• The traditional primary colors are RED, YELLOW, and BLUE.
• Mix two primary colors to get the complementary colors.
• The traditional complementary colors are ORANGE (Red plus Yellow), GREEN (Yellow plus Blue), and PURPLE (Blue plus Red).
In grade school you probably had plenty of opportunities to mix primary colors and make new colors. It was magic!
The way we see color is a bit different. You've probably seen a prism break a beam of light into a rainbow of colors. The visible spectrum of light breaks down into three color regions: RED, GREEN, and BLUE.
• Add RED, GREEN, and BLUE (RGB) light to create WHITE light. Because you ADD the colors together to get White, we call these the additive primaries.
• Subtract one of the colors from the other three and you are left with yet another color. RGB minus RED leaves CYAN. RGB minus the BLUE leaves YELLOW. RGB minus GREEN leaves MAGENTA. These are called the subtractive primaries (CMY).
Try mixing GREEN and BLUE paint and I bet you don't end up with a nice CYAN. Why? Because the color we see is reflected light and light and ink don't work in quite the same way.
Now put all this aside for a bit and look at the way we try to reproduce color in print and on the Web.
