Causes of Color
Color is a fascinating concept and far more complicated than one might expect considering that the names of colors are one of the first things we learn as children in school. Though color theory is most often studied by artists, designers, photographers and other creative professions, how a color comes to be is actually quite scientific.
Scholars have learned that all the colors in the universe, from the yellows and oranges of leaves in autumn to a neon green paint job on a hot rod, originate from a mere fifteen fundamental physical causes. And these fifteen causes of color combined with the signals received by your eye and sent to your brain are what make us say things like “Wow, what a beautiful sunset!”
The average human eye has three types of cones that sense three different sections of the light spectrum. One cone perceives mostly short wavelengths (450 nanometers) which translates into a bluish color, another cone perceives mostly medium wavelengths (540 nanometers) which we see as a green color and the third cone perceives mostly long wavelengths (580 nanometers) which we interpret as having a red color.
Now anyone who is familiar with photo editing software will immediately recognize these three colors as those that make up the RGB spectrum. In most software of this type, a person is able to adjust the level of each color individually thus changing the overall appearance of the photograph.
The RGB (Red Green Blue) colorspace actually grew out of early experiments done in the late 1920s by W. David Wright and John Guild who mapped all the colors visible to the human eye in a three dimensional graph.As for most people, from an early age it’s hard to grasp the idea that red, green and blue combine to make white. As anyone who used finger paints as a child will attest to, combining red, green and blue paint only leads to a murky brown.
The difference, of course, is that the RGB colorspace is an additive model that combines all primary colored lights, while black is the absence of light. In the CMYK model, it is just the opposite: white is the natural color of the paper or other background, while black results from a full combination of colored inks. CMYK, the model on which the entire printing process is based, stands for Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and K is used to represent Black, though the letter K actually comes from the word Key, as in the key line on the metal plate used to transfer the ink to the paper.
The interesting part comes when we at Colourtime try to match colors designed in an RGB space to our output colors based on a CMYK model. But of course, with the level of expertise we have, it’s no wonder the documents we print end up looking fabulous every time!To learn more about these forms of color, from “made light” to “lost light” to “changed light,” visit the Causes of Color website.
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