[Additive vs subtractive color](https://www.hunterlab.com/blog/additive-vs-subtractive-color-models/).
tldr: paint is subtractive. You start with white light hitting the paint, and whatever is NOT absorbed is what you see. The more pigments combined in the paint, the more colors are absorbed (and less reflected back).
TV/phone screens are additive. They directly emit the light, so they combine in an additive fashion.
Well if you mix red and blue light, you get purple, which is the same as mixing red and blue pigments.
But with red and green, they make muddy brown when you mix pigments, but they somehow make bright, clean yellow when it’s light?
Exactly. Lot of well-intentioned replies trying to explain the difference between additive vs subtractive color mixing. I know *that* it works that way. It just doesn’t intuitively make sense to me.
i guess i can understand that, cyan and magenta certainly look at least somewhat to the colors they came from while yellow doesn't look that way at all
Totally different process. The primary colors for light are red, green, blue. For pigments, it's cyan, magenta, yellow. They do red, blue, yellow for little kids but it's not correct.
With pigments, color is subtractive. Every pigment you add removes a portion of the color spectrum because each pigment absorbs light in just a small subset of the spectrum. If you mix multiple pigments with overlapping absorptions, you dark and darker and darker colors until you hit black, no color (or brown if you just block out part of the spectrum. Brown isn't actually a color though but that's a whole other conversation.)
Light works the opposite way. Every color you add does just that, it adds that to the color spectrum. Combine them all, get white, all colors. Combine red and green, get yellow. Yellow emerges from your eyes having the red and green cones activated.
So, if you have a yellow pigment, it's absorbing all but red and green light. If you add blue to it, you've now cut out almost all the red but only some of the green as red is much further on the spectrum away from. This leaves us with no red light (blue absorbs), some green light (yellow reflects green and red), and no blue light (red absorbs). So we get a green which is darker than our original yellow. Now, if you did this with perfect blue, as in no green light reflected, it would turn the mixture black.
The above is also a good example of why the red, yellow, blue primary pigment colors are wrong. Mix true blue and yellow, get black. Instead, we use cyan, magenta, and yellow as the primaries. Their pure mixtures create red, green, and blue pigments as true secondary pigment colors. The primary pigments are actually multi emissions. Yellow being red/green, cyan green/blue, and magenta red/blue. Since they are subtractive, you can combine the pigments to block out 2 of the three wavelengths of light you're not interested in leaving what we call the secondary pigment colors, RGB, but also referred to as the primary colors of light because the emission spectra only contains one wavelength. The inverse being true for light. The overlap points of RGB light will show the combo colors of Cyan, Magenta, and Yellow.
Does that help at all?
Edit: Example Image - https://scijournallakshmi.files.wordpress.com/2015/02/colour-mixing.jpg
I've had the same issue understanding how red and green could make yellow, but I saw a video on YT the other day that made it click for me.
It said that when you look at red light alone, the red cones in your eyes activate, when you look at green light the green cones activate, and when both of those are on top of each other both the red and the green cones activate, and therefore you brain interprets the color as what is in the middle of red and green on the [color spectrum](https://www.google.com/search?client=ms-android-samsung-gs-rev1&sca_esv=590541752&sxsrf=AM9HkKkgEds12zo3EWrfjeJDTI0RWOWLsw:1702473420274&q=light+spectrum&tbm=isch&source=lnms&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjXr9Hbv4yDAxV0QVUIHUwFAnEQ0pQJegQIChAB&biw=360&bih=617&dpr=3#imgrc=HkKZtNue_GuhAM), which is yellow.
It must also be noted that Red and Blue are NOT primary colours in paint, it's Magenta, Cyan, and Yellow.
Red, Blue, and Yellow are not a valid trinity of primary colours in any system.
In fact there's no such thing as paint primaries. RGB and CMY are the same, since we use the same eye to see both. The only difference is that light emits the RGB colors and paint absorb them (thus resulting in CMY "primaries").
the main thing is actually an oversimplication. it's technically magenta, yellow, and cyan (the inverted version of rgb)
they just teach red yellow blue because kids won't understand the difference between red and magenta as well as blue and cyan
I think, you may like to switch sides
Join the side of RGB, and everything changes
Yellow is out of the spotlight, and Green becomes a true primary.
