The Yellow controversy: Since we learned color at an early age with paint and pigment. one of the first things we were taught was primary and secondary color mixing. Now mind you we are mixing pigments. So if this is a painting blog the primary colors are red, blue and yellow and the secondary colors are green, orange and purple. Great!

However this is photography and we are learning about light and light color. There are two light color wheels one is additive color and one is subtractive color. Think of it like this: to get white on a white sheet of paper we need to make sure we don’t add anything to it. In fact if there is color on our white sheet of paper we would want to take it off the sheet (subtract it) in order to keep it white. If the white sheet of paper was filled with all colors it would be dark and close to black. This is your subtractive color wheel. The absents of color is white. Similar to grade school and that pigment based color wheel. You will see this used in the printing industry and the colors used are cyan, magenta, yellow and black often called (cmyk). Cyan, magenta and yellow are the secondary colors on the light color wheel.

Now lets look at a white screen in the movie theater with all the lights off in a light tight room. What you see is nothing just pure black. You need to add some light to see something (additive color wheel here). Say I had a flashlight with a red gel over it and shined it on the screen, what you would see is red light. Now I turned on another flash light with a green gel over it and shined it on the wall. I would see red, green and where the two intersected yellow. Yes kids, green and red make yellow with light! If I add a blue gelled flash light all three of the primary colors would add up to neutral white light. Where two primaries intersect you will see the secondary colors cyan, magenta and yellow.

This knowledge is used every time you sit down in Photoshop or go to print a photo so it is good to know what you are doing with color.

“RED light rays only contain red because it is a primary color. So GREEN light rays only contain green, and BLUE rays only contain blue. Again, that is because these are the PRIMARY colors.

Secondary colors – magenta, cyan, and yellow are considered SECONDARY colors because each one is a mix of two PRIMARY colors. Mixing PRIMARY & SECONDARY colors will give you TERTIARY (third tier) colors …. making up all the visible colors in the spectrum.”