No Stupid Questions
No such thing. Ask away!
!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.
All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.
Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.
If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.
Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.
If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here. This includes using AI responses and summaries.
Credits
Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!
The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!
view the rest of the comments
Like others have said, it's about additive vs subtractive color
And to start off with, probably everything you know about color is probably over simplified, or even outright wrong. Light and color and how your brain interprets that information is pretty complex stuff. Even this explanation is gonna be glossing over things.
Starting from the basics, white light contains all of the colors of the rainbow.
Your eyes, however, are mostly only sensitive to red, green, and blue light, most people only have receptors in their eyes (cones) for those 3 colors. They do pick up a little bit from the surrounding parts of the spectrum but not much, and your brain sort of fills in the gaps from there. If your red cones and green cones are both getting stimulated by light, your brain will interpret that as yellow or orange depending on just how much each is picking up.
So your monitor is starting with no light across all 3 colors (black)
And then adding light to get the desired colors.
But if you're drawing or painting, ou're starting with a white canvas, not a black monitor, so how do we go about getting the colors we want!
Well we're going to put paint or ink on the canvas to absorb the colors we don't want.
Back in elementary school art class you probably learned about complementary or opposite colors. Unfortunately the colors you learned were kind of wrong. Close enough for kids mixing finger paints, but not exactly.
The opposite of red isn't green it's cyan.
The opposite of green isn't red, its magenta
But the opposite of blue is in fact yellow, so one out of three is something I guess.
What does that actually mean though? Well yellow ink absorbs basically all of the blue light while still reflecting red and green.
Cyan absorbs all the red light, while still reflecting blue and green
And magenta absorbs all the green light while still reflecting red and blue
So by mixing and matching those 3 colors, you can dial things down from 100% white light to a mix of red green and blue that your brain can interpret as other colors.
In theory mixing a bunch of those 3 colors together, you can eventually get down to black, in practice your pigments aren't perfect, and even if they were it would get expensive to use that much of those 3 pigments which is why most color printers are CMYK, with "K" standing for black for reasons I've never bothered to look up and I'm not gonna start now.
So your monitoring is adding light from 0 up to make the color you need. It's "additive."
And paint is dialing things down from 100 to the desired color. It's "subtractive."
Hopefully that all makes sense, color is weird.
Put another way, let's say white is 100% of each red, blue and green light, and black is 0% of each. Every other color is made up of different percentages of those three.
Your monitor is counting up from zero, you just need to add the colors you want.
On a white canvas you need to subtract from 100.
Cyan is basically negative red, magenta is negative green, and yellow is negative blue.
This is a common misconception, but it has nothing to do with imperfections in the pigments. The real issue is that you don’t want each of your primaries to block a full third of the visible spectrum—you want each to block a narrow band of frequencies that overlaps as little as possible with the sensitivity curves of the other cone cells in your eyes, in order to produce fully-saturated colors. The tradeoff is that intermediate frequencies aren’t blocked by any of the primaries, which is why we need to add black.
You are right, but I felt like that kind of gets a little too far out of an easy-to-explain model, and decided to kind of push that off into the stuff I said I was going to gloss over because colors are weird
I suppose it's sort of more like the pigments are intentionally imperfect to compensate for the also imperfect way that our eyes pick up colors that aren't exactly red/green/blue
EDIT: Or perhaps from a certain point of view the pigments are more perfect than our eyes are. The point is the whole system is pretty wonky, a bunch of happy evolutionary accidents happened that allowed our ancestors to be better able to tell what fruit was ripe and spot predators, and at some point we also invented art, computers, monitors, and inkjet printers, and all we have to look at them with are some squishy orbs in our skull meant to spot berries and lions.