NameOfWhimsy

joined 1 year ago

It's kinda cool (to me at least lol) how literal the terms "additive" and "subtractive" for color mixing are. With additive mixing (such as on a computer screen), you start with black and add the primary colors (RGB) in different combinations. If you add all of them you get white.

Subtractive mixing (like pigments) starts from white and "subtracts" those same RGB colors. You can think of cyan, magenta, and yellow as "minus red", "minus green", and "minus blue" respectively, since that's which wavelengths thise pigments absorb. So mixing cyan and magenta for instance gives you "white (RGB) minus red minus green", which leaves only blue.

Just to clarify, with pigments (subtractive color mixing) the primary colors are in reality cyan, magenta, and yellow, which is why printers use CMY (and K, which is black). Blue and red are kinda close to cyan and magenta though, so those are sometimes stated as the primary colors along with yellow even though that's not exact