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?


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