colour scheme
Lee Poulsen (Mon, 27 Sep 2004 12:36:15 PDT)

This is what I was taught growing up as a kid. (Although I didn't know
the terms 'secondaries' and 'tertiaries' when I was a kid!) However, at
least for me where I grew up (California and Texas), 'violet' and
'purple' were basically synonyms. Grown-ups never distinguished between
to the two when speaking to me. 'Purple' tended to be used more by us
kids and 'violet' sounded more formal and "adult".

And I learned all about mixing blue and yellow to make green, blue and
red to make purple/violet, and red and yellow to make orange. But if
you look at the outer curve of the CIE color space diagram, a triangle
with points at red, yellow, and blue encloses less of the colors than a
triangle with points at magenta, yellow, and cyan (especially since
subtractive, i.e., reflective color pigments are never as intense as
colored light and therefore always form a smaller triangle overall). I
think that due to two things, 1) the non-natural-ness of cyan and
magenta in historical human color terminology, and 2) the resemblance
of cyan as a shade of blue and magenta as a kind of overly intense
pink/red, these two colors were just lumped in with blue and red. And
therefore you ended up with red, yellow, and blue being the pigment
primary colors. (Plus, I think sources for cyan and magenta pigments to
make paints of those colors was very hard to come by in nature before
the modern era of synthesizing compounds and synthetics. There are not
too many teal and magenta rocks, minerals, animal products or plant
items.)

However, you can get a much wider gamut or range of many different
colors if you actually use magenta, yellow, and cyan/teal as your
pigment primaries. And that's why virtually every color printer I've
ever heard of, inkjet, laser, or other, uses those three colors. (As
well as modern color printing processes which all seem to use the CMYK
colors as their bases.) If you use a color laser printer very much,
then you'll have had a lot of experience with the cyan and magenta
toner cartridges (as well as the yellow and black toner cartridges)
letting loose some of the toner and getting the brilliant cyan and
magenta toner dust all over things from time to time.

Using the CMYK primaries, you get:

PRIMARIES: Magenta, Yellow, Cyan
SECONDARIES: Red, Green, Blue
TERTIARIES: Magenta-Red (rose red), Red-Yellow (orange), Yellow-Green
(chartreuse), Green-Cyan (aqua), Cyan-Blue (turquoise), Magenta-Blue
(purple/violet)

--Lee Poulsen
Pasadena area, California, USDA Zone 9-10On Sep 25, 2004, at 2:39 AM,
Jamie wrote: