Wednesday, September 15, 2010
Additive and Subtractive Color
What we have learned about additive and subtractive color theories in class has added to my knowledge but also has connected things I already knew. The subtractive color mixing is so familiar. Red, yellow, and blue are what I think of when I hear primary colors, but it is interesting to think of primaries as red, green, and blue in additive color mixing. I recognize using red, green, and blue from photo editing software and cyan, magenta, and yellow from printer cartridge ink and. What I find really interesting is that using the colors of the additive system might be a better mixing system for mixing paint, but we use the subtractive method because it is the traditional system for mixing paint. In light of the fact that our eye sees color through red, green, and blue detectors it seems logical that we should reproduce certain colors by mixing paint using red, green, and blue as primaries. If we use the system our eyes use to perceive color wouldn't our resulting mixes be more accurate?
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What a great question to bring up.
ReplyDeleteSince additive color is the theory of light and perception, we DO use RGB when the color we are creating is using light. For example, stage lighting or the colors that we see on a computer monitor. But if we used RGB as the primaries of pigment, then we would not get the full spectrum of colors. For example, although red and green light mix to make yellow, it would produce brown if we were mixing paints. There is a physical event happening in the pigment when white light contacts the pigment's surface. That is the absorbing (subtracting) of certain parts of the visible spectrum, and reflecting the rest. And there is a separate physical event happening in our eye. That is the RGB cones collecting the reflected light, and processing that information to send our brain the visual.
This is the reason that we need both of these theories. To account for light AND for pigment.