“Yeah! The real primary colours are CMY!”
Also bullshit.
Our RGB primaries are a simplification that comes from availability of pigments. While blue was originally a very rare and valuable pigment made from precious stones, it was still more available than magenta or cyan, which are made synthetically.
All of the following is taking paint mixing into mind.
When looking at a continuous colour wheel:
You can see where each colour sits on the spectrum. When you consider a RBY palette, we are limited to essentially the colours in this triangle:
Mixing a vibrant Purple or Green is often difficult with a basic rby colour palette, and a Magenta or Cyan is impossible. We define a primary colour as “foundational colours that cannot be created by mixing other colours”, which means that CMY are real primaries, right? Well, if we look at the CMy palette:
We DO get a wider range of colours, but you’ll notice that a true purple, green, blue, and red are still outside of our range. You can get a pretty close red with Yellow and Magenta, but it will never be as vibrant as a pure Red pigment. So then Red is a primary?
When painting, you should use the colours that you need for the work, and mix from there. The ‘primary colours’ are a tool to teach students the theory of colour mixing. It is not a perfect guide, but teaching complex colour theory to novice painters is just intimidation. Most people get an intro to art, learn RBY, and then leave art, don’t think about it again until a TikTok titled “school LIED to you” introduced CMY.
EDIT: this is from the perspective of an artist. I am not an expert, and certainly got something wrong in here, but the primary argument has always annoyed me
Are you confusing subtractive and additive colors? For subtractive (used for e.g. paints) you use CMY, with white being what you get with no colors and black is a perfect mix of full CMY. With subtractive each color takes light away.
Additive (used for lights) works the other way round: the base colors are RGB. No light colors is black, all light colors is white. Adding another color in additive adds more light.
So, sure, if you use additive base colors in a subtractive process, you will get garbage and vice versa.
The real fascinating thing is that Impossible Colors exist, which means it’s kind of impossible to actually represent all colors or impossible to precisely represent them.
Imo it seems colors are relative to how our brain and eyes are adapting to their current field of view, meaning the color you experience is not fully dependent on the light an object actually reflects nor the activation of your rods and cones but is dependent on the way your brain processes those signals with each other. Ergo, you can’t actually represent all colors precisely unless you can control every environmental variable like the color of every object in someone’s field of view and where someone’s eyes have been looking previously etc.
And here I thought the primary colors were RGB
RGB are the additive colors (light projected) CMYK are the subtractive colors (light reflected)
Any set of colors can make a primary color palette. It’s just that we most often mean for human eyesight.
Even then, when talking about perception, because the response of red and green comes in our eye overlap we need imaginary colors to uniquely express them. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/eb/CIExy1931_ProPhoto.svg/1280px-CIExy1931_ProPhoto.svg.png
There are different sets of primaries used when we talk about screen, print, light, and paint.
Most people learn RBY through painting, whether as a child, or in art classes at school, and assume it applies to all colour.
Well written!
Yes we can use any colors as “primary colors”, I use 6 when I paint (plus burnt Sienna & Umber because I’m lazy).
The colors you chose lets you mix up paints in a gamut, a gamut of colors is what you can get from those “primaries” that constitute said gamut.
Cheers.
I think the original quote was something like “Eraserhead is my most spiritual film” “Elaborate on that.” “No.”
I miss him so fucking much bros
I believe the actual quote is “Eraser head is my most spiritual film”.
I imagine you are right
they are, it comes back when we were way more limited in paint colors… should be cyan, magenta, yellow.
Right, CMY for ink, RGB for light though.
this image is pretty helpful. With light you’re starting with white (the center of the left diagram) and subtracting colours to get your ideal colour. With ink, you’re adding colour to get your ideal colour, and adding all of your colours will get you to black.
Uhm… No.
It depends on you doing additive or subtractive colour mixing.
Additive mixing (e.g. light, in the form of colour LEDs or similar colour sources) must utilise RGB, due to how physics works.
Subtractive mixing (such as, printing, painting, etc.) on the other hand is better off with CMY+K for higher precision, again, for physics reasons.
ummm… yeah i know.
primary colors are from subtractive mixing, ie mixing paint… like i said.
and it originated from back when they couldn’t make a good cyan or magenta, so the color wheel had blue and red instead.
you’re supposed to be able to mix the primary colors to get any other color, but that’s bullshit unless you want it to look like a medieval painting.
additive color came a few centuries later with electricity and artificial lighting and is not relevant.
CMY(K) are also no good primary colors.
they look pretty good to me
James Hoffman is dead??
/jk, but this meme is really too sad to joke about…
That comment was really
awful, just super nasty and totally uncalled-forinteresting.
Well, Plato had some unique ideas about colors, too. He was a genius nevertheless…
lmfao
He was a master of comedy even though it wasn’t his focus. He just wanted to make cool art, and to him his movies were like moving paintings. I think Wild at Heart could be his funniest film.
