modern color theory (concepts) color theory

This page introduces the conceptual basis

of artists' "color theory" — the traditional body of lore applied by
modern color theory
painters and photographers to the design and creation of
(applications)
images. The addition of "modern" indicates that I compare the
traditional (and still popular) tenets of color theory to the talking about color
answers provided by modern color science.
misconceptions in traditional
The companion page on modern color theory (applications) color theory
provides practical insights into pigment attributes, paint
formulation, the behavior of color mixtures, palette design and additive & subtractive color
the principles of color contrast — the practical knowledge mixing
necessary to put color theory concepts to work.
visual color relationships
This page is a condensed summary of the content included in my
pages on color science and artistic color theory. summary of modern color theory

Before we start: what is color theory for? Historically, its

teaching literature has claimed to provide artists with four broad
of knowledge:

• Insight into subtractive color mixing with paints, inks or

dyes.

• Prediction of the color context effects produced in colors that

are viewed in contrasting surrounds or visual patterns.

• Guidance in the selection of color schemes or color design

used in paintings, furnishings and architectural interiors.

• Identification of the relationship between individual colors and

ideas or emotions — usually called color symbolism.

An exploration of the issues important to color design is provided

on the page color harmony & contrast.

Traditional color theory has implicitly been about conceptual

color, my term for color treated in the abstract rather than as
physical paints or visual color relationships. Conceptual color
is divorced from materials or colorants, independent of viewing
context, and mixes according to idealized rules. In both this
page and the next, I emphasize the differences between
conceptual and material color, as each influences the visual color
we experience through our eyes.

talking about color

"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather
scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean — neither
more nor less."

— Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass

When you consider that painters are in the business of

manipulating color, it is surprising that very few artists can
describe color clearly. In fact, a muddled color lexicon is one of
the hallmarks of "color theory" past — and of color theory even
today. Betty Edwards, in her recent Color: A Course In
Mastering the Art of Mixing Colors (2006), is an enthusiastic
contributor to this carefree performance tradition.

Why do artists need to talk about color accurately and clearly?

Simply because how we talk about color affects how we
understand color, and how we understand color affects how we
identify, manipulate and use colors in painting.

Four Kinds of Color. One of the difficulties in talking about

color is that color seems to exist in several different forms.
Indeed, Paul Green-Armytage, in one of the many web pages
now lost to oblivion, claimed to identify seven types of color. For
the artist, however, it is helpful to discriminate between four
types of color.

1. There are four fundamental categories of color:

material color, radiant color, visual color, and conceptual
color.

• material color is the physical pigment, dye, filter, pigmented

or dyed material, or light source that originates the experience
of color. Artists very often speak of "mixing different colors" or of
"choosing colors for a painting", and what they are talking about
is material color (pigments).

Material color is the sense in which we equate color with the

physical world, and speak of a pigment as cadmium orange or
phthalo green, or a dye as yellow number two, or talk about a
white shirt or a red sky.

• radiant color is the mixture of light wavelengths emitted by a

light source, or transmitted by a filter or other semitransparent
medium, or reflected from an opaque material such as paint, ink,
dye, or photographic emulsion. This defines color very narrowly,
as a physical stimulus independent of any other lights or
surfaces around it.

Radiant color is exactly specified as a spectrophotometric

curve, which can be measured in lights, filters, surfaces and
colored substances such as pigments, inks or dyes. When
measuring radiant color, the principal assumption is that the
surface attributes of the material color (including color
unevenness, texture, gloss or mirrorlike reflectivity, iridescence,
and translucency) do not significantly affect the
spectrophotometric measurement.

Radiant color is not equivalent to the material color of a pigment,

dye or filter: we never experience material color directly, but
only through the radiant color it creates. In addition, a pigment's
radiant color changes as it is diluted, mixed with different
vehicles, applied to different surfaces, or viewed from different
angles or under different types of light. The same "color"
(material color) can produce an enormous range of different
"colors" (radiant colors).

• visual color is the perception of radiant color in a specific

viewing context — usually as a physical surface in a specific
place under a specific intensity and color of illumination.

