Neat article, but I found it surprising that the author didn't go into a bit more detail about why RGB is used and where it's used. Saying that it's just how computers or televisions deal with it because of monitors only offers a bit of information.<p>While the explanation of additive and reductive color combining was interesting, I think it's important to note that it's because you're dealing with waves of light being absorbed or reflected.<p>I learned more about color theory and light in stage lighting classes than anywhere else. Teaching your brain how to combine colors correctly to get the exact shades you're looking for on the stage is hard. You really do have to forget a lot of what you learned in art classes to be effective. Understanding how colored light is absorbed, reflected, or otherwise changed on makeup, furniture, fabrics, and other surfaces added a whole different level of complexity not found in typical art classes.<p>Searching Google for "stage lighting color wheel" reveals more wheels similar to the one that you see at the author's really cool implementation[0].<p>[0] - <a href="http://bahamas10.github.io/ryb/" rel="nofollow">http://bahamas10.github.io/ryb/</a>
I think don't even understand the point of the author.<p>For one, I learnt in school that the primary colours where red, green and blue, and later that the substractive primary colours where cyan, magenta and yellow. So nothing different from the RGB/CMYK colour wheels everyone uses.<p>Second, well nobody will ever be able to create all colours from mixing red, yellow and blue, plain and simple. Unless your red is actually magenta and your blue is actually cyan.<p>At this point, you have just created a colour picker that uses cyan, magenta and yellow with no easy way to change lightness (without the K scale, you will have to manually change every colour level to match the global lightness you want).<p><i>But</i> his implementation has a brightness slider and uses "real" red instead of magenta, and "real" blue instead of cyan, which makes it a BMYK color wheel, and which prevents it from reproducing all colours. Even just setting brightness to the minimum gives a dark brown instead of black, because he's mixing colors from different models.
I couldn't take the article seriously after the suggestion that he was producing colours that are not seen on a natural rainbow and that the rainbow is wrong. The spectra for sunlight is almost complete in the visible region apart from a few small gaps where various elements absorb the light. If you look at a proper spectrum for sunlight you can clearly see the colours he claims are missing.
I believe Red, Green, and Blue are the colors of light and Cyan, Magenta, and Yellow are the colors of pigment.<p>Apparently the common color wheels, Red Yellow and Blue, are based on Newton’s prism experiments [1].<p>[1] <a href="http://learn.leighcotnoir.com/artspeak/elements-color/primary-colors/" rel="nofollow">http://learn.leighcotnoir.com/artspeak/elements-color/primar...</a>
This is a rather restrictive approach to the problem of 'I want to choose from a more aesthetically appealing subset of the colors computers can reproduce' (where 'aesthetically appealing' is valid for some definition rooted primarily in experience with physical paints, stubborn adherence to school artroom dogma, and nostalgia). You could achieve the same effect with a color picker that only includes the colors traditionally produced by Crayola.
If you want to go down a reading rabbit hole about color theory for a while, check out <a href="http://www.handprint.com/HP/WCL/wcolor.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.handprint.com/HP/WCL/wcolor.html</a>
I stopped thinking in terms of the RYB "color wheel" shortly after middle school art class. RGB and CYMK seem natural to me.<p>If you're interested in a color wheel for a picker design that has perceptual evenness, check the Munsell CS (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Munsell_color_system" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Munsell_color_system</a>) ... in a color picker it might be cool to select via projections of CIELAB as the refined version of same.
What I always found fascinating which is not addressed here, is how the visible light spectrum is a straight line with other "colors" at its ends, yet somehow our brains cut out that segment of the EM spectrum, and manage to bend it into a circle, so that color "wheels" make sense to us and flow nicely, when in fact red and violet are quite separate on the EM spectrum. It's our brains that play a little trick
The RYB color model is fine for third graders and cosmeticians but if you want to understand how color works you need to understand RGB. And yes that goes painters too. Mixing paint is more complicated than just using a color pick on your monitor because there is a volumetric/dilutional component and the paints is rarely a pure color (i.e. red paint is 256,0,0). It is galling that their are still university level art professor who persist in RYB color wheel malarky. Nothing irritates me more than the phrase, "we are mixing paint, not color". You are mixing both!
Cool article! I've understood the difference between additive and subtractive for a while, but hadn't thought about the discrepancy between RYB and CMY.<p>I also recommend watching this short video on the origin of ROYGBIV, and why Indigo probably doesn't really deserve it's own letter - but it got one, because of European music notation:
<a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/video/archive/2014/01/why-roygbiv-is-arbitrary/283432/" rel="nofollow">http://www.theatlantic.com/video/archive/2014/01/why-roygbiv...</a>
There is no RGB value for the cavernous void reaching deep into a cliff, into which a dark crack gives you a glimpse, which gobbles the burning light of the noonday sun, or your brightest flashlight, and gives back nothing.<p>RGB is just 3 pixels of different intensities, next to each other and sitting on your desk.
> the real color wheel below, in all of its glory, showing colors you will never see on a rainbow produced in nature.<p>Magenta? sure, everyone agrees is a bastard color- but cyan is on the rainbow in the spot labeled 'blue', and _your_ blue is labeled 'indigo'.<p>CAN'T PROVE ME WRONG IMMA COLOR EXPERT
Two semi-popular color picker extensions for Photoshop that already include RYB modes:<p><a href="http://www.coolorus.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.coolorus.com/</a><p><a href="http://anastasiy.com/colorwheel" rel="nofollow">http://anastasiy.com/colorwheel</a>