Additive vs. Subtractive Color
Working with light: additive primaries
- Red, green and blue components are added by the superposition property of electromagnetism
- Conceptually: start with black, primaries add light
Working with pigments: subtractive primaries
- Typical inks (CMYK): cyan, magenta, yellow, black
- Conceptually: start with white, pigments filter out light
- The pigments remove parts of the spectrum
- Inks interact in nonlinear ways--makes converting from monitor color to printer color a challenging problem
- Black ink (K) used to ensure a high quality black can be printed