Hi everyone,
I'm bumping this topic again, as to ensure that we don't cause too much confusion between the Oz deep and the SA "deep". A little bit of history, this mutation is not new, and has been known for a number of years locally as a type of violet. Ben, you might recall some of our very first conversations where I spoke about a "poor" violet which wasn't as pronounced as the american violet. In any case, this has to a large extend caused some damage to the reputation of this beautiful mutation, as people are expecting a purple phenotype which isn't forthcoming in SF birds. It took some time, but I think most of us here have moved on and accepted that this isn't a violet mutation (perhaps an allele, though?). Most have since moved on to the name 'deep' or SA 'deep', but I think we are repeating the mistakes of the past of calling it something that it very well might not be. Some will disagree, others might agree. I think we should give it a different/unique name until we know everything there is to know about it. Hopefully we will get it spot on the first time, but at least we will be avoiding any further confusion that might arise. Our approach might be similar to what we have for cobalt and mauve, which we all know as common names for SF/DF dark, i.e. perhaps we can consider first giving common names to SF and DF birds, and then later give a single name for the actual mutation.
Let's have a look at the tail feathers in Tienie's pic (green, dark green, "SA deep" green and violet green):
It should be clear that all four main tail feathers are distinctly different.
I have looked around a bit, and this is a very interesting link
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shades_of_blue. Of special importance is the table at the bottom of the page. In this page, the cobalt colour fairly well represents the main tail feather of a SF dark blue bird, so perhaps we can consider to name the SF 'deep' blues along a similar line. Considering the table and comparing the tail with the pic above, one notices more green in the tail than compared to cobalt (i.e. some psittacin is left), so in the table some candidates are Bondi blue, Cerulean and Teal.
If we consider the colour RGB composition:
Cobalt - (0, 71, 171)
Cerulean - (42, 82, 190)
Teal - (0, 128, 128)
Bondi - no info.
Personally, I don't like the addition of the red component (42) in Cerulean, but Teal can be interpreted as less blue than cobalt (128 down from 171), but more green (128 up from 71). It might not be exact, but is indicative of what we see in the pic as well. And to put things in perspective (and to show that RGB isn't the best colour space to be working with), the wildtype main tail feather is of the cyan colour family, with RGB of (0, 255, 255), i.e. we have reduced the green component by 50% going from cyan to teal (same goes for blue, which might cause confusion if we link it strictly to melanin, which we shouldn't).
Thoughts?
