wasn’t sure if i should post here or to nostupidquestions.
so i get that there 3 primary colors, Red, Blue, Yellow, combining them you get a secondary color.
add red and blue you get purple, add blue and yellow you get green, add yellow and red you get orange, combine all 3 you get brown.
So wouldn’t brown be a dark white or a light black since white is the presence of all color and black is the absence?
I think i also read somewhere that RBY only works for paint, but when it comes to atoms releasing photons, the three primary colors are RBG, in which case start from the top, go into the quantum chemistry if you need.
In: Physics
The easy but I’d that the colors aren’t binary, but proportional.
The colors you outline are different combinations of different levels of the three component colors. To get purple, you have all or equal red and blue and no yellow. To get orange you have lots of red and some yellow and no blue. To get shades or hues of those colors, change the proportions.
White is the “full on” of each of the component colors, and black is the “full off” of them. The gradients of grey come so of the “equals” of all of the component colors. When all of the colors are equally “half on,” you get a district grey, not too bright or dark. Changing them equally will give you different shades of grey, while changing them slightly off but close to even will give you different hues.
Brown is every color mixed together. White and black are more shades & not colors. So Grey is just a shade. It can’t be made with colors. Brown can be lightened or darkened with black or white, but the pigment comes from the colors that made it.
Grey is light black. It’s between black and white.
The thing that distinguishes grey from brown is that there is not a lot of orange. Brown is really just ‘dark orange’. Reddish grey, orangeish grey and yellowish grey have a tendency to look ‘brown’. But bluish, greenish and purplish grey are… just shades of grey.
RBY doesn’t actually work for paint, and the fact that you can’t make grey with them is an example of why. Cyan, magenta, yellow, and white gives you grey. Cyan, magenta and yellow are the subtractive primaries and make black*, white simply dilutes that mix into grey.
*well technically a very dark grey, absolutely pure black can’t physically exist, best anyone has done is Vantablack, which is 99.965% black. But for all practical purposes this can be called black.
Grey is white (all colors) but less bright than surrounding things. You can actually use a white backdrop in a photo studio to do any shade from pure white to pure black, depending on how much you light it compared to your subject.
Making grey with paint is theoretically easy and in practice very hard. All you do is mix opposing colors from the color wheel – orange and blue, green and red, yellow and purple. (Which, you’ll notice, means you would have all three primary colors represented.) In practice it’s not that easy, because very few paints are *perfectly* one color. Your blue leans a bit towards green, etc. So you often need tiny amounts of another color to offset that.
And as someone else said, grey is rarely perfectly grey. It’s usually got a bit of other colors in it. If those are warm colors, it rapidly starts looking brown, but cool colors we continue to see as grey.
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COLOR THEORY!
So all the stuff we see is a combination of two variables: frequency and intensity. (Mantis shrimp see more, dogs see less.). In our eyes we’ve got rods and cones. Rods can’t tell the difference between frequencies, but are more sensitive to intensity. They can see better at night, but with no color. The 3 (or 4 for freaks) types of cones absorb more Red, Green, or Blue. And from the mix of which cones are wiggling, we can identify the spectrum of frequencies which is visible light. This is what color is.
Radiation can come with a mix of frequencies, just like sound. Getting single pure frequency is actually kinda hard. White light is an even mix of all visible frequencies, with a lot of intensity. An even mix of frequencies with low intensity fades from white to grey to black. Blackness is simply no light, and none of our eyeball cells pick up anything. In total blackness, that sort of background hazy splotchy redness you see is your cells failing to sit still and wiggling on their own.
Grey is all the different frequencies of colors, but with an intensity of about half-way through human’s range of vision.
Brown is a low-intensity orange.
Atoms release photons with a variety of frequencies and different mixes of frequencies at different intensities, both within and without the visible spectrum. The RBY and RGB systems represent the visible spectrum in different ways, but fundamentally are both talking about the same thing: Frequencies and intensities. RGB lines up closer with the biology of our eyeballs.
Some people think that colors only exist inside our heads and it’s all a social construct, but they’re wrong.
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