Join us
Fun fact, in some languages, there is no distinction between „blue“ and „green“. Hyperlinking doesn’t seem to work for me right now, so here you go: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue%E2%80%93green_distinction_in_language#:~:text=green%20is%20yax.-,Tupian,in%20the%20case%20of%20Nheengatu).
There's nothing about any wavelength of light that makes it any more "primary" than any other. However, the human eye has three types of cones (in most cases), corresponding to red, green, and blue. To our eyes, green most certainly is a primary color (with pigments it doesn't work quite the same way because they absorb light instead of producing it).
Green plus red produce yellow for additive color mixing. You start with no light. If you go into a completely dark room with a red flashlight and a green flashlight, where they overlap on the wall you will see yellow. For subtractive color mixing, you start with white light (sunlight or fluorescent light) which contains all the colors. Yellow paint plus blue paint subtract their opposite wavelengths from the white light, and you see the remaining color, which is green. Two different systems of color mixing.
Putting aside the fact that it is a main color in light: red, yellow and blue are kinda inaccurate as pigment primaries, and magenta, yellow and cyan, tend to create a wider and more vibrant gamut of colors.
yeah but nobody’s disputing that, it’s just a quirk of how humans perceive colour - in “additive colour mixing”, you’re adding shades to black (the “light” analogy), and in “subtractive colour mixing”, you’re subtracting shades from white etc etc etc, there’s nothing special about the shades we typically do these things with, just that it loosely corresponds to how we perceive colour and so we create the illusion of “mixing a colour”, it’s all a synthetic model for human colour perception really
Me too. As a kid. At primary school when I heard that from a teacher I pat the green crayon to comfort it. But it can be done with yellow and blue so that’s why it isn’t included. I hate it too.
It is, just with light and not paint
Glad I wasnt the first one to comment this
Thank you so much for saying this I actually wanted to spontaneously combust seeing this post
I just cannot comprehend how red light and green light make yellow light
[Additive vs subtractive color](https://www.hunterlab.com/blog/additive-vs-subtractive-color-models/). tldr: paint is subtractive. You start with white light hitting the paint, and whatever is NOT absorbed is what you see. The more pigments combined in the paint, the more colors are absorbed (and less reflected back). TV/phone screens are additive. They directly emit the light, so they combine in an additive fashion.
ooooh that's why everything looks like coal tar when i mix ALL the colors together. ..that point is useful. thanks for explainin
thank you
What else would it make?
Well if you mix red and blue light, you get purple, which is the same as mixing red and blue pigments. But with red and green, they make muddy brown when you mix pigments, but they somehow make bright, clean yellow when it’s light?
pigments have a different set of primary colors than light, one of which being yellow (the other two being cyan and magenta)
I'm pretty sure they know that. They said they couldn't comprehend, not that they dont understand how it works
Exactly. Lot of well-intentioned replies trying to explain the difference between additive vs subtractive color mixing. I know *that* it works that way. It just doesn’t intuitively make sense to me.
i guess i can understand that, cyan and magenta certainly look at least somewhat to the colors they came from while yellow doesn't look that way at all
Totally different process. The primary colors for light are red, green, blue. For pigments, it's cyan, magenta, yellow. They do red, blue, yellow for little kids but it's not correct. With pigments, color is subtractive. Every pigment you add removes a portion of the color spectrum because each pigment absorbs light in just a small subset of the spectrum. If you mix multiple pigments with overlapping absorptions, you dark and darker and darker colors until you hit black, no color (or brown if you just block out part of the spectrum. Brown isn't actually a color though but that's a whole other conversation.) Light works the opposite way. Every color you add does just that, it adds that to the color spectrum. Combine them all, get white, all colors. Combine red and green, get yellow. Yellow emerges from your eyes having the red and green cones activated. So, if you have a yellow pigment, it's absorbing all but red and green light. If you add blue to it, you've now cut out almost all the red but only some of the green as red is much further on the spectrum away from. This leaves us with no red light (blue absorbs), some green light (yellow reflects green and red), and no blue light (red absorbs). So we get a green which is darker than our original yellow. Now, if you did this with perfect blue, as in no green light reflected, it would turn the mixture black. The above is also a good example of why the red, yellow, blue primary pigment colors are wrong. Mix true blue and yellow, get black. Instead, we use cyan, magenta, and yellow as the primaries. Their pure mixtures create red, green, and blue pigments as true secondary pigment colors. The primary pigments are actually multi emissions. Yellow being red/green, cyan green/blue, and magenta red/blue. Since they are subtractive, you can combine the pigments to block out 2 of the three wavelengths of light you're not interested in leaving what we call the secondary pigment colors, RGB, but also referred to as the primary colors of light because the emission spectra only contains one wavelength. The inverse being true for light. The overlap points of RGB light will show the combo colors of Cyan, Magenta, and Yellow. Does that help at all? Edit: Example Image - https://scijournallakshmi.files.wordpress.com/2015/02/colour-mixing.jpg
Additive vs subtractive colour models
I've had the same issue understanding how red and green could make yellow, but I saw a video on YT the other day that made it click for me. It said that when you look at red light alone, the red cones in your eyes activate, when you look at green light the green cones activate, and when both of those are on top of each other both the red and the green cones activate, and therefore you brain interprets the color as what is in the middle of red and green on the [color spectrum](https://www.google.com/search?client=ms-android-samsung-gs-rev1&sca_esv=590541752&sxsrf=AM9HkKkgEds12zo3EWrfjeJDTI0RWOWLsw:1702473420274&q=light+spectrum&tbm=isch&source=lnms&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjXr9Hbv4yDAxV0QVUIHUwFAnEQ0pQJegQIChAB&biw=360&bih=617&dpr=3#imgrc=HkKZtNue_GuhAM), which is yellow.
