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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;GDJMSP, post: 3172138, member: 112&quot;]This was the original question -</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>And although it has been answered it&#039;s apparently still generating more questions. So I&#039;ll try to explain it a different way.</p><p><br /></p><p>What causes the confusion or perhaps I should say lack of understanding with this is how light and the colors we see normally behave. White light is composed of many different colors. And when white light strikes say a red object what happens is this - because the object is red it absorbs all other colors in the light except the red. The red that is in the white light is not absorbed, instead it is reflected and thus that is the color we see the object as being. The exact same thing happens with all other colors except black. Black absorbs all colors and thus what we see is the lack of light being reflected to our eye. This is what happens with most objects. So it stands to reason that if an object is made of something that is 75% one color, then that is the color we should see. Or so we think.</p><p><br /></p><p>But with metal it&#039;s different because metal has a different structure than most other objects - it&#039;s crystalline in nature - and so it reflects and absorbs the light in a different way. And it also refracts the light because it is crystalline - which most other objects do not do. So it subdues darker colors and exaggerates lighter colors.</p><p><br /></p><p>And then if you throw in toning, or corrosion if you prefer the word, into the mix everything changes yet again because the metal changes from one substance to another and thus it reflects, absorbs, and refracts light differently than it did before. The toning or corrosion interferes with those 3 properties creating light of a different color than what we originally saw and things go back to acting the way things normally do when it comes to color. Different colors are now absorbed, reflected, and refracted depending on how thick the toning/corrosion is. And once the toning gets thick enough all we see is black because all color is then being absorbed by the object.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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