posted 06-03-1999 01:23 PM            

I am not a scientist. Most of what I know about the science of color is remembered from general science classes in high school. I have been out of highschool for a few decades. Maybe someone will be able to fill in or correct the following casual analysis.

The color of a object is a result of surface reflection/absorption of visible light.

Black is the absence of any visable light or reflected light.

White light is all colors of visable light spectrum combined.

A white piece of paper reflects all (or most) of the white light directed at it.

A black piece of paper absorbs all (or most) of the white light directed at it.

Silver in its natural state (unrefined) is whitish in color.

Refined pure silver (unpolished) is greyish in color.

posted 06-08-2006 09:31 AM            

The question is confusing two of the several phenomena about light and color. The first phenomenon is absorbtion. This means that an opaque object with a non-reflective surface gets it color from absorbing different wavelengths of visible light and emitting others. The ones it does not absorb are what people see as its color. For example an orange absorbs all wavelengths of light except for red and yellow which when combined make it appear to be orange. Things that appear white absorb very little light from any part of the spectrum and people's brains perceive a combination of the full range of visible wavelengths as white. Black things absorb all wavelengths and this absence of light coming off the object makes it look black.

The second phenomenon is reflectivity. Some materials possess the ability to reflect large amounts of light that strike them. This can be increased by polishing the surfaces to make them very smooth, or with a liquid allowing the surface to be undisturbed and settle down into a very smooth surface. When light strikes such an object it reflects in large part until it hits something that does not reflect and then the light comes back to your eyes from this secondary object through a return reflection from the reflecting object. There is no such thing as a perfect reflecting surface and so the refelecting object will absorb and emit a bit of the light hitting it in addition to the reflecting of light from the secondary objects. Silver is a pretty good reflecting material and the reflectivity increases as it is polished which means you see more and more of the colors of the secondary objects and less and less of the whitish grey of the silver itself.

If you want to really see an object - try to paint it. Painting silver or chrome or other reflective surfaces, especially ones that are not flat is a real challenge. You need to paint the distorted reflections of the secondary objects nearby to make it look right.

There is much more to it than this and if you would like to know more just ask.

posted 06-08-2006 09:38 AM            

Very interesting and very clear. I no longer feelmoody about the subject. If there is more to know, please tell us.

posted 06-08-2006 12:46 PM            

Visible light is a narrow sliver in the electromagnetic radiation spectrum and it is the only part our eyes have the ability to detect. Our retinas have some specialized cells in them call cones and rods. Rod cells are sensitive to light intensity and cone cells are subspecialized to detect either red, green or blue light which are known as the primary colors (though actually they can detect a bit of light from the nearby wavelengths also). The cones and rods send signals by micro-electrical impulses to our brains where they are combined and interpreted as being colors.

In addition to there not being a perfect reflective surface, there is also not a perfect absorptive surface. An imperfect absorber of all light frequencies winds up emiting partial amounts of all frequencies. That is what we see as shades of grey which is what we see when we look at silver that has a matte surface to dampen its reflectivity, though even a matte surface is reflecting to some degree in a material like silver.

Another of the many phenonmena associated with light and color is a pair called diffraction and interference. Simply put this is where light gets bounced around after hitting an object and light waves start adding and subtracting from each other to make different colors. For example, if you have a piece of silver with a zillion tiny scratches on the surface and you shine a strong light on it, if you look closely you will see a bit of a rainbow effect which is caused by this pair of phenomena. What is happening is light waves are reflecting off of the sides of the zillion micro-grooves and interacting with each other.

One last thing and I'll stop babbling, when you paint a picture of a reflected surface, you always use a color value that is slightly less intense than the object that is being seen in it. This is because of the point I mentioned earlier that there is no such thing as a perfect reflective surface - you always loose some energy in the process and this is what your eyes are actually seeing. If you paint the object to have an equally bright color as the object being reflected it will look artificial. Also, you need to tint the reflecting surface image with the color that it would have were it not for its reflectivity since there will be an element of that color in the object in real life. For silver, this is simply adding a touch of light grey which is color neutral to the objects being reflected. For a colored object like an object with shiney red paint it gets more complicated since you need to combine a bit of that red color to the color of the reflected object.

posted 06-14-2006 05:54 PM            

I was once doing a demonstration at a store in Boston and a woman who had stopped by was comparing our silver to another brand and she said that the other brand's color was more pink than ONC's. Though I could not see the distinction she said she could, I thought later that perhaps the difference had to do with differing polishing compounds used. Our finisher refers to the final polishing of the silver as "coloring". He uses a white compound for that last step and perhaps the other company, who's product that woman was looking at, had used rouge, thereby imparting a pink tint that she could see.

posted 06-16-2006 10:16 PM            

No object has color in and of itself, the color resides solely in the light absorbed and/or reflected from it. Therefore, the color of silver is "None".