I did a large scale study of the different colors used in the herbal section a few years ago: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
I quickly noticed that our eyes and brains are bad at really seeing colors. We will automatically adjust for context. Think of those optical illusions where two squares that appear different are actually the same color. And we will also adjust for expectations. If a berry has been colored a rusty brown, we might remember it as true red.
So what I did was sample all colors in photoshop, averaging an as large as possible sample area.
In the spreadsheet, the color I called "rust" (using an automatic color naming tool) is closest to true red. It is almost exclusive to herbal A (35 occurrences) with only one attestation in herbal B.
If you isolate the colors, you see that they are all browns, even f5v:
One possibility is that they actually had no way of making red, so tried to approach it by thinly applying rusty brown. In You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. you can see that the color is much more brown where the paint is thicker (i.e. more saturated).
I quickly noticed that our eyes and brains are bad at really seeing colors. We will automatically adjust for context. Think of those optical illusions where two squares that appear different are actually the same color. And we will also adjust for expectations. If a berry has been colored a rusty brown, we might remember it as true red.
So what I did was sample all colors in photoshop, averaging an as large as possible sample area.
In the spreadsheet, the color I called "rust" (using an automatic color naming tool) is closest to true red. It is almost exclusive to herbal A (35 occurrences) with only one attestation in herbal B.
If you isolate the colors, you see that they are all browns, even f5v:
One possibility is that they actually had no way of making red, so tried to approach it by thinly applying rusty brown. In You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. you can see that the color is much more brown where the paint is thicker (i.e. more saturated).