Color wheels are wrong? How color vision actually works
This article tries to sensationalize and obfuscate something that is pretty simple in reality.<p>RGB are the primaries in light. By mixing these three colors you can create any color the human vision system can perceive (yes, because of tristimulus).<p>When white light hits a material, some of those RGB wavelengths are absorbed (subtracted). RGB - GB(Cyan) = Red, RGB - RG(Yellow) = Blue, RGB - RB(Magenta) = Green. Thus, Cyan, Magenta and Yellow act as primaries (colors from which you can construct any visible color) for materials that absorb, not emit light.<p>The forth primary in print media, Black, is simply added because inks are imperfect and a mix of CMY inks yields a kind of murky black (plus it wastes ink).<p>It's a historical simplification to say that "red, yellow and blue" are the primaries for paint, the red works like a magenta, the blue works like a cyan. They sell Cyan/Yellow/Magenta primaries for oil/acrylics and if you paint with these you'll get a brighter, wider palette but you can get there with a traditional palette by adding whites and other pigments.<p>The tone of the article is awful. The opening sentence, "Ask any artist..." is flatly untrue, this stuff is basic for most visual artists (I first learned about the CMY primaries in a community ed. Painting I class). It's not that the article is factually wrong, it's just basic stuff presented as if it were obscure or clever.<p>None of this makes the color wheel or any other color theory any less valid. The "four color" wheel he lists at the end is not wrong, it's just silly: you could pick any points on the wheel and their opposites and have the same thing.