Comment on Why is #FFFFFF white, but mixing red green and blue paint is black?
AbouBenAdhem@lemmy.world 3 days agoIn theory mixing a bunch of those 3 colors together, you can eventually get down to black, in practice your pigments aren’t perfect
This is a common misconception, but it has nothing to do with imperfections in the pigments. The real issue is that you don’t want each of your primaries to block a full third of the visible spectrum—you want each to block a narrow band of frequencies that overlaps as little as possible with the sensitivity curves of the other cone cells in your eyes, in order to produce fully-saturated colors. The tradeoff is that intermediate frequencies aren’t blocked by any of the primaries, which is why we need to add black.
Fondots@lemmy.world 3 days ago
You are right, but I felt like that kind of gets a little too far out of an easy-to-explain model, and decided to kind of push that off into the stuff I said I was going to gloss over because colors are weird
I suppose it’s sort of more like the pigments are intentionally imperfect to compensate for the also imperfect way that our eyes pick up colors that aren’t exactly red/green/blue