<i>the amazing mantis shrimp (see Figure 6) is thought to see the world in more colors than any other animal: some species of mantis shrimp have over 8 different photoreceptors (cones)</i><p>Mantis shrimp actually have quite poor color vision despite their exotic equipment.<p><a href="https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/science.1245824?sid=87341158-29b9-41a2-9744-d4c2c20906ac" rel="nofollow">https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/science.1245824?sid...</a>
For software engineers wanting to know more about this subject I highly recommend this article:<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIE_1931" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIE_1931</a><p>Human color vision is a <i>lot</i> more complicated than it seems at first. The sensitivity curves of the actual receptors in the eye do not directly match our physiological perception curves for red, green, and blue. The red perception curve even has some negative (!) values. There is a lot of neurological processing involved and that is why colorspace models are so complicated and imperfect. There is no simple absolute "RGB" mapping like I and many others have naively assumed before digging into it.
The question in my head has always been, is what I'm seeing as 'red' for example, the same that others see? And, in the end, does it matter? I see what I recognize as 'red' and I use the word 'red' to describe what I see. You see what you perceive as 'red' and use the same word for it. We would have a shared word for the color, but what we are actually seeing is not the same at all.<p>These are the things that make my brain hurt.
Color, Color Science, color vision, reproduction, perception, etc. often surprises engineers when they realize how incredibly complex the subject can be. Many years ago I took a course on Color Science at the Rochester Institute of Technology. I was working in a domain where I realized I had to know more about this subject than I could learn on my own at the time. This has come up many time during my career (even today). I am so glad I took the time to learn more about this from the folks who, quite literally, wrote the books on the subject (Fairchild, etc.).<p>Here's a fun video to watch:<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mf5otGNbkuc">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mf5otGNbkuc</a><p>Another interesting topic to understand:<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metamerism_(color)" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metamerism_(color)</a>
Interesting to also consider the science of Optical Illusion in response to how we see color.<p>See 151 Illusions & Visual Phenomena with explanations by Michael Bach<p>[1] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25045392" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25045392</a>