additive color

For many of us, our first exposure to additive color was in elementary school when we learned about Roy G. Biv. In nature white light is best represented by sunlight, which is a combination of all colors of the spectrum. When white light strikes an object that produces a prism effect, those colors are separated into a color continuum which is made up of thousands of different colors. Since the brain likes simplicity, it groups all of these many colors into seven distinct bands of color. In order of appearance are: Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo and Violet.

Once separated, colored light can also be joined together. One of the most common applications of this is in the realm of color monitor technology. Color television and computer screens both create many different colors by emitting many small beams of different colored light which are mixed together. Although there are seveal different technologies that accomplish this, one, RGB, is probably the most prevalent.

the RGB variant of
additive color

Mixing colors in RGB (which stands for Red, Green and Blue) is pretty bizarre for most of us who are accustomed to thinking in terms of subtractive color. Yellow is made by mixing Red and Green. Cyan is made by mixing Blue and Green, and Magenta is made by mixing Red and Blue. White is the mixture of Red, Green and Blue at full strength, while Black occurs when there is an absence of light (as evidenced when a power surge cuts the power to our computer before we've saved the big project that's due the next day). Strange as it may seem, color that we see that comes directly from a light source, that is, without being reflected off of a secondary object, is mixed in precisely this way.

-tsc