Why do printers have CMYK ink instead of RYB & black ink?
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Mixing lights is an additive process. Lets say in a dark room with white walls, if you point a red, blue or green light at a wall, you will either get red, blue or green. However if you begin combining the lights by pointing them at the same spot, the resulting lit area will come closer to white, with white being a combination of all three.
Mixing paints is a subtractive process where adding pigments or colours to the white surface takes you further away from white. If you were to add equal amounts of red blue and green together you get a yucky brown. The best combination of colours to mix for the broadest range of hues are cyan, magenta and yellow, with black to get to the darkest shades of the colour range.
Funnily enough the secondary colours (equal mix of two primary colours) in the additive colour space turn out to be the primary colours of the subtractive space, with blue and green making cyan, red and green making yellow, and red and blue making magenta.
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