Equipment & Techniques > Beginner's Questions

semantics: purple vs violet

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bhickory:
Ages ago in a media design class I was taught that purple was a shade of blue and violet was the proper name for red+blue, but now despite what I though was strong Google fu, I can find nothing on the subject. Anybody have any pointers to back up that claim, or did this teacher just make it up and leave me facing a month of dishes for losing the bet?

spidermike:
As I understand it, purple is combination of rd and blue but vilet is actually a colour in itself (it has its own band in the spectrum) so is what I would consider a 'shade of blue' so I would say your teacher had it the wrnog way round.

You need to be careful as to whether you are talking about colour mixing on a screen versus colour mixing with paints - pains is subtractive in that one pigment blocks part of the 'spectrum' of shades in the other and what you end up with is the remaining colour wavelengths. Mixing light (for example on a computer screen) is additive in that mixing RGB to different extents creates the shades.
When creating with pigments, both are (IMO) red+blue of differeing intensities.

jferrari:
Violet is the name of the girl I brought to the Deep Purple concert!  ;D

Otto Phocus:
I am so old that I remember when Indigo was a color.   ;D

Violet is an individual "true" color in the spectrum.  It occupies about 380-420nm.  Violet can be described using objective terms purely from a physical standpoint.

Purple is a combination of Red (620–750 nm) and Blue (450–495 nm).  Purple is a perceived color caused entirely by the human eyes and brain working together.  One can not describe purple in objective terms.

So if you wanna impress your friends you can talk about regions of the light spectrum and the fact that RGB displays have a very hard time displaying violet but instead use purple.

But from a practical photography standpoint, there may be little difference between violet and purple.

Isaac:

--- Quote from: Otto Phocus on June 24, 2015, 07:54:12 am ---Violet can be described using objective terms purely from a physical standpoint.
--- End quote ---



--- Quote ---…color is not something out there in the world, separate from us.

"The agreed-upon technical definition of color," says Fairchild, "is that it's a visual perception."
--- End quote ---

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