> What colors are we? The short answer is maybe something like “brown” and the long answer is very, very long.
Pete Shirley (author of Ray Tracing In One Weekend) is also a part time color scientist, and he clued me into the fact that if you crank the saturation to 100% of pictures of people of any race, the skin color comes out orange. I think I heard that some face detectors may work on this principle, but I don’t remember where I heard that.
And brown is just orange... with context.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wh4aWZRtTwU
and brown is just dark orange.
Yes, true! Though cranking saturation doesn’t brighten colors (much… at least it’s not supposed to), and maybe interestingly, light brown isn’t quite orange. There might some asymmetry in color names.
So it might not be that surprising that dark skin people turn orange when sat is cranked, but perhaps slightly surprising that light skin people do.
Anyway, I suspect it’s computationally easier to turn everyone orange than brown. Plus, given that brown skin is already a category, orange could be useful terminology/category.
And orange is just a yellow red.