Best Visible Colour by the Human Eye
The retina has three types of specialized sensors (the channels), which respectively have maximum sensitivity to blue light, green light or red light. All the tones we perceive are from the combination of these three fundamental colors. What is the best visible colour by the human eye?
The human eye is distinguished preferably first from green, then red and finally blue. The linear combination of these three basic components allows to perceive all the other colors: it is the additive syntheses of colors.
But the eye does not show the same sensitivity to all these colors.
Under normal lighting conditions, it is in yellow-green light that the eye is most sensitive. To be received with the same intensity, an orange red light source must be almost 10 times more powerful than a yellow-green light source.
The more bright rays we add, the brighter the light becomes. By adding the three primary colors in equal proportions, the light obtained would be white. However, if any of the base colors were present, the color perceived by the eye would be black.
Why do we see green colour better than other colors?
Among the three primary colors, red, green and blue, which allow to compose and see the full range of all the other colors and shades, the human eye distinguishes itself better from green.
It has been known for a long time that development, especially from a human point of view, explains in part its singular development in the history of evolution. And from then on the man could very well see the green. Indeed chlorophyll organisms have always represented an important part of the diet, for animals as well as for men.
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At the base of the food chain, the importance of green -colored organisms has therefore led men’s vision to specialize, with the aim of distinguishing the entirety of its shades to maximize chances of survival.
Thus it is in the yellow-green color that the eye has the greatest sensitivity. Tests show that in order to see more accurately, an orange red light must be 10 times more powerful.
The sensitivity of the human eye to green explains why digital photo cameras have two green pixels for a red pixel and a blue one. Same thing for different screens. The two green pixels allow to make all shades green.
Note that colors are reconstituted in our brain by mixing the perception of blue, green and red light. By doing this mixture of the three primary colors the human brain has the theoretical capacity to see up to 8 million colors. But most of us only see one to two million.
Sources: PinterPandai, Sciencing, Aiken Standard, Mental Floss
Photo credit: Synthese+.svg / Wikimedia Commons
Photo description: Additive color mixing with RGB colors. Additive color or additive mixing is a property of a color model that predicts the appearance of colors made by coincident component lights, i.e. the perceived color can be predicted by summing the numeric representations of the component colors.
