Paint color names: a waste of space
Mar. 4th, 2008 02:14 pmOK, this is bothering me. Paint catalogs. Enormous listings of lots of colors with subtle differences between them - each with its own name.
Someone had to come up with all those names. And they have to all be stored somewhere. And it's really, really, pointless.
We already have ways of uniquely identifying colors - a way that doesn't vary between different paint manufacturers, and one that is very natural, in the sense that the mapping of colors to names preserves various properties. It's called red-green-blue. Or any of the other equivalent systems - cyan-magenta-yellow (seems appropriate for paint), hue-saturation-value, what-have-you.
There is no benefit to adding these paint names. They take up space, but convey little real information. Now obviously if we have "red" and "blue", we all know what those mean; these are useful, if imprecise, terms. But what is the relation between "overt green" and "organic green", to use an example from the Sherwin-Williams catalog? From the names, it's unclear.
"Light green" and "dark green", though imprecise, at least tell you the qualitative relation between the two; one is lighter than the other. You could make paints in colors called "light green" and "dark green", even though both those terms cover a wide (and varying) range of colors. But it is clear that such a system cannot be extended to cover arbitrarily many colors, as our language only has so many descriptive colors words (unless you want to allow names like "dark light dark blue blue green", in a sort of binary-search-naming, which gets quickly impractical).
No; color-space is three-dimensional, and the way to describe points in it is with three real numbers[0]. If I we're talking RGB, and I say, (2/5,8/9,1/2) and (2/3,0,1), you may have little idea what the colors look like, but you can easily tell the relation between them - the latter is more red, much more blue, and much less green - and even compute a measure of distance between them. I suppose the HSV system is better if you want to get a mental image of what the colors look like, but you still get precise description and an idea of the relation. (Just remember the first coordinate is actually in the unit circle, not [0,1]!)
But if I say "luau green" and "kind green" (both from the Sherwin-Williams catalog), all you know without reference to a catalog is that both are somewhere in the green region. And since the catalog doesn't list RGB values (or any others), you can't even get an idea of the precise differences; you have to go purely by eye. Why be less precise than possible? Nothing is gained by it. These names are not descriptive to the level of precision actually expressed in the paint - indeed, they're hardly descriptive at all beyond the basic level of "red", "orange", etc. Not to mention those whose name tells you absolutely nil, like "emotional".
Now there's one more possible angle here, and that's the process of manufacturing the paint. The world is not a computer screen; arbitrary values of red, green, blue cannot be simply generated. Chemicals with the proper color must be manufactured, and what colors are possible are limited by what chemistry is possible. But that does not excuse not listing RGB values; it only says that we cannot expect to find paints with aribtrary colors. (Although, can't that be overcome just by mixing the paints? Maybe not, I don't know.) In other words, the map from paints to colors is not surjective, but it is still well-defined and injective. Furthermore, the names given have nothing to do with the chemistry of the paint. They are purely color names, as we would expect. So that does not seem to be a reason for this.
In short, paint color names do not match the level of precision displayed by the paint itself; they contain little real information; and they do not reflect the structure of the space they label. They are not only arbitrary but useless, and they are a waste of space.
-Harry
[0]OK, looking things up, I'm apparently oversimplifying how color-spaces work. Still, it's good enough for my purposes here, I think.
Someone had to come up with all those names. And they have to all be stored somewhere. And it's really, really, pointless.
We already have ways of uniquely identifying colors - a way that doesn't vary between different paint manufacturers, and one that is very natural, in the sense that the mapping of colors to names preserves various properties. It's called red-green-blue. Or any of the other equivalent systems - cyan-magenta-yellow (seems appropriate for paint), hue-saturation-value, what-have-you.
There is no benefit to adding these paint names. They take up space, but convey little real information. Now obviously if we have "red" and "blue", we all know what those mean; these are useful, if imprecise, terms. But what is the relation between "overt green" and "organic green", to use an example from the Sherwin-Williams catalog? From the names, it's unclear.
"Light green" and "dark green", though imprecise, at least tell you the qualitative relation between the two; one is lighter than the other. You could make paints in colors called "light green" and "dark green", even though both those terms cover a wide (and varying) range of colors. But it is clear that such a system cannot be extended to cover arbitrarily many colors, as our language only has so many descriptive colors words (unless you want to allow names like "dark light dark blue blue green", in a sort of binary-search-naming, which gets quickly impractical).
No; color-space is three-dimensional, and the way to describe points in it is with three real numbers[0]. If I we're talking RGB, and I say, (2/5,8/9,1/2) and (2/3,0,1), you may have little idea what the colors look like, but you can easily tell the relation between them - the latter is more red, much more blue, and much less green - and even compute a measure of distance between them. I suppose the HSV system is better if you want to get a mental image of what the colors look like, but you still get precise description and an idea of the relation. (Just remember the first coordinate is actually in the unit circle, not [0,1]!)
But if I say "luau green" and "kind green" (both from the Sherwin-Williams catalog), all you know without reference to a catalog is that both are somewhere in the green region. And since the catalog doesn't list RGB values (or any others), you can't even get an idea of the precise differences; you have to go purely by eye. Why be less precise than possible? Nothing is gained by it. These names are not descriptive to the level of precision actually expressed in the paint - indeed, they're hardly descriptive at all beyond the basic level of "red", "orange", etc. Not to mention those whose name tells you absolutely nil, like "emotional".
Now there's one more possible angle here, and that's the process of manufacturing the paint. The world is not a computer screen; arbitrary values of red, green, blue cannot be simply generated. Chemicals with the proper color must be manufactured, and what colors are possible are limited by what chemistry is possible. But that does not excuse not listing RGB values; it only says that we cannot expect to find paints with aribtrary colors. (Although, can't that be overcome just by mixing the paints? Maybe not, I don't know.) In other words, the map from paints to colors is not surjective, but it is still well-defined and injective. Furthermore, the names given have nothing to do with the chemistry of the paint. They are purely color names, as we would expect. So that does not seem to be a reason for this.
In short, paint color names do not match the level of precision displayed by the paint itself; they contain little real information; and they do not reflect the structure of the space they label. They are not only arbitrary but useless, and they are a waste of space.
-Harry
[0]OK, looking things up, I'm apparently oversimplifying how color-spaces work. Still, it's good enough for my purposes here, I think.
