it throws open before our frenzied eyes.
Science-fiction author H. P. Lovecraft considered The Colour Out of Space his best story. In this 1927 classic tale of cosmic horror, a small Massachusetts farming community faces unspeakable evil from the outer reaches of the universe. The extraterrestrial villain is not a face-hugging or chest-bursting alien but something far more terrifying: a weird color.
Slowly but surely the otherworldly color mutates and destroys crops, insects, wild animals and livestock. It impregnates the land and the water. The unfortunate farmers who encounter the bizarre hue fall prey to insanity and untimely death.
And you thought vision research was for wimps.
This article features some of the most spectacular color phenomena this side of the galaxy. You won’t see any extraterrestrials, but many strange illusions arise from taking colors out of place and putting them in an unusual context. Use caution: the peculiar shades and tints you are about to experience could blow your mind.
This article was originally published with the title Colors Out of Space.
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12 Comments
Add CommentThis illusion is not an opponent process, but rather appears to rely on blending. The yellow circular lines are thin. Anything on the scale of a pixel or so is not perceived very well by itself and gets blended with the surrounding colors to build a sense of the complete shape, and that means the structures combine red and yellow to make orange or blue and yellow to make more of a cyan color. The illusion is not sustained as well if you copy the image and paste it into a paint program and zoom in.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHowever, when zooming in on the image above, it becomes obvious that the yellow circles are not "pure" yellow in pixel color anyway. The image has possibly been reduced in size from the original by a standard image resizing algorithm. The image processing program performed two steps. The first is a "blur" step, contributing aspects of the neighboring pixels to the current pixel, and then a down sampling step, which removes some of the pixels so that the image is smaller. This prevents massive distortions in the overall image representation, but it means that if you were to use an RGB sampler on an average pixel in the "yellow" lines, they are not yellow at all. They range as some fuzzy blend of the original yellow with the background. Granted, when zoomed in, the lines look more yellow than they do at the scale above, so this is probably more about testing the resolution of color distinction than anything else.
In the third example of concentric same-colored circles, I experience a secondary effect of the color differences - in every bulleye, the inner circles, the ones appearing brighter, they are standing off the page, very much in the foreground, while the rest fades back into the background, creating a vivid, for me anyway, 3D effect. Somewhat related, read the The Art of Color by Johannes Itten if you can find it - color is personal.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe above comment was for Image 3/4. It seems our comments aren't slide specific.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI echo the comments of Shade1974. I zoomed in on the images at the pixel level and its clear that the captions that go along with the images are misleading. For instance, in the first image the eyes are, in fact, substantially different colors. This is clear when one zooms in at the pixel level, taking 'context' out of the equation.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisExamination of the color values of the girl's eyes with Adobe Photoshop reveals that both eyes are the same shade of gray. They each measure R=127, G=127, B=127.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisRe photo 4 of 4: Depends on what you mean by "surrounded." The gray strips on the left side are surrounded by white horizontally, but black in the vertical direction; and vice-versa on the right. To my eye, on the left the black sections above and below the gray areas IN THE SAME BAR are more prominent than the SEPARATE white bars on either side, so makes sense to me that the gray midsections of each bar look lighter than the corresponding gray midsections on the right (where the surrounds and the effect are reversed). This is a matter of gestalts: each bar appears to me as a single gestalt, despite the alter(n)ation of tones; whereas any triplet of 3 bars that has the striped (and therefore geometrically different) bar in the middle is not a gestalt; or cannot be seen as such so easily. Has everyone these days forgotten the tremendously important work of the gestalt psychologists in the '20s and '30s of the last century? And for that matter, the work of Edwin Land on perceived color as a field phenomenon, so ably reported in this journal in the '50s and maybe later?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisDid anyone consult a color-blind person for their perception? Several of these don't have that affect on me.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI'm red-green-pastel colorblind in the severe category.
Finding the dropped thing on the floor has always been easy for me. I never look for the color. My world has always been controlled by geometry. The shape of things to come.
BTW, my favorite color is burnt orange. Explain that.
The thing I see is that I have to read the comments before I know what to look for.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis might not seem helpful until you realize I'm R/B color blind. So both eyes look grey to me.
However, the left eye seems a lighter shade of grey.
Oops, I erred: I'm red green colorblind. I claim red blue by mistake. Sorry.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBut someone asked about color blind folk, so here it is.
Ok, I call scientific fraud on this. There is little sense to this claim and if anything, they're saying you're all color blind, which you aren't.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis article and slideshow would be significantly more interesting if the pictures were not saved in badly compressed JPEG and therefore colourblurred. Some of the captions are now lying (for instance http://www.scientificamerican.com/slideshow.cfm?id=colors-out-of-space&photo_id=4B011270-D5EA-1D86-0DA789FDDD994CB7), because the JPEG will blur the colours a bit if you compress it like that. (Load it and check the colour values. The colours are _not_ the same, although they probably were once.)
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisCould we have them in PNG instead?
What is the difference between White's effect (slide 4)--which allegedly "changed everything in visual science" in 1979--and the von Bezold spreading effect (1874)?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thishttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bezold_effect