Explaining the livery debate - or why the correct shade of green doesn't exist

[Nick C]

YouTube explainer-of-interesting-things Tom Scott has posted a good explanation of how colour perception works:

 

 

 

[Nearholmer]

It would help if he made his programmes half as long again, and spoke more slowly, or simply cut-out all the surplus words that he uses, and calmed down a bit, because if that hadn't been a subject I'm already fairly familiar with, I think my brain would have glazed-over at that machine-gun rate of delivery.

 

Anyway, a factor that he didn't have time to touch on is reflectivity, which in our context is probably as important as the comparative effect that he focused on. His hoody makes an easy example, because it is not very reflective at all, and presents most of its surface at a single angle to the viewer - its mostly a vertical rectangle. Our brains have to work a lot harder to decide what colour a thing is if it is highly reflective and an odd shape that presents at multiple angles.

 

A nice shiny steam loco boiler cladding being a really interesting one, because under a bright sky a lot of the surface presents as near white, or near black, with the added spice of reflection of colour from nearby objects, so most of what we are seeing is nothing like the actual colour at all, its a series of graduated horizontal stripes of radically different colours, yet our brain assigns a single colour to the whole thing. 

 

 

[westerner]

Plus we all see colours slightly differently.

[Zomboid]

You can't trust anything really. Digital photographs go through the lighting of the environment at the time the picture was taken, the camera, any post processing filters, the screen and your eyes. By which point any resemblance to the original object is little more than a coincidence. Film photos are chemical reactions and the chemistry is hugely influential. Scanned film photos have all of the above.

 

And as for memories...

[Michael Hodgson]

On 14/04/2021 at 22:57, Nearholmer said:

A nice shiny steam loco boiler cladding being a really interesting one, because under a bright sky a lot of the surface presents as near white, or near black, with the added spice of reflection of colour from nearby objects, so most of what we are seeing is nothing like the actual colour at all, its a series of graduated horizontal stripes of radically different colours, yet our brain assigns a single colour to the whole thing. 

 

So you should put a horizontally striped set of transfers onto your boiler, with the colours fading rainbow-style, that is one colour merging into the next from white to green to black and that will give you greater realism?

 

And doesn't this logic mean a loco will look greener on a dark day in the p*ssing rain than it does on a bright summer's day? 

[Nearholmer]

Well ..... you could do that.

 

I wouldn’t personally.

 

Because it would do no such thing as create greater realism.

 

If you paint a model loco whatever colour, with the same reflectivity at the prototype, job done.

 

I really think that many models are painted too ‘flat’, and fail to look realistic as a result.