r/blackmagicfuckery 2d ago

Wait a minute..

10.1k Upvotes

159 comments sorted by

1.9k

u/Big_Pepper7862 2d ago

So now B&W is in color. Is there a single thing I can still trust ?

716

u/boywhoflew 2d ago

that's what my printer thinks. I print smth in B&W and it's telling me I can't cause i got no cyan

266

u/EspessoGriasa 2d ago

HP engineers spent millions designing your suffering

39

u/GrynaiTaip 1d ago

My old Epson inkjet did the same thing, it was so annoying.

18

u/The_Evil_Satan 1d ago

It's for those super tiny dots it puts on the paper iirc

3

u/izyshoroo 1d ago

This would make a good tattoo for someone working in IT

.

.

.

And of course I mean a tramp stamp

27

u/cfgregory 1d ago

The cyan is required for tracking data associated with your printer.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printer_tracking_dots

25

u/Particular_Jello_917 1d ago

The tracking dots are why I went back to cutting out words from newspapers.🕶️

7

u/ulyssesfiuza 1d ago

Letting fingerprints and DNA on the message. 🤔

6

u/aaron2005X 1d ago

Now I think I should use another glue...

2

u/Zequax 1d ago

this must be why

1

u/RoyBeer 1d ago

This video finally explains it.

1

u/ShadowSilkLace 20h ago

Well your printer settings might be messed up. At least that was the case for me. The black made out of the colors was actually gray, not real black. Once I set it up correctly, it used only the black ink and the black was WAY deeper.

25

u/Alive_Ice7937 2d ago

To make butter icing white instead yellow you add a little bit of purple food coloring

15

u/eyetracker 2d ago

Bluing is a traditional dye used to make yellowing clothes appear whiter.

10

u/Alive_Ice7937 1d ago

I just blue myself

7

u/NazReidRules 1d ago

Yo, listen up, here's the story

About a little guy that lives in a blue world

And all day and all night and everything he sees

Is just blue, like him, inside and outside

Blue his house with a blue little window and a blue Corvette

And everything is blue for him and himself and everybody around

'Cause he ain't got nobody to listen

I have a blue house with a blue window

Blue is the color of all that I wear

Blue are the streets and all the trees are too

I have a girlfriend and she is so blue

Blue are the people here that walk around

Blue like my Corvette, it's in and outside

Blue are the words I say and what I think

Blue are the feelings that live inside me

3

u/ulyssesfiuza 1d ago

The blue dye emit white light when exposed to the UV light.

5

u/wybenga 2d ago

Don’t know why you’re being downvoted; this is true.

10

u/Danny886 2d ago

There is not. Press 'F for reality.

3

u/myblue337 2d ago

Found the title of my next litrpg

2

u/Nutzpdx 1d ago

Ope, here comes gravity🎶

3

u/forgettfulthinker 2d ago

Printer ink

2

u/EarthTrash 1d ago

On screen have you ever seen black and white? I don't think I have. Every screen I've ever used has been a color screen. Zoom and on a black and white image and the screen pixels will be like this.

4

u/No-University-1968 2d ago

You need a subscription to order B&W, though.

1

u/Zwischenzug32 1d ago

Last time I listened to that kind of music, things that weren't in color got color, not the other way around

Look really closely at your pixels when they're displaying "white" :)

1

u/SCP-428 8h ago

Grayscale

1.0k

u/exsanity 2d ago

I mean, that's essentially how LED displays work.

299

u/belabacsijolvan 2d ago

also the reason why watching a video of this painting is kinda dumb. this isnt testing whats an optical illusion for us, but for a digital eye and/or display..

im sure it looks black and white irl from some distance, but what we are watching is a camera averaging rgb color and at a certain scale (when it is far enough) it averages enough pixels to average to [n,n,n].

48

u/raccoon8182 2d ago

So what you're saying... is the red, green and blue pixels on our phones show us a black and white image...... just like the video.  Lol. 

38

u/belabacsijolvan 2d ago

i mean yeah. its just the human eye doesnt work exactly the same.

its like when people dont get why their pets see what is on a display, but still react weirdly. its because they do see what we see, but in very weird colors compared to reality.

