colors: RGB versus primary colors

PB
Posted By
Paul_Bullen
Oct 3, 2003
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272
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5
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I am learning and relearning a lot as I slowly move through Lynch’s _Hidden Power of Photoshop Elements 2_, but there is a question that has come up that is not addressed in the book: If the three primary colors are red, blue, and yellow, while are color photographs separated into red, blue, and _green_ layers?
Thanks for any guidance.

Paul (Bullen)
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color rgb vs

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CS
Chuck_Snyder
Oct 3, 2003
Paul, the primary colors for light are red, green and blue; if you shine three flashlights – one red, one green, and one blue – at a single spot, the spot will turn out to be white. I think that makes it additive color. As I recall, red, blue and yellow are the primary colors for painting, which is subtractive color (paint absorbs certain colors of light and allows others to reflect).

Someone will come along with a much more cogent response, but if you remember that R+G+B=W for light, you’re pretty much there…

Chuck
EM
Elena_Murphy
Oct 3, 2003
You’re right Chuck. Red, green, and blue are colors that combine to create white light. The absence of all three colors is black, which is why it’s dark out at night. Cyan, magenta, and yellow, the three colors that are what your printer use, are the opposite and the more ink you have, the closer you get to black.
However, primary colors, on the other hand, refer to the color spectrum. Red, blue, and yellow are all colors that are not made up of other colors, hence they are primary. For example, the secondary colors are made up of combinations of the primaries; red+blue=purple, red+yellow=orange, and blue+yellow=green. Purple, orange, and green are all secondary colors. Then, there are tertiary colors…
CS
Chuck_Snyder
Oct 3, 2003
Elena, I think we’re both right, based on the link provided below:

http://www.beer.org/~tpark/color.html
DS
Dick_Smith
Oct 3, 2003
Elena and Chuck,

Thanks to you both for a very "colorful" discussion. I will be better able to answer questions from some of my students in a Digital Imaging class that I teach.

Kudos to you both.

Dickj

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PB
Paul_Bullen
Oct 4, 2003
Thanks for people’s comments. I am still confused, but it will help.

If Dick isn’t already familiar with it, he might enjoy Josef Albers, _The Interaction of Color: Unabridged Text and Selected Plates [Revised Edition]_ (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1975)–ix + 81 pages, $12. I was forced to move on to other things before finishing it, but I understand it to be a classic on the aesthetic-psychological effects of colors when they a combined (next to each other, not on top of each other) in various ways.
–Paul (Bullen)

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