A common misconception is that we can combine all the colors in the rainbow (red, blue, green, yellow, violet, indigo, and orange) to produce white.
What Colors Make White? (Everything You Need to Know)
Plain and clean, the color white makes a bold statement without saying much. The classification of white as a color is up for discussion. It doesn’t exactly belong on the spectrum, which explains why. When every wavelength is reflected, our eyes see the color white. On the other hand, we perceive the color black when a negligible amount of light is reflected.
White conjures images of purity, orderliness, and innocence, and it might give a room a sensation of emptiness. White spaces may also seem roomy and vacant. White may occasionally seem icy as well – a look that frequently evokes ideas of sterility and blandness.
Indeed, while looking at white, many people imagine ‘clean slates’, which is why the color is also often linked to ‘new beginnings’ or ‘fresh starts’. White may express a variety of positive qualities, including freshness, purity, and simplicity.
Since it is an anomaly in the color family, it is natural to wonder about the color components of white.
Color Theory – White
Saturation is a basic aspect of color that has to be understood. Saturated colors are deeper and richer.
Additionally, you may combine hues to make new shades, which is how we have ended up with such a large and vibrant collection of colors.
Mixing Colors
There are two ways you can mix colors. The first is additive mixing, which is the process of combining two different hues of light.
Since every light builds upon the previous ones, the resulting color can be brighter.
Then, there is subtractive mixing, which is the type that most people are familiar with. This technique involves blending colored substances like paints to produce a different hue.
While subtractive mixing is the most common form of color mixing, it is considerably limited as far as the color white is concerned.
Are Black and White Colors?
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Written by
Jonathan Hogeback
Editorial intern, Encyclopaedia Britannica.
Jonathan Hogeback
Fact-checked by
The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
Encyclopaedia Britannica’s editors oversee subject areas in which they have extensive knowledge, whether from years of experience gained by working on that content or via study for an advanced degree. They write new content and verify and edit content received from contributors.
The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
Color, in terms of pigment, is every shade and hue found in a brand new box of crayons (and any combination you could make from them). To put it in scientific terms, however, color is simply the range of visible light that humans can see. Different colors, such as red and orange, and other invisible spectrums such as infrared light, move around in waves of electromagnetic energy. The human eye is capable of seeing only light with wavelengths between 380 and 750 nanometers. For example, the visible spectrum begins with the wavelengths that we call violet, between 380 and 450 nm, then moves on to blue, green, yellow, and orange, and ends with what we call red, between 590 and 750 nm. When you look at someone’s red shirt, for instance, that shirt will be absorbing or scattering wavelengths of light lower than 590 nm, so those waves will not reach your eyes. But a red shirt will be reflecting some wavelength between 590 and 750 nm, which your eyes process as red.
The trouble in this scientific approach is that some colors considered important in the crayon box are notoriously missing. Black and white, as well as colors like pink, don’t seem to have a place in a visible spectrum of light that goes only from violet to red. So does this mean that black and white aren’t real colors?
It depends on how you want to define color. If color is solely the way physics describes it, the visible spectrum of light waves, then black and white are outcasts and don’t count as true, physical colors. Colors like white and pink are not present in the spectrum because they are the result of our eyes’ mixing wavelengths of light. White is what we see when all wavelengths of light are reflected off an object, while pink is a mix of the red and violet wavelengths. Black, on the other hand, is what our eyes see in a space that reflects very little light at all. That’s why, if you enter a room with the lights turned off, everything is dark and black. If you include in the definition of color, however, all of the ways in which human eyes process light and the lack of it, then black and white, as well as pink, earn their places in the crayon box.
Color Mixing
All colors can be created from a combination of the three primary colors of red, green and blue. The secondary colors of cyan, magenta and yellow are created from a combination of two primaries, and white light is perceived from the combination of all three.
How it works:
The human eye perceives color using three types of receptor whose sensitivities peak in the red, green and blue regions of the spectrum. Other colors are recognized by stimulating more than one type of receptor to a varying degree. Because of this, all colors can be perceived by different combinations of the three primary colors (this is the principal of color TV, as the TV Color Perception demo shows). In this demo, the three primary colors are projected onto a screen and overlapped (figure 1). Where two primaries overlap, a secondary color is created. Equal intensities of red, green and blue creates white light.
figure 1. Colors produced by mixing red, green and blue light
Setting it up:
The three primary color slides are backed with aluminum foil with 1cm diameter holes to give the circular pattern on the screen. Each slide is mounted in a slide projector and angled at the screen so that the overlap as shown in figure 1 is obtained.
Our slides are manufactured by Sergent-Welch (3662). Choosing any set of RGB filters could cause problems with color and intensity balancing in trying to obtain a pure white.