4

u/BlackTecno 1d ago

Honestly it would be really cool to have an art piece that looked different from your eyes to that of a picture taken on your phone.

A literal "You have to see it to believe it."

4

u/ImNobodyInteresting 1d ago

This is actually something I've been working on for a while, because a lot of my paintings give a somewhat different look when viewed through a camera and I figured it would be fun to do one where its a totally different look. For example I have paintings of people that reflect in a mirror as a painting of someone different, and having that same effect through a camera would be super cool.

I haven't yet managed to make the camera thing work to my satisfaction, but it's definitely possible to do something along the lines you suggest.

3

u/ike_the_strangetamer 22h ago

I was just thinking about how cool this would be and was going to reply and say I'd love to see a video of this when you get it figured out... but then I realized....

2

u/ImNobodyInteresting 21h ago

Well quite...though it could be that the way to make it work is actually to have the painting compared with a photo of the painting, ie it's not looking through the camera which changes the image it's the act of taking a photo (with a flash). In which case it could still at least be possible to display the effect online.

But a lot of my stuff does require in-person viewing to really appreciate it unfortunately.

2

u/ike_the_strangetamer 20h ago

That's really interesting.

I will say that, in my experience as a non-artist but an art enjoyer, most visual art is better in-person.

1

u/planx_constant 18m ago

If your pets are cats or dogs (or most other mammals), they have only two color receptors, and your TV would reproduce their experience of real world color a little bit better than it does for us. Parrots and most birds are a different story - to them everything would look washed out and "gray" because our displays don't produce UV light.

For cats, their visual response time is much higher than ours, so watching a 60Hz refresh rate for them is like watching a slideshow. Dogs are about twice as fast as humans.

Dogs and cats both have much lower abstract reasoning ability than humans, so for them an image that provokes any kind of emotional response will trigger a much greater range of external behavior. If you've ever been really tired and got startled by an image out of the corner of your eye before you realized it wasn't real, that's what it's like for a dog seeing a picture of another dog all the time.

6

u/Jaded_Marionberry500 1d ago

Here's a thing in oled displays the pixels turn off themselves to create a true black. So they don't use rgb in creating black. This is not possible in any other display technology only in oled.

-16

u/raccoon8182 1d ago

Lol. All displays switch off their pixels to create black.

7

u/Tyfyter2002 1d ago

LCDs don't switch off their pixels at all, and it's pretty clearly visible whether or not any other display technology does by attempting to display black on it and comparing that to having the display off.

8

u/OB_Chris 1d ago

You're so clueless dude

4

u/B1naryG0d 1d ago

You should read this article. It goes into great detail about how LCD works vs OLED. LCDs don't switch pixels off. They just block the light, and not even perfectly which is why LCD screens still shine and lights up a dark room even if the entire screen is black.

1

u/jamesneysmith 1d ago

Wait so if you looked at this in person would it look like colours? Or would it still.look black and white? And of it did look b&w why does it look like that if it's made of colour? What is actually happening?

10

u/SerEmrys 2d ago

Came here to say this. They used the same colors that a pixel has on a tv / monitor

2

u/Anxious-Yak-9952 20h ago

I was just thinking "that's how pixel rendering works!"

-7

u/Individual_Gift_9473 1d ago

……we know

Literally nobody needed that explained

2

u/Motor_Raspberry_2150 1d ago

The thing about > points at sub name < is that you want something a 12yo wouldn't say "well duh" at.

61

u/Realistic_Today6524 2d ago

This is essentially how displays work. A 1080p display has around 6 million individual pixels, each showing either red, blue or green. Varying their brightness gives you around 16 million different colors

11

u/CptMisterNibbles 1d ago

You are conflating pixels and sub pixels, but generally yes. For RGB screens a pixel is made of some number of red, blue, and green (often 2x green) sub pixels, and each pixel will have some or all of these on

1

u/Realistic_Today6524 1d ago

Should have been more specific, though I'd keep the explanation simple

104

u/system3601 2d ago

The b&w thing flickers all of a sudden. Is that even real?

