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Question on CG Color Theory


Mistro

Mistro

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Growing up as an artist, I know that the primary colors Red, Blue and Yellow cannot be mixed. When I shop for paints I always buy the primary colors, black and white. I would also buy emerald green as that is hard to mix. My question is why are the primary colors in digital art Red, Green, and Blue? Why not yellow instead of green? Just curious.
 
It is more common to find RGB to be used as primary colours, in fact it is only artists that use RYB as far as I know. Of corse printing is normally done with CMYK.

The reason being that the cones in our eyes are most sensitive to the colours RGB, which when mixed, they can more accurately create different colours in the spectrum of light human eyes can see than RYB.
 
Mistro, that is a great, very fundamental question. You would likely be shocked to know how much has been written on this exact topic, and to know that it is a topic of current R&D activity (ie, for monitors, TVs, etc.)

Here's a good introduction to the topic (ie, the tip of the iceberg):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primary_color


HTH,

Tom
 
I have to confess. I been using a four primary palette all along and didn't realize it. When I think about it, it is impossible to mix emerald green (or any rich greens from yellow and blue or black) from RYB. My thoughts of what primary colors were was based on whether a color can be mixed or not. Guess I just learned and realized something. So now I wonder if they ever implement a four primary for displays and it becomes common, if applications like Photoshop will introduce it as well. I will dig some more on this interesting topic.
 
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Don't forget, a bit of the old apples-and-oranges thing has crept into this discussion. The way 99.9% of the population use RGB is in additive mode, whereas RYB (as painters use it) is subtractive.

With respect to your question about displays that use more than three colors, it's definitely being worked on by TV manufacturers, but as you suggest, it's a very big deal to switch over to it because of cost, increase in the needed bandwidth, etc. OTOH, doing so is exactly analogous to Epson and some of the other printer mfgrs going from 4 color inksets to 6 and more colors, so I think there is a very good chance this will happen.

T
 
I think it will be interesting to see what methods they use for holographic TV's, when they have been developed to hd quality.
 
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