Visual color literally does not exist outside individual

consciousness. There is an enormous body of evidence to show
that color experience is remarkably personal: it varies
significantly across individuals, for a variety of reasons (genetics,
age, experience). In addition, the same radiant color can appear
as very different visual colors, depending on the intensity of the
light and the context in which it is viewed. As a practical matter,
then, the connection between a material color and visual color
can be highly variable across individuals and viewing contexts.

Although visual color is personal, it does not have to be private.

We can fairly reliably communicate visual color to other people
through a variety of color specification strategies. For these to be
effective, five conditions must be met when a radiant color is
visually examined: (1) distractions caused by the surface
qualities of the material color (such as color irregularities,
surface reflections or iridescence) are eliminated or minimized;
(2) the material color is illuminated to approximately daylight
brightness; (3) the illumination is both "daylight white" and
broadband (i.e., the light includes all visible wavelengths at
roughly equal energy); (4) the material or radiant color is
surrounded by a medium gray background; and (5) the viewer's
eye is accustomed or adapted to the background color and
intensity of the illumination.

When these conditions are met, visual colors can be specified by

mathematically translating the radiant color (the reflectance
curve) into a color appearance specification on the three
colormaking attributes (discussed below); or by finding the best
visual match between the visual color and a material color
sample published as a standard color atlas; or by matching the
material color to a colorant mixture defined as a color "address"
in a color reproduction system (such as the code "#336699" in
the digital RGB color space or the formula "30-50-15-5" in the
Pantone CYMK system). Note that these are not "different kinds"
of color, but rather different ways to specify the material or
radiant stimulus for the visual color.

• conceptual color is color as an abstract concept, a sensory

memory, a color label that calls to mind a visual or material color
that is not present as a physical exemplar or as a visual
perception. It is color defined primarily through language,
memory, custom and habit.

Conceptual colors can be communicated as single color words

(auburn, chartreuse), compound color descriptions (brilliant dark
blue), the average color of a variable environmental stimulus
(sky blue, sea green, cherry red), a color in color theory
(primary blue; "yellow and blue make green"), an imaginary
color ("no paint can be a pure red") a metaphorical color ("a
golden sunset"), and much more.

Compared to material, radiant and visual colors, conceptual

colors are simplifications in three respects: (1) they are
categorical colors that apply equally to many different kinds of
material or visual color (blue can refer to eyes, skies, berries,
plastics, flowers, textiles, ceramics, paints, stained glass,
photographic emulsions, television screens and lakes); (2) they
can refer to colors that are unknown to the person to whom the
color is being described ("yellow is the color of my true love's
hair"); (3) they disregard variation produced by individual
differences in color sensitivity and viewing conditions (a lawn
viewed at twilight is still called green); and (4) they assume that
color descriptions mean approximately the same thing to all
people. These simplifications make conceptual colors very useful
in the social framework of talking about color, but unreliable as
the basis to specify color for any specific purpose.

It is extremely helpful to keep in mind the differences between

material, radiant, visual and conceptual colors when thinking
about color across the many topics in color theory.

The Colormaking Attributes. A standard, unambiguous

language for visual color description is an innovation of 19th
century color scientists. And the foundation of this color
language is the idea of a "color container" or color space.

2. Vision scientists have identified three colormaking

attributes — lightness, hue and hue purity — that are
sufficient to precisely specify any visual color.

(Brightness replaces lightness when we want to describe lights

or the light falling on or reflected from surfaces, and colorfulness
replaces chroma when we want to describe lights or surfaces in
comparison to an ideal or imaginary, "pure" hue.)

Let's consider each colormaking attribute separately, to

understand how the attributes arise in radiant colors, and how
we should describe (as conceptual colors) the color perceptions
(the visual colors) they produce.

Brightness/Lightness. The visually most important

colormaking attribute is the light or dark of a color as it
appears in emitted or reflected light. This is perceived in two
distinct ways:

3. Brightness is the sensation of light emitted or reflected

from an object that is greater than the light reflected
from a matte "white" surface under the same
illumination.