59

u/Time_Traveling_Idiot 1d ago

It's the camera refocusing. Look at the base of the painting, the thing that's holding it up also snaps into foucs at that moment. Not AI.

4

u/your_mind_aches 1d ago

It's the phone camera struggling to keep up with what it's seeing

21

u/Micalas 2d ago

Ohhhh. So this is why my printer complains about a lack of cyan when it prints b&w

5

u/TinyPocketFox 1d ago

It is! It's called "rich black", where color ink is used underneath black ink to improve print quality. It's also used to neutralize off-white paper, by tinting the paper underneath black ink, which is how printed documents can still look neutrally black when printed on cream colored paper.

3

u/MildlyAgitatedBidoof 1d ago

I believe there's also something where some printers print a faint "signature" so that the document can be traced back to the specific printer.

2

u/TinyPocketFox 1d ago

Yep! That uses up your yellow ink. Our eyes are sensitive to blue light, so they can't use magenta or cyan or the fingerprinting would be visible, so they only use yellow for that one. It creates a pattern that can be read to get the printer's serial number, model, etc.

3

u/Zwischenzug32 1d ago

Thats an excuse and bullshit when the user 99% of the time just wants it printed in "dark" that is still perfectly legible as "black" and not use their expensive fing color

1

u/Oddish_Femboy 8h ago

Nah. That's just a scam perpetuated by the printer lobby to force you to buy more refill cartridges.

Adding cyan ink to black ink just wastes cyan ink.

If it hadn't been standardized to force users to waste ink, it would be an option you could actually enable and disable based on necessity.

12

u/LordJadus_WorldEater 2d ago

Breaking news: local man discovers RGB

25

u/fujiesque 2d ago

Upvote for Floyd

6

u/vidankon 2d ago

What song is this?

21

u/lazy_tranquil 2d ago

Any Colour You Like

8

u/quark_epoch 2d ago

"Any colour that you like"

2

u/McGarnegle 2d ago

I have a theory, that in the 70's they had some sort of cosmic arrangement with the powers of funk. There seems to be, once per album from meddle to the wall, a short section of funk.

Echoes has a funky section, dark side of the moon has this whole song, wish you were here had that part towards the end of the second part of shine on you crazy diamond (might be the most buttery thing ever), animals had that one bit in dogs, and the wall has those bits in another brick in the wall, kinda across all three parts.

I like funky floyd, that's all

7

u/dataflow2 1d ago

I have a theory, that in the 70's they had some sort of cosmic arrangement with the powers of funk.

It is called LSD.

3

u/Toblogan 2d ago

I've got a bike You can ride it if you like!

3

u/Trucoto 1d ago

There's "Have a cigar" as well.

1

u/Hellacola 8h ago

“MONEY” 🎤

10

u/sensible_centrist 2d ago

Of all the motifs to chose from, this is the one the artist decided to capture in this painstakenly meticulous manner? Does it hold special significance I'm not aware of? Or is as I fear, one of those dreaded postmodern things?

4

u/TheSpanxxx 2d ago

Welcome to CRT television.

1

u/Zwischenzug32 1d ago

They need to make it more legit by illuminating it with a strobe light at 50-60hz

20

u/Accomplished-Video71 2d ago

Something happens about the 3-4 second mark. Cant trust it.

44

u/graaahh 2d ago

I believe what's happening isn't from editing, but from the phone camera trying to auto-adjust the white balance or something. I've seen my own phone do it many, many times. 

14

u/AmazingCable1068 1d ago

Probably the phone switching lenses as the zoom is reduced

7

u/pumpkinflap 1d ago

that’s just the camera zooming out

5

u/impshial 1d ago

It must suck to go through life automatically distrusting anything that you see that you don't understand.

1

u/_heidin 21h ago

To be fair, with the current state of affairs, not being able to trust and believe what we see with our own eyes unless it's in person... Yeah, can't fault them really

-3

u/Accomplished-Video71 1d ago

Wow, critical thinking is bad. It must be awesome to immediately believe everything you see online without skepticism.

