On Sun, Nov 02, 2014 at 07:47:42PM -0700, Gillian Densmore wrote: > Anyone care to speculate why printers don't use Red Green Blue + > Saturation, I ask as you can make most any concievable color this > way. >
You just need to ask an artist who uses real paints this. Basically, pigments work by absorbing certain frequencies. If you absorb red, the resulting pigment looks like cyan, if you absorb green, you get magenta and if you absorb blue you get yellow. By mixing these three pigments on the page in different amounts, you can absorb differing amounts of the RGB components of the incident light. Printers will usually also add a black pigment, because if you add equal parts of cyan, magenta and yellow, the result looks like a murky brown, rather than the crisp black that you'd like. Also note that children tend to learn these "secondary" colour combinations, such as yellow+blue (really cyan) makes green, and so on, because they're exposed to it through paints. The next generation, brought up on iPads, may well learn the primary combinations eg "red+green = yellow". Cheers -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics [email protected] University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au Latest project: The Amoeba's Secret (http://www.hpcoders.com.au/AmoebasSecret.html) ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
