like if you wanted to mix paint to get a color from a computer would you do the opposite of what the RGB value is? I’m confused
like if I wanted to take the RBG code R:99, G: 66, B, 33 wouldn’t it look more lightful than if I mixed paint into 1 part blue, 2 part green, 3 part red? how would you paint a color code?
Like others have said, it’s about additive vs subtractive color
And to start off with, probably everything you know about color is probably over simplified, or even outright wrong. Light and color and how your brain interprets that information is pretty complex stuff. Even this explanation is gonna be glossing over things.
Starting from the basics, white light contains all of the colors of the rainbow.
Your eyes, however, are mostly only sensitive to red, green, and blue light, most people only have receptors in their eyes (cones) for those 3 colors. They do pick up a little bit from the surrounding parts of the spectrum but not much, and your brain sort of fills in the gaps from there. If your red cones and green cones are both getting stimulated by light, your brain will interpret that as yellow or orange depending on just how much each is picking up.
So your monitor is starting with no light across all 3 colors (black)
And then adding light to get the desired colors.
But if you’re drawing or painting, ou’re starting with a white canvas, not a black monitor, so how do we go about getting the colors we want!
Well we’re going to put paint or ink on the canvas to absorb the colors we don’t want.
Back in elementary school art class you probably learned about complementary or opposite colors. Unfortunately the colors you learned were kind of wrong. Close enough for kids mixing finger paints, but not exactly.
The opposite of red isn’t green it’s cyan.
The opposite of green isn’t red, its magenta
But the opposite of blue is in fact yellow, so one out of three is something I guess.
What does that actually mean though? Well yellow ink absorbs basically all of the blue light while still reflecting red and green.
Cyan absorbs all the red light, while still reflecting blue and green
And magenta absorbs all the green light while still reflecting red and blue
So by mixing and matching those 3 colors, you can dial things down from 100% white light to a mix of red green and blue that your brain can interpret as other colors.
In theory mixing a bunch of those 3 colors together, you can eventually get down to black, in practice your pigments aren’t perfect, and even if they were it would get expensive to use that much of those 3 pigments which is why most color printers are CMYK, with “K” standing for black for reasons I’ve never bothered to look up and I’m not gonna start now.
So your monitoring is adding light from 0 up to make the color you need. It’s “additive.”
And paint is dialing things down from 100 to the desired color. It’s “subtractive.”
Hopefully that all makes sense, color is weird.
This is a common misconception, but it has nothing to do with imperfections in the pigments. The real issue is that you don’t want each of your primaries to block a full third of the visible spectrum—you want each to block a narrow band of frequencies that overlaps as little as possible with the sensitivity curves of the other cone cells in your eyes, in order to produce fully-saturated colors. The tradeoff is that intermediate frequencies aren’t blocked by any of the primaries, which is why we need to add black.
You are right, but I felt like that kind of gets a little too far out of an easy-to-explain model, and decided to kind of push that off into the stuff I said I was going to gloss over because colors are weird
I suppose it’s sort of more like the pigments are intentionally imperfect to compensate for the also imperfect way that our eyes pick up colors that aren’t exactly red/green/blue
Put another way, let’s say white is 100% of each red, blue and green light, and black is 0% of each. Every other color is made up of different percentages of those three.
Your monitor is counting up from zero, you just need to add the colors you want.
On a white canvas you need to subtract from 100.
Cyan is basically negative red, magenta is negative green, and yellow is negative blue.