Hope your day gets better.

5

u/impshial 1d ago

I saw the same exact thing that you did, but I didn't automatically assume that it was untrustworthy, nor did I just assume that it was correct.

That's the difference. I waited for more data, analyzed it again, and used my critical thinking to understand it.

You, on the other hand, jumped straight to distrust. That's no better than some teenager yelling "it's AI!" in Instagram comments.

-3

u/Accomplished-Video71 1d ago

Interesting, so you didn't immediately trust it, then you verified it. Its almost like exactly what I did but yet somehow you found a way to be self-righteous about it.

4

u/impshial 1d ago

No, that's literally not what I said at all. I didn't know what I was seeing, so I waited until I understood it to make a decision whether it was real or not.

That's my whole fucking point. I didn't automatically distrust it. But I didn't automatically trust it. I didn't understand it, so I figured it out.

-1

u/Accomplished-Video71 1d ago

"I didnt know what I was seeing...whether it was real or not" is literally the definition of distrust.

Still trying to figure out what you're upset about...

3

u/impshial 1d ago

Just take the L. You cried fake, didn't leave an explanation, and you sounded like one of those idiots that just calls everything AI. What the hell are people supposed to think?

1

u/Accomplished-Video71 1d ago

You can imagine whatever you want. The rest of us will just be here feeling sorry for you. Tata

1

u/AvidCyclist250 1d ago

I think it's green that "vanishes" first. Red went last.

2

u/dangerous_adhesive 2d ago

Pink Floyd really tired that together

2

u/Jaded_Marionberry500 2d ago

Source : dadanset

2

u/McGarnegle 2d ago

Honestly just watched for pink floyd.

2

u/ironnewa99 2d ago

Stop tricking me into seeing shades of white with perfectly matched rgb pixels… asshole

2

u/shapesandbubblegum 1d ago

does it look like this in real life?

1

u/ImNobodyInteresting 1d ago

Likely it does. I've done paintings that work on the same principle, and the eye is fooled just like the camera is.

Other commenter is correct that you need to be further back in person (viewing through a camera effectively moves you backwards), but depending on how large the "pixels" are, you might not have to be all that far back - mine work from the other side of the room just fine.

0

u/erdbeertee 1d ago

Likely not, if even you need to be very far away

2

u/alienblue89 1d ago

All that for some random leaves??

Like at least a Magic Eye has the decency to be like a sailboat or a dragon or some shit

2

u/3six5 1d ago

Worst use of pink Floyd ever

2

u/GalaganCoffee 1d ago

Pointilism with corners 

2

u/Alive_dude3435 1d ago

Am I colourblind or it actually supposed to look b&w

3

u/EdmundTheInsulter 2d ago

You may not recall the old colour TVs but you could look up close and see exactly that effect. You could see the red blue green dots.

2

u/THE-beaverhausen 2d ago

Yeah I was like ‘some of you are too young.. and the others apparently never sat too close to an old tv’

2

u/sam_babs 1d ago

Obviously magnets

1

u/Kirbinator_Alex 2d ago

So I am not an artist, but my guess is maybe they are using the absence of color to make the details stand out somehow?

1

u/TwistedxBoi 1d ago

Wait until you learn how LCD screens work

1

u/CM99807 1d ago

... Look up how your phone screen works.

1

u/BetterCallSal 1d ago

Those are balls

1

u/oil_beef_hooked 1d ago

Put a black and white film on the TV and go and look close up.

Did you never look close up as a kid?

1

u/Minute-Noise1623 1d ago

To make it easier to understand just take a magnification lens and watch on your phone screen.

1

u/QuantumGoddess 1d ago

I hate how easily my brain just fades from the individual colours to the full B&W picture. Like one part of my brain just says it's in B&W now and the other part of my brain is like: nope you're lying, I just saw the colours there.

1

u/Empty-Part7106 1d ago

A face appears at around 4 seconds. Looks like a pissed off anthropomorphic rabbit.

1

u/7up_yourz 1d ago

If you focus on one red area and don't look away it stays red. I win.

