Where is the origin of color?

Answer 1

In physics it's the frequency of the light. That's O.K. for cameras and TV's.

In reality, it's a brain function - somewhere in the ocipitral lobe (toward the back of your head ---

because you see color with "too few" color discriminating cells to fit any of the cute color wheel therories.

Land (the poloroid guy) did some interesting work 40 years ago with two color film.

As above, color is your brain's interpretation of the frequency of light. A single color is created by one frequency of light (monochromatic). White light contains all of the frequencies of visible light from infra-red (long wavelength) through ultra-violet (short wavelength). If you look at a rainbow, you see white light separated into all of the colors that make it up. This is because, when light passes through a prism, it bends, but each separate frequency will bend to a different degree. So when you see a rainbow each band of color is caused by one frequency (actually a narrow range of frequencies) of light. With light different colors may be created by combining two or more monochromatic (individual frequencies) colors. The colors in the monitor you're viewing this with are created with only Red, Green and Blue light. This is called additive coloring. Most of the colors you see, though, are created by reflected light. Red paint looks red because it absorbs all of the colors in white light except red. Since the red light is not absorbed, it is reflected to your eye and your brain interprets the color as red. Unlike when mixing light, when you mix paints, you are combing materials that absorb different wavelengths of light to create colors. This is subtractive coloring. That is why the primary colors in light (red, blue and green) are different from those in paint (red, blue and yellow).