Color Mixing - Importance To Vision

Importance To Vision

Additive color mixing—red and green combining to make yellow, for example, or blue and yellow producing white—runs counter to the commonsense observation that, for example, yellow paint plus cyan paint makes green paint. In this case, one must understand that the wavelengths of light that reach the eye are often selected via these more intuitive subtractive processes: for example, cyan paint appears to our eye as cyan because it absorbs red wavelengths, and a yellow paint appears yellow because it absorbs blue wavelengths. When white light falls on a combination of cyan and yellow, then, both red and blue are absorbed, and green is reflected to the eye.