Every pixel on your screen is made up of 3 color lights, red, green, and blue (RGB). These colors are
known
as the 3 primary colors.
wait... Aren't the primary colors red yellow and blue??
First some history
Color theorists since the seventeenth
century, and many artists and designers since that time, have taken red, yellow, and blue to be the
primary
colors. This RYB system, in "traditional color theory", is often used to order and compare colors, and
sometimes proposed as a system of mixing pigments to get a wide range of, or "all", colors. Of course,
the
notion that all colors can be mixed from RYB primaries is not true, just as it is not true in any system
of
real primaries.
For example, if the blue pigment is a deep Prussian blue, then a muddy desaturated green may be the best
that can be had by mixing with yellow. To achieve a larger gamut of colors via mixing, the red and blue
pigments used in illustrative materials are often closer to peacock blue and carmine,
respectively. Printers traditionally used inks of such colors, known as "process blue" and "process
red", before modern color science and the printing industry converged on the process colors (and names)
cyan
and magenta, in addition to yellow, hence CMY.
Subtractive vs. Additive
The subtractive color mixing model predicts the resultant spectral power distribution of light
filtered
through overlaid partially absorbing materials, often in the context of an underlying reflective surface
such as white paper. Each layer partially absorbs some wavelengths of light from the illumination
spectrum
while letting others pass through, resulting in a colored appearance. The resultant spectral power
distribution is predicted by sequentially taking the product of the spectral power distributions of the
incoming light and transmissivity at each filter. Overlapping layers of ink in printing mix
subtractively over
reflecting white paper, while the reflected light mixes in a partitive way to generate color
images. The RGB color
model (mentioned above) on the other hand, is additive in the sense that the three light beams
are added together,
and their light spectra add, wavelength for wavelength, to make the final color's spectrum. This is
essentially
opposite to the subtractive color model. Because of properties, these three colors create white, this is
in
stark contrast to physical colors (which by definition are subtractive), such as dyes which create black
when mixed. This can be observed below.
In code, RGB is typically refered to as rgb ('r', 'g', 'b'), with red as rgb ('r', 0, 0),
and yellow
which is observed when both the red green lights are on as rgb ('r', 'g', 0) etc.. And since LCD
screens can
emit each of the 3 lights in any given pixel in 255 strengths, with 0 being off and 255 being the
brightest,
a bright red would be refered to as rgb (255, 0, 0) and so on, thus giving a total of
16,581,375 different
colors!
Hit the to close the Eyedropper without selecting a color
on 'start' this box will start cycling through the 8
combinations that can be made using RGB (that is, with each bulb being either on or off).
veiwed colors
Some text to compare text-color to backround-color and help with your color scheme
The study of the human eye also sheds light on how we perceive color. The visual system in the
human eye is highly complex. It is unlike a camera or a television camera, which separate out one
primary color from the others, because the eye's visual system can distinguish each color.
The human brain and the visual system are two of Nature's most amazing creations. What we do know
about them reveals that they are far more complex than we ever imagined.
to close the Eyedropper without selecting a color