I know from the art class I took in elementary school that there are primary colors and secondary colors. The primary ones being Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, and Purple.
So my question is why do we use red, green, and blue? Wouldn’t it make more sense to do every other color on the spectrum so that all colors in between could be mixed from them? Like Red, Yellow, and Blue?
In: Technology
The “primary” colors are arbitrary and depend on the medium. It’s actually kind of disingenuous to be taught there are objective primary colors, because there aren’t. There’s colors that are useful for a given medium. For blending light, useful colors are Red, Green and Blue because you can mix those three colors to make a very large color space with a relatively simple encoding to represent it.
For ink, often there’s Cyan, for instance because that is more useful when mixing inks.
Color is just reflected light, and mixing colors of different things are going to have different outcomes. For instance, you cannot get the same color space with red, green and blue when mixing paints of different types.
Anyway, the point is to say, there’s really no such thing as primary colors. There’s just color palettes that are useful.
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