Imaginary color

Impossible colors or forbidden colors are supposed colors that cannot be perceived in normal seeing of light that is a combination of various intensities of the various frequencies of visible light, but are reported to be seen in special circumstances.

These impossible colors are of two types:

The color opponent process is a color theory that states that the human visual system interprets information about color by processing signals from cone and rod cells in an antagonistic manner. The three types of cone cells have some overlap in the wavelengths of light to which they respond, so it is more efficient for the visual system to record differences between the responses of cones, rather than each type of cone's individual response. The opponent color theory suggests that there are three opponent channels:

Responses to one color of an opponent channel are antagonistic to those to the other color, and signals output from a place on the retina can contain one or the other but not both, for each opponent pair.

Real colors are colors that can be produced by a physical light source. Any additive mixture of two real colors is also a real color. When colors are displayed in the CIE 1931 XYZ color space, additive mixture results in a color along the line between the colors being mixed. By mixing any three colors, one can therefore create any color contained in the triangle they describe—this is called the gamut formed by those three colors, which are called primary colors. Any colors outside of this triangle cannot be obtained by mixing the chosen primaries.

When defining primaries, the goal is often to leave as many real colors in gamut as possible. Since the region of real colors is not a triangle (see illustration), it is not possible to pick three real colors that span the whole region. The gamut can be increased by selecting more than three real primary colors, but since the region of real colors is not a polygon, there always will be some colors at the edge left out. Therefore, one selects colors outside of the region of real colors as primary colors; in other words, imaginary primary colors. Mathematically, the gamut created in this way contains so-called "imaginary colors".

In computer and television screen color displays, the corners of the gamut triangle are defined by commercially available phosphors chosen to be as near as possible to pure red and pure green and pure blue, and thus are within the area of real colors; note that these color space diagrams inevitably display, instead of real colors outside your computer screen's gamut triangle, the nearest color which is inside the gamut triangle. See page Gamut for more information about the color range available on display devices.

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