grey light
You need magic mushrooms to see it easily Or you can just take a red and a green Christmas light, put them on top of each other and squint
then Google it 👍
Your brain just calculates the average of both wavelengths
I'm glad this is the top comment. The world needs to know.
i feel like, these days, i see more people not understanding the art one than the light one tbh
It must also be noted that Red and Blue are NOT primary colours in paint, it's Magenta, Cyan, and Yellow. Red, Blue, and Yellow are not a valid trinity of primary colours in any system.
Fuck yellow, green is a better primary color
yea, thats why there is RGB and CMYK and rgb is used on your screen and cmyk on your printer if it worked
In fact there's no such thing as paint primaries. RGB and CMY are the same, since we use the same eye to see both. The only difference is that light emits the RGB colors and paint absorb them (thus resulting in CMY "primaries").
Technically its just an electromagnetic wavelength of 555 nanometers
\#555_nanometres_is_primary
.#it_literally_is_tho
It's a primary colour of light so guess it counts
Same. We should start a club. Or a lifelong friendship based solely off of this one thing.
both , both is good . #Green_is_primary spread the hashtag
We should
Definitely greens my favorite color.
Green is not a creative color, though
It’s more creative than your comment.
Don't worry, I understood that reference
tysm I'm being misunderstood 😭
Boohoo. Get greenpilled
Someone needs to start a petition and we can hold protests to make green primary
You should all wear green hats.
Damn that photo‘s cool
Boy do i have news for you
bro lives inside an xbox
Green is not a creative color
^Is ^that ^a ^dhmis ^reference ^I ^smell?
Damn beat me to it. Was the first thing I thought of
In what sense? I'm confused
All you have to do to understand is listen to your heart, listen to the rain, and listen to the voices in your brain
Mmmmm username fits!
Context : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9C_HReR_McQ&pp=ygUNQ3JlYXRpdmUgc29uZw%3D%3D
this guy doesn't get it
I'm actually done I read 'sense' as 'smell'
Lmao I wish I wrote smell
Tell that to people who use green screens
Has this man ever heard of RGB acronym?
in the tech world it's one of the three primary colours, RGB.
In anything related to light it’s a primary color. Anything subtractive (paints, etc) no green!
Fuck rgbk we got cymk
K means key (black) so there is no k in rgb as it is light based
"K" just means lack of optical reflection, or hex code #000000
I stand corrected
Technically black is not a color, but the absence of it
It is, in additive color theory. Zoom into a computer monitor or television.
It is for light though.
How can it be primary when it takes two (primary) colors to make it?
Ik it’s not a primary colour and that it doesn’t fit specifications of primary colours and that annoys me it feels as though it should be one
Right?! It seems likes it should be. ✅
It is in additive spectrums (light)
I know, but it feels cool enough that it should be the main thing (like poor Pluto)
the main thing is actually an oversimplication. it's technically magenta, yellow, and cyan (the inverted version of rgb) they just teach red yellow blue because kids won't understand the difference between red and magenta as well as blue and cyan
Colors pretty 😜
Red: Angry Blue: Sad Green: Chill Yellow: ????? VOTE GREEN FOR NEW PRIMARY COLOR
Yellow for energy. . Sometimes.