Brightness is only weakly correlated with the actual luminance

of an object. For example, car headlights appear painfully bright
at night, but in noon daylight they may be barely visible. The
luminance is the same, but the apparent brightness varies with
context.

4. Lightness is the sensation of light emitted or reflected

from a surface as a proportion of the light emitted or
reflected from the brightest surface (or a matte "white"
surface) under the same illumination.

Lightness is strongly correlated with the overall reflectance

(luminance factor or albedo) of surfaces, provided that different
surfaces are in view at the same time and all surfaces are
illuminated within the same light environment.

Artists commonly use the term value to refer to lightness, a

term made standard through the Munsell Color System.

The example below shows variations in the lightness of a blue

hue with low chroma.

differences in lightness or value

hue and chroma held constant

Extremes of lightness or value are described as dark or black up

to light or white; for self luminous areas (lights) the extremes of
brightness are described as faint or dim up to brilliant or bright.

Perceptions of lightness form a continuous achromatic series,

called a gray scale of values, extending from perceptual black
through grays of increasing lightness to perceptual white. All
colors, disregarding their hue and chroma, can be matched to a
step on this lightness scale, either visually or by measuring their
reflectance with a spectrophotometer.

In technical color models, lightness is measured on a scale

from 0 (black) to 100 (white); painters and photographers use
printed gray scales that may contain anywhere from 5 to 20
gray scale steps. Different naming or numbering categories are
used in these systems; see for example my Handprint
lightness categories.

perceptions of lightness form a gray scale that is

much smaller than physical reflectance limits

The physical basis of lightness is essentially the overall

proportion of light shining on a surface that is reflected from the
surface: dark surfaces reflect very little light, and pale or white
surfaces reflect a lot of light.

However this does not mean that our perception of lightness is

fixed on extreme physical reflectance values of almost 0%
("pure black") and 100% ("pure white"). Instead, the perceptual
white and black values are anchored on the most extreme light
and dark surfaces within the field of view — and by
remembering how familiar surfaces look under normal light.
These relative contrasts can define a complete range of grays in
surface luminances that do not vary by more than 20 to 1. In
fact, we typically perceive as "black" surfaces that reflect as
much as 10% of the light falling on them, and as "white"
surfaces that reflect only 90% of the light — a reflectance ratio
of just 9 to 1.

In addition, judgments of light and dark can change when

surface comparisons change: think of laying an old white sheet
you consider "white" against a brand new white sheet. Lightness
is affected by the relative lightness contrast among all visible
surfaces. Changes in illumination have less impact on perceived
lightness, provided the same surface contrasts are in view or the
surfaces are already familiar.

Hue. This is the most familiar color attribute, the one that
answers the question, what color is it? The example below
shows several different hues.

differences in hue
colors in the same column are the same hue: (top row) hues at
maximum chroma; (middle & bottom rows) dark and light hues, with
chroma and lightness held constant (colors of equal nuance) in each
row

5. Hue is the attribute of color matched by a single

wavelength of light or by a mixture of "violet" and "red"
wavelengths of light.

Hues arise because the light incident on a surface is reflected

unequally at different wavelengths. The eye combines these
different wavelengths into a single hue perception. This hue can
usually be matched by the color of a single wavelength of light,
called the dominant wavelength of the hue, notated as the
wavelength number, e.g. a pure yellow is indicated by the
wavelength number 575. Hues that do not appear in the
spectrum are matched by a mixture of two wavelengths of light,
one violet and one red. As these two wavelength mixtures or
extraspectral hues are awkward to specify for technical
reasons, they are usually denoted by the wavelength number of
the hue directly opposite on the hue circle: thus an extraspectral
magenta is notated by its complementary "green" wavelength,
c560.

The artistic description of hue departs from everyday color

description in two ways:

• Hue names are limited to six: the spectrum hues — red,

orange, yellow, green, blue and the extraspectral hue violet
(or purple, which I use to describe a dark violet). Note that the
extraspectral range includes many hues commonly labeled red
(diagram, right).

