How does color work. I know how light gets absorbed and reflected depending on the color of the thing, but that does not explain HOW things have color.
Like. I can have a red house, red clothes and my blood is red. But all those things are VERY different things. What properties do all of them have that makes them red? How does my red look red ? Molecules? And we can mix colors too. What specificly is mixed?
What quality in red paint is also present in my blood?
I am not the best at explaining, but what I want to know is what do same colored things have in common that makes us see them as the same color despite being very different kinds of things.
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When light is emitted, it’s because an electron is transitioning from a high energy state to a lower energy state, and the difference between those determines the wavelength. More energy = shorter wavelength.
When light hits an object, if an electron can jump by the same amount of energy, the photon can be absorbed. If the electrons need a different amount of energy, the light either reflects off or passes through. Different materials have electrons that need different amounts of energy, so they absorb different wavelengths.
When the light hits our retina, we have three types of cone cells that are more sensitive to different wavelengths, and our brain interprets the relative amount of each type of cell as color. Mixing color on your computer monitor is about selectively activating those cone cells using red, green and blue light.
Print and paint work the opposite way, you have pigments that selectively absorb light, so you see the different colors when illuminated with a white light(which contains all the colors)
So for red: With additive color, you need a red light, with subtractive color you need to absorb everything except red light, so you would mix magenta(to absorb green light) and yellow(to absorb blue light).
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