Degrees
So, spent the last bit of time crawling around a warehouse, helping a client with inventory. The inventory is gutters and they come in about eleventy billion colors. The hard part in organizing this stuff is actually being able to tell the difference between white, 80 degree white, linen and 81 degree white. Ok, I made the last one up. I can’t tell the difference because I have a penis.
April 25th, 2012 at 10:21 am
I hadn’t seen your write up of your adventures in painting.
I needed that laugh.
Thanks.
April 25th, 2012 at 10:32 am
I used to work in a place that MADE Colors for the Plastic Industry. Try matching the same shade of Gray for General Motors using 3 different Polymers for their Dashs.
April 25th, 2012 at 11:48 am
I think you need your eyes checked. Or your penis. Since you seem to think that they are somehow connected.
April 25th, 2012 at 12:09 pm
Long ago I worked in a chem lab where one researcher was trying to simplify the tests done to validate color matching lot to lot for a fabric manufacturer. He had dozens of swatches of fabric neatly arrayed, organized by lot number, time of manufacture, dye machine and several other variables provided by the factory.
He also had four or five sensitive instruments to “read” the colors. He industriously compared the instrumental outputs in measuring swatch colors in a very scientific manner to determine which machine worked “best” for this fabric manufacturer’s products. And after several days of testing, he knew how to tell the difference between a matching pair of fabric swatches and nonmatching swatches, to several significant digits.
Of course, he validated this by asking our female lab partner to look at the swatches and tell him what she thought – match or no match. With one quick glance at any pair of swatches (that to me and him looked absolutely identical) she was about 98% as good as the best instrument he was using.
Her testing was not, of course, reported to the fabric manufacturer.
April 25th, 2012 at 12:28 pm
Its why they change outfits about 6 times before finally being ready to go out.
April 25th, 2012 at 1:00 pm
Breda: Actually, they are connected.
About 5/9th of the female population have a 4th set of color sensitive cones in their eyes.
The only men with this set of cones would be 5/9th of all men who are XXY genetic chimeras.
The US army has cottoned on to this, and is starting to slowly replace sniper spotters and photo interpreters with women who can pass a specific vision test.
April 25th, 2012 at 1:48 pm
There’s always the color IQ test:
http://www.xrite.com/custom_page.aspx?PageID=77
Perfect score is a 0 (no mistakes). I scored a 4.
April 25th, 2012 at 1:51 pm
Part of it is also training and experience.
If you’re not used to (from artistic or graphic design training and/or experience) telling similar colors apart, you’ll be bad at it.
Practice helps.
April 25th, 2012 at 2:08 pm
Les,
I tried to take the test, but I was too impatient. I bet a lot of men fail for the same reason.
April 25th, 2012 at 3:20 pm
If the color isn’t in the Crayola 8 count box, you can get along pretty well without it.
April 25th, 2012 at 3:49 pm
When I was being trained to run a Drum Color Scanner (18 years ago!) we had a week of color theory. I had a German instructor from the Lintotype|Hell company. (They made the Drum scanners) In Color Theory he told us of an expensive color experiment they did in Germany.The test was similar to regular 200 block color tests, but they added even more blocks of color.
At the end the data showed that the optimal scanner operator to be sought after were women from 19-26 years old. Followed by males 21-25. They even broke the data down by race. It was very expensive but then they realized that the data could never be used in hiring practices.
The theory explained to us was thought that since everyone has differences in their Rods and Cones, and that color is very perceptual that women are exposed to more varying shades of pastel at earlier ages than boys. Boys are tended to be surrounded by stronger primary colors. Thus, they theorized that some girls adapted to seeing the difference in shades of color and hues depending on how exposed they were to varying degrees of colors as children. At least that is how they tried to explain the data they collected.
I’m not sure how much of that is 100% accurate, but he was very sincere in telling us that and was a brilliant guy.
April 25th, 2012 at 5:07 pm
Les,
That test is interesting, and I spent too much time on it, but I still only scored a 10. For the life of me I couldn’t see anything out of order, yet I had at least 3 mistakes.
Weird, like when I found out I was several db down at 8kHz in one ear, I didn’t know what I didn’t sense.
April 25th, 2012 at 5:21 pm
Aren’t the primary colors green, black, brown & tan ? All the colors you need are at Bass Pro.
April 25th, 2012 at 5:36 pm
Heh, I got an 8. I like messing with colors some, not at all colorblind, but I know there are subtleties I just don’t get. A friend of mine was painting his garage door black. Just black. How hard can that be? Something wasn’t quite right. He found out there were nine different colors called “black”. Why is that necessary?
April 25th, 2012 at 5:53 pm
I once painted my house “Gun Metal”. Bet you could identify that and tell it from the 11B other shades of gray (or blue).
April 25th, 2012 at 6:01 pm
Love the penis/color theory. Apparently my penis was damaged in transit. I can reasonably well, apparently for a guy, identify color differences. My problem is naming the colors once you get outside the half dozen or so common names. I see ’em, I just can’t say ’em. Thus I am … color mute.
April 25th, 2012 at 7:10 pm
I think that’s just a result of not putting in the time or the effort to learn all of the various bullshit color names. Personally, I prefer the CMYK or RGB system.
April 25th, 2012 at 10:51 pm
RGB… THAT is us guys… 🙂
April 25th, 2012 at 11:30 pm
I lived in a house for 13 years before I figured out the den was green and not gray. Somebody finally told me.
Yeah, all rods, no cones. Mostly. I can tell the sex of a gnat at 50 paces but can’t tell you what color its eyes are unless they’re red, green, or blue.
April 26th, 2012 at 12:41 am
@Rabbit
And if you -dated- that gnat that fact would be used against you. Because you obviously just don’t care enough to notice.
Monster!
😉
April 26th, 2012 at 12:50 am
7, but I sell contract furniture for a living, tell me about shades of “beige.” =/
April 26th, 2012 at 6:57 am
Everything I learned about color, I learned in the first grade with an 8-set of crayons. Those are the colors. Everything else is bullsh*t.