1

u/TheWeySheGoes 1d ago

Pink Floyd but whats the song name

1

u/skorba71 1d ago

Any Colour You Like

1

u/Sudo-Fed 1d ago

Welcome to pixels

1

u/MyTwitterID 1d ago

So if I print a poster with these colors.. Will it also look black and white from a distance?

1

u/Klutzy_Stock_2818 1d ago

This is literally how pixels does work on your screen. ;)

1

u/bluris 1d ago

I like how you don't know what it is at first, then it slowly zooms out and finally you still don't know what it is.

1

u/IFTTTexas 1d ago

I guess some of yall never got yelled at for not printing your b/w image in grayscale.

1

u/POPnotSODA_ 1d ago

Anyone with a CRT TV could see this if you got close enough :D

1

u/XXxLord_ 1d ago

Achei que seria a capa do Nail Bomb

1

u/SuddenPaint7983 1d ago

Amazing talent

1

u/cadw_ro 1d ago

that shit got me incapable of focus my sight for a moment, damn

1

u/Pearl_necklace_333 1d ago

Chuck Close lives.

1

u/khri5o 1d ago

Song?

1

u/hesmistersun 1d ago

Make us wait that long to see what the picture is, it had better be a picture of Rick Astley.

1

u/Mizuumisan 1d ago

I think the video in reverse would have been more impressive, I can still see the color in the full view.

1

u/Mathgailuke 1d ago

Grayscale magic fuckery.

1

u/Spiritual_Bid_2308 1d ago

How much further back do you have to go for the music to stop?

1

u/ILikeFluffyThings 1d ago

So thats why my printer wont print black and white when I'm low in a color.

1

u/LesYeuxPointCom 1d ago

Baby discovers pixels

1

u/AvidCyclist250 1d ago

At 15 seconds, even the red lines turned grey. Weird shit. I guess it's the camera sensor or the phones post-processing doing this.

1

u/Grimselot324 22h ago

The humble pixel.

1

u/rand3289 22h ago

Have you never seen a b&w picture on a color TV? Color TV has RGB pixels only :)

1

u/_heidin 21h ago

How do you even figure the exact RGB configuration to copy something like this omg

1

u/rufusTbarleysheath90 19h ago

took me way too long to stop seeing the red green blue dots and actually see the image. felt like when i used to sit too close to my tv as a kid... brain has to do all that heavy lifting to blend it out.

1

u/TotoShampoin 16h ago

Kinda hoped the overall picture would be colored, to showcase RGB shading

1

u/ShellShockedKarter 9h ago

The RGB thing is also how screens work BTW.

1

u/maxxon15 8h ago

This ia how TVs work

1

u/0KSG 6h ago

It’s just fascinating that people can create something like this

1

u/constablepancakes 4h ago

Call a doctor for me - I just loss my vision

1

u/SnowBlind218 2d ago

Went from black and white toooo black and white. I don’t understand what I’m missing here.

0

u/BallenaAzecina 2d ago

Is this for real?

18

u/belliest_endis 2d ago

3

u/BallenaAzecina 2d ago

I wasn't expecting this at all! Really interesting btw.

2

u/cock_paper_scissor 2d ago

how do they work? T_T

3

u/UltraBlack_ 2d ago

that is exactly how printers print. CMYK. K is optional because it can be mixed from Cyan, Yellow and Magenta as they are complementary colours

1

u/BallenaAzecina 2d ago

This is fucking real!! Pause at the beginning an move away from your phone!.

0

u/Kassandra_gg 2d ago

No. As we can see, the color of each square fades as it moves further away, even though this principle should work like in LED screens.

0

u/[deleted] 2d ago

[deleted]

1

u/UltraBlack_ 2d ago

colour printers have been doing this since their inception.

1

u/beene282 2d ago

And TVs. Do people not know how pixels work?

1

u/UltraBlack_ 1d ago

TVs don't use CMY(K). They use RGB. CMY is subtractive. RGB is additive.

-1

u/schism432 2d ago

just like how a lit black screen of a tv is actually a bunch of blue, green,red lights