this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2023
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Explain Like I'm Five

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How do computers make any color using red/green/blue, when paints make every clor using red/yellow/blue?o (wirebase.org)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/explainlikeimfive
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Im always confused by RGB. I learned that if you want orange, you mix red and yellow. If you want green, you mix blue and yellow, if you want purple, you mix red and blue.

How is it that computers need green and not yellow?

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago

It's kinda cool (to me at least lol) how literal the terms "additive" and "subtractive" for color mixing are. With additive mixing (such as on a computer screen), you start with black and add the primary colors (RGB) in different combinations. If you add all of them you get white.

Subtractive mixing (like pigments) starts from white and "subtracts" those same RGB colors. You can think of cyan, magenta, and yellow as "minus red", "minus green", and "minus blue" respectively, since that's which wavelengths thise pigments absorb. So mixing cyan and magenta for instance gives you "white (RGB) minus red minus green", which leaves only blue.