Why do printers combine cyan, magenta and yellow to create a colour image while video displays like TVs and Monitors use Red, Green and Blue?
In: Technology
It’s the difference between adding light from nothing – which is black – to everything – which is white. The fundamental colours of that system are red, green, and blue, the *additive* colour system, you’re starting with no light and adding it in, and red, green, and blue and lower
With printing you’re (usually) starting with a white sheet of paper, and adding pigments to filter that white paper down to other colours, and the primaries for that system are cyan, magenta, and yellow (with Key usually, but not always, meaning black). It’s a *subtractive* system, whatever you do you’re removing light.
Why are the primary colours different?
If you imagine printing red paint onto a paper. What paint does is filter out any light that *isn’t* red and that’s what you end up seeing.
So…what happens if you want to print any other colours onto that answer is you can’t, because you’re already down to a “lower” point than a lot of other colours sit.
But in printing, you can *make* red with yellow and cyan mixed together, so having yellow and cyan as some of your primary colours gives you more options for colour.
Similarly, if you tried to have a “cyan” pixel on a monitor, cyan is a mixture of green and blue light added together, so if you start with cyan, you now have no way to make green, or blue because you’re already “higher” than that, closer to white than green or blue sit.
This is why when you’re a kid you mix paints together expecting great colours, and often end up with a murky brown/black. This is typically because getting kids to understand the distinction between “Red” “Blue” and “Yellow” compared to “Magenta” “Cyan” and “Yellow” is tough, so you ended up with that less than optimal solution of Red blue and yellow.
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