Color Vision: The Most Perceptible Color To The Eyes
Hello guys,
You guys probably already knew this, but the human eye is more sensitive to some color than others. As a matter of fact, green is a color that the human eye is very good at noticing because there are two cones in the eye out of the 3 that can absorb the green wavelengths.
[1]What’s the most perceptible color to the eyes?
It turns out to be a yellow-green.
This color called “Chartreuse” is right at the tip top of the human eye sensitivity graph in terms of wavelength. There are other colors called Chartreuse that might not look exactly like the web version, but this is the one I’m explicating about.
This shade of green is a mixture of green and yellow. It’s 50% green and 50% yellow and its right in the middle of the visible light spectrum that we can see.
According to laserpointersafety.com, the specific wavelength that’s right in the middle is 555 Nano meters. You’ll also notice on this light response graph for cones in our eyes that green is right in the middle of the overlap of the medium and long wave sensitive cones in our eyes.
Not surprisingly, the fact that our eyes are more sensitive to green, is used in video camera sensors where it actually samples more information in the green channel than the red and blue. That’s because our eyes are more sensitive to changes in contrast and resolution in that green channel and you can actually sacrifice some of those red and blue, people wouldn’t even notice.
It’s for this reason we usually use greenscreens because the camera is capturing more green information for us and therefore, greenscreen is one of the best colors because you can key it better and have better resolution and more information of that greenscreen going into the camera. That’s just a little fun fact.
This knowledge about our eye sensitivity is actually useful in few other ways as well. This is the reason we have a lot of green laser pointers at night because its easier to see the green laser beam because our eyes are more sensitive to that.
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[4]![[4]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Green-lased_palm_tree_(crop).jpg){kind=link}
Also, you see a lot of neon green cycling jackets, if you’re at night cycling, you want to be very visible and you want something reflective as well, then a green jacket is gonna be much easier to see.
I hope you guys at least find some of this information interesting and maybe a little bit useful. If you enjoyed this article, share your thoughts in the comments and don’t forget to smash that upvote button below.
References: 1 - 2 - 3
Image sources: 1 - 2 - 3 - 4
GIF made by @foundation
Even when i close my eyes, i still see the yellow-green color due to its radiance. I used to think that yellow was the most noticeable color to the human eye, but this has informed me otherwise.
ahaaa A quality and very interesting post Sir. thumbs up. but I have a question. can you tell me How many colors and shades can our eye distinguish in a single scene?
When discussing the number of colors perceptible to the human eye, I tend to refer to the 2.4 million colors of the CIE 1931 XYZ color space. It is a fairly solid, scientifically founded number, although I do admit it may be limited in context. I think it may be possible for the human eye to be sensitive to 10-100 million distinct "colors" when referring to both chromaticity and luminosity.
Interesting, I wonder if this applies to humans only, and why green? My instinctive, off the cuff, explanation is it was adaptive to see variations in green to be able to distinguish ambush predators, looking at it with a Darwinian evolution bias. But that doesn't explain in terms of human ancestors from non-green biomes. Oh well, it's interesting non the less, perhaps green is a better choice for vests used by those that need to stand out in construction or emergency work. And as for non-humans (animals not extraterrestrials hehe ) guess that's a topic for another day. Thank you for the thought provoker, it's s good conversation starter.
Our eyesight is probably centered upon green because of the prevalent form of photosynthesis on our planet. There are many forms of light conversion that could have evolved, in fact it's believed that before blue-green cyanobacteria (plants) there were purple bacteria that converted the sunlight.
That makes sense, so perhaps other animals, if they can see color that is, do indeed see green best.