> 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.

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mryingster 17 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

And brown is just orange... with context.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wh4aWZRtTwU

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madcaptenor an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

and brown is just dark orange.

	▲	dahart 28 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		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.
	▲	adamhartenz 21 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		And orange is just a yellow red.