Tuesday, January 31, 2012

Primary Colors

Featuring OK Go and a video they made for Sesame Street



Very good, but this only applies to pigments (paints and dyes) and is called subtractive color mixing. Mixing light, such as in live theater, is very different. The primary colors of light are red, green and blue. I think they need a sequel on additive color mixing!
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8 comments:

  1. jedwisJanuary 31, 2012 at 1:38 PM

    I like it Hale, good stuff. Very entertaining, like watching a tire display go round & round. How do they move around without moving their feet? lol

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  2. kkditherJanuary 31, 2012 at 3:49 PM

    OK Go did that cool video with the treadmills. I still don't get how all those colors combined in light make white. When you do it with paint it is ugly brown.

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  3. hale-boppJanuary 31, 2012 at 6:35 PM

    Our eyes have three types of cones to detect color: one cone responds to red light, one to green and one to blue. Hence, these are the three primary colors of light. When all three types of cones are nicely stimulated, the brain interprets that as white light.

    Now for pigments. They work by absorbing light. So a red object reflects mostly red light and a blue object reflects mostly blue light. Yellow is the oddball. It reflects yellow light but red and green combine to make yellow in additive color mixing so yellow can also reflect red and green light. So when you mix red and yellow, the reflection is a combination of red, green and yellow which gives orange (the ratios can change the final result of course).

    When you mix blue and yellow, blue absorbs the red. Remember yellow is a light is a combination of green and red so green is still reflected (but not red and blue which are absorbed) and you get green.

    Blue and red are two primary colors of light so when you mix them you get magenta/purple, similar to what you get when you mix blue and red light.

    When you mix all the colors of pigments, most light is absorbed leaving a muddy brownish (the primary pigments aren't perfect so they don't give you black).

    Colors are not as simple as you learned in grade school art!

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  4. drewzepmeisterJanuary 31, 2012 at 8:39 PM

    That is true, hale! Being a printer, I made a few mistakes and learned from it. For example, trapping colors. If you try to print yellow over black, it will turn green. Same goes red over black (turns brown).

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  5. sylviaJanuary 31, 2012 at 9:34 PM

    i thought i knew everything about the color wheel until i wrote a very pissed off letter to alex trebek telling him he was wrong about how many colors there are in the rainbow...

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  6. OrbsCorbsJanuary 31, 2012 at 9:46 PM

    Did Trebek himself respond, or an asst.?

    Whatever was in the basic Crayola box, that's what I know about colors.

    Oh yeah, and if you mix everything up, it comes out ugly brown. I guess everyone learns that.

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  7. sylviaFebruary 1, 2012 at 6:40 AM

    nobody responded - and then i found out i was wrong. despite the 3 primary colors (red yellow blue)& 3 secondary colors (orange green & violet) that i learned in art class, there are actually 7 colors in the rainbow.

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  8. jedwisFebruary 1, 2012 at 7:42 AM

    I learn way too much on this blog. Now I'm craving the SNL skits for Jeopardy...very funny...What does a dog say? Rough, just like your mother likes it, Trebek. lol

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