Neocities.org
I was reading your RGB Delusion page and I had a couple questions since I'm interested in colors and trying to learn about them. You said CYM is the true primary trio for subtractive color mixing, though the blue yellow gradient was generate digitally, so it's a result of lights, which are additive color. So could CYM be the primaries for additive color too? Or was it made to imitate subtractive colors?
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Also does color temperature play into it at all? I have noticed while using paint that mixing cool yellow and blue results in much better greens than warm. I would infer now that cool blue must be in part cyan, though I don't think I've seen cyan paint much, at least not the pure bright cyan you see on a screen.
You're right, the blue-yellow gradient is additive, since its just mixing RGB light values. The main point of that was to show that blue and yellow are complimentary colors, not neccessarily saying anything about additive vs subtractive. The problem with RBY is that 2 of the colors are complimentary, so they make grey if mixed. (part 1))
That's one of the reasons why, when using paint, people use 5-color-primary palettes. You need to mix cool-blue with yellow to get a brighter green, since it is closer to cyan. The closer to cyan you can get with a blue, the brighter green you'll get when mixing with yellow. There are cyan paints, but they don't look the same as the cyan you can get with light. The other issue is with color naming. (part 2)
Since cyan isn't commonly differenciated from blue (most people say its "light blue"), every hue between cyan and indigo might all be referred to as "blue". One of the other issues might be historical pigment availability; there were a lot of natural blue pigment sources (cobalt, indigo, lapis, phtalo) but not many good cyans. (end)
The color differentiation is interesting; one thing I learned in color classes is that some cultures differentiate colors differently. Some don't think of green and blue as separate. It seems strange since we're all theoretically seeing the same color spectrum. I'm curious about magneta since it actually isn't part of the spectrum...