I'm curious about how the machines that do color matching at paint stores work. They use some kind of light and sensor to match the color of a surface to a paint color, but I know that paint and other pigments are considered to be subtractive color. How does this color matching process differ from color matching with RGB?
briana-jin-zhang
I always found it weird that in color theory for art, the primary colors are red, yellow, and blue with red + yellow = orange, yellow + blue = green, red + blue = purple, and red + yellow + blue = brown, but for light they are very different. The reason why is because the colors you see is actually the one ray of light that the object does not absorb. This is how paint is considered subtractive, because for example, red paint absorbs all light except red and green paint absorbs all light except green, so when you add the two paints together, they are absorbing even more light which yields the darker, brown result.
I'm curious about how the machines that do color matching at paint stores work. They use some kind of light and sensor to match the color of a surface to a paint color, but I know that paint and other pigments are considered to be subtractive color. How does this color matching process differ from color matching with RGB?
I always found it weird that in color theory for art, the primary colors are red, yellow, and blue with red + yellow = orange, yellow + blue = green, red + blue = purple, and red + yellow + blue = brown, but for light they are very different. The reason why is because the colors you see is actually the one ray of light that the object does not absorb. This is how paint is considered subtractive, because for example, red paint absorbs all light except red and green paint absorbs all light except green, so when you add the two paints together, they are absorbing even more light which yields the darker, brown result.