Totally Business News Story
Colors
08/13/2008 1:57 PM
A while back, I was having a discussion about colors with an artist friend. It started with the hexadecimal value of black (000000). This means that there is no red, no green, and no blue in the color. His argument is that if there are no colors, we should see white.
I always remember similar arguments in both my science and art classes as a kid. The science teachers told us that the primary colors are red, green, and blue, while the art teachers said that the primaries where red, yellow, and blue. They never really made it clear that the science teachers were talking about spectral colors (light) while the art teachers were talking about pigment colors.
Spectral colors are subtractive. This means that they filter out everything but themselves. If you look at a blue light, you only see the blue hues and no red or green hues. If you blend all primary colors, you see all colors. Hence, white light. This didn't make sense to me until I took photography in high school.
Pigment colors are solid objects. The best example is paint. If you mix yellow paint and blue paint, you get green paint. You are adding one color to another opposed to taking that color away.
Now we get to my major confusion. The Glad® ZipLock™ commercials stated that yellow and blue make green. It's pretty simple. One side of the zipper is yellow and the other side is blue. Once you close the bag, the zipper becomes green. This meant that the bag is sealed properly. This is simple additive color science. But the zipper is translucent. This means that it allows light to travel trough the zipper ends. Making the colors spectral. How do we get green light from a blue light and a secondary yellow light?
