RGB PRIMARY COLORS TV

'A small amount of yellow primary removes a small amount of blue light from the original white stimulus (e.g. 'The yellow primary controls the amount of blue light reaching our eyes,' Fairchild says. The reason behind these inaccurate terms? Light. 'The long-wavelength sensitive cone, for example, has peak sensitivity in the yellow-green part of the spectrum, not the red part.' 'It is often mistakenly written that RGB are optimal because the visual system has receptors in the eye that respond optimally to red, green and blue light but this is a misconception,' he says. Most sources will tell you red, green and blue are the additive primaries, as Newton originally proposed, but Westland says it's a lot more complicated than that. 'In most devices, three different colors of light (primaries) are emitted and as they are used they are added together.' But the range - or gamut - of colors that can be produced from three additive primaries varies depending upon what the primaries are.

RGB PRIMARY COLORS TV

'In simple terms, additive color mixing is where we have a device such as a TV or a smartphone screen that emits light,' Westland says. And if you've been onstage, you might have looked up behind the curtain to see the red, green and blue lights that serve as theatre's additive primary colors.' Your computer screen and TV work this way. When mixed together, red, green and blue lights make white light. And the red and green also make a lighter color - and a surprise to nearly everyone who sees it – yellow! So red, green and blue are additive primaries because they can make all other colors, even yellow.

The red and blue mix is lighter too, a beautiful magenta. 'When the blue flashlight circle intersects the green one, there is a lighter blue-green shape,' he says.

With each mix, we add lightness, therefore we call this kind of mixture additive light.' If you imagine each flashlight is fitted with a transparent color filter - one red, one green and one blue - Raiselis says that's the key to understanding additive color mixing. The shared intersection of two flashlight circles is brighter than either of the circles, and the third flashlight circle intersection will be brighter still. 'A simple way to think about additive light is to imagine three flashlights projecting individual circles of light onto a wall. 'Additive colors are those which make more light when they are mixed together,' says Richard Raiselis, Associate Professor of Art at Boston University School of Visual Arts. Newton deemed those three colors the 'primary' colors since they were the basic ingredients needed to create clear, white light. When he was 23 years old, Isaac Newton made a revolutionary discovery: By using prisms and mirrors, he could combine the red, green and blue (RGB) regions of a reflected rainbow to create white light. Let's talk about the additive system first. Let's get into those distinctions - but fair warning: everything you know about primary colors is about to change before your eyes. The subtractive primaries also modulate red, green and blue light, but a little less directly.' The additive primaries do this very directly by controlling the amounts of red, green and blue light that we see and therefore almost directly map to the visual responses. Those are roughly sensitive to red, green and blue light.

'That is to modulate the responses of the three types of cone photoreceptors in our eyes. 'Both systems are accomplishing one task,' says Mark Fairchild, professor and director of the Program of Color Science/Munsell Color Science Laboratory at Rochester Institute of Technology in New York. This leads to two types of colour mixing, additive and subtractive.' 'Light enters our eyes in two ways: (1) directly from a light source and (2) reflected from an object. 'We see because light enters our eyes,' he says. Stephen Westland, Professor of Colour Science at the University of Leeds in England breaks things down into simple terms (before getting into the confusing complexities), in an email.

Rgb primary colors