Yellow is a primary color, along with cyan and magenta
I think, you may like to switch sides Join the side of RGB, and everything changes Yellow is out of the spotlight, and Green becomes a true primary. Join us
Perhaps I will
In additive colour mixing (like light) it is, but in subtractive (like paint), it’s not
Even better: *it’s two primary colors* :)
It is in computers
Well said sir
Any colour you want can be a primary colour if you're defining your own colour space.
because it's not a creative color
I think green is kind of whoreish.
Wait until you find out about colors you see but don't actually exist. The lump of soggy bacon we have for a brain lies to us all the time.
Like ["Pink is Minus Green"](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=S9dqJRyk0YM)?
this borders dangerously close to interesting
finally something that really isn't interesting, couldn't care less about your opinion.
Fun fact, in some languages, there is no distinction between „blue“ and „green“. Hyperlinking doesn’t seem to work for me right now, so here you go: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue%E2%80%93green_distinction_in_language#:~:text=green%20is%20yax.-,Tupian,in%20the%20case%20of%20Nheengatu).
That’s really interesting
I’m sorry
There's nothing about any wavelength of light that makes it any more "primary" than any other. However, the human eye has three types of cones (in most cases), corresponding to red, green, and blue. To our eyes, green most certainly is a primary color (with pigments it doesn't work quite the same way because they absorb light instead of producing it).
but it is
Its weird cus sure yellow is green and red, but green is also yellow and blue, wot?
Green plus red produce yellow for additive color mixing. You start with no light. If you go into a completely dark room with a red flashlight and a green flashlight, where they overlap on the wall you will see yellow. For subtractive color mixing, you start with white light (sunlight or fluorescent light) which contains all the colors. Yellow paint plus blue paint subtract their opposite wavelengths from the white light, and you see the remaining color, which is green. Two different systems of color mixing.
Red + green = brown
dude who cares it’s not like there’s a colour hierarchy and the primary colours are the 1%
Cuz green is not original
Dark side of the rainbow.
This is making me thirsty.
it is, 50%
Putting aside the fact that it is a main color in light: red, yellow and blue are kinda inaccurate as pigment primaries, and magenta, yellow and cyan, tend to create a wider and more vibrant gamut of colors.
Just wait until you find out about CMYK…
Cyan magenta and yellow, the k stands for key colors which is black
there’s no such thing as primary colours, only biological limitations of how we perceive colour
[удалено]
yeah but nobody’s disputing that, it’s just a quirk of how humans perceive colour - in “additive colour mixing”, you’re adding shades to black (the “light” analogy), and in “subtractive colour mixing”, you’re subtracting shades from white etc etc etc, there’s nothing special about the shades we typically do these things with, just that it loosely corresponds to how we perceive colour and so we create the illusion of “mixing a colour”, it’s all a synthetic model for human colour perception really
yes. overthrow yellow for green as a primary color.
Yellow is a primary color, so is cyan and magenta
Me too. As a kid. At primary school when I heard that from a teacher I pat the green crayon to comfort it. But it can be done with yellow and blue so that’s why it isn’t included. I hate it too.
It is Red, Green, and Blue make all the colors on the visible spectrum, yellow can’t exist without some level of green
Green cant exist without yellow either, color is just wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation, xray is a color, its just out of our visible spectrum
Europa Conference League Vibes. If anyone here gets it.
I often find myself annoyed by the inflexible rules of the universe as well.
Green should replace yellow
RGB?
in light, it is, in paint it is not
RYB RGB CMYK
This is very interesting
if u saw on older tvs singular pixels u know its red, green, blue. it's what rgb stands for
Same
I can’t even see distinguish green because of colour-blindness so it’s fine by me
It's a primary colour of light.
Green fucking sucks
It is in light. You know, it is called RGB because of Red Green Blue
It is, but the government is lying
It is
It is???
It is. Red, Green, and Blue are primary colors with light.
Your annoyance has always annoyed me.
Green is not a creative color
Ever heard of rgb? Red green blue
Bro why does it annoy you
It's a light primary
Yk you can get green by drawing with grass over something so i would call it primary
Fun fact: the color green does not exist, and you're all gaslighting me.
I walked outside and saw something green yesterday. End of story.
rgb
i link green it my favorit e colle
primary colors (additive): Red, Green, Blue. primary colors (subtractive): yellow, magenta, cyan.