• Dull colors are named as spectrum hues. The unique the extraspectral hues
names for dull or muted colors — such as brown, maroon, pink,
these include all hues between
tan, gold, russet, olive and so forth — do not describe spectral
blue violet (left) and orange red
colors, and this means they are not hue names, even though (right)
they may be appropriate informal replies to the question, what
color is it?

For the spectral wavelength and paint pigment hues

corresponding to the major hue categories, see my Handprint
hue categories.

Spectral hues blend continuously, each into its neighbors, to

form a circle of hues, in spectral order from red to violet.
Extraspectral hues (reds and violets mixed from a blend of "red"
and "violet" light) close the hue circle. Hue only specifies the
location of a color around the circumference of this circle,
usually specified as an angle (the hue angle) measured from an
arbitrary starting hue (usually red or yellow).

Blends of the basic hues are named with two neighbor hue
names, following the rule the tinting hue name precedes the
dominant hue name, as adjective before noun. Thus red
orange is an orange leaning toward red, blue violet is a violet
leaning toward blue, and so on. This creates six basic and twelve
compound hue categories. These are illustrated below, in the
approximate spacing that the hues display in a visual hue
circle.

perceptions of spectral hues form a hue circle

six basic hues and twelve compound hues, with achromatic white,
gray or black

This hue circle may seem erratic, but in fact the locations of red,
yellow, green, blue and violet are equally spaced around the hue
circle, and match up with the five basic hue categories of the
Munsell Color System (5R, 5Y, 5G, 5B and 5P); orange has
been added to discriminate among the very large number of
artists' pigments in the yellow to red hues. (Exemplars of the
hue categories are presented below.)

Some blended hues are more familiar as unique color names

(especially magenta for violet red and cyan for green blue), but
other names for compound hues are unfamiliar or infrequently
used (chartreuse for yellow green). Naming hues with matching
pigment names ("ultramarine" for violet blue, "vermilion" for
orange red) should be avoided, to prevent confusion between
colors and paints.

Achromatic colors, including white, gray or black, are not hue

categories, but are used to describe colors of paint (davy's
gray), gradations in lightness (a dark gray value), dull color
appearance (a gray green), or even levels of luminance (a gray
day, a black night).

To assist you in learning the hue categories, this site uses a palette
scheme icon (right) to identify pigment categories and to identify artist
palette paint selections. Click on the icon anywhere it appears to view
the key to the palette scheme; click on any hue marker in the palette
scheme to see a listing of watercolor pigments currently available in
that hue category (as listed on the complete palette page).

An artist's color mixing skill is greatly aided by learning the

correct hue designations for dull colors. "Brown" for example is
actually a near neutral, dark valued orange with a dominant
wavelength around 610 nm. Of course you would not normally the palette scheme used
describe your coffee as dark orange. But accurate hue naming throughout this site
makes it clear how a color should be mixed with paints and how click on the icon to go to the key to
a color is likely to change when in shadow. the palette scheme

For example, red orange can be mixed as orange paint tinted

with some red paint; dark orange (brown) can be mixed by
darkening an orange paint with black; and an orange surface in
deep shadow shoud be painted with brown paint.

Hue Purity. The third colormaking attribute represents the

quality of color commonly called chroma or saturation.

6. Hue purity is the concentration or intensity of hue

independent of its luminance or lightness, commonly
termed the colorfulness, chroma or saturation of a color.

The example below shows variations in the chroma of a green

and red at constant hue and lightness.

differences in chroma (saturation)

hue and lightness held constant

This basic attribute of "hue purity" has gone by many names —

Sättigung, colorfulness, chromaticness, chroma, saturation,
excitation purity, colorimetric purity, chromatic content,
brilliance — each definition anchored to a specific stimulus
attribute or color comparison. Artists can use either chroma or
saturation to describe hue purity without worrying about the
technical distinction between the two terms:

• Chroma was first used by Albert Munsell in his Munsell Color

System (1915), and the term now has widespread application in
technical color systems.

• Saturation goes back to 19th century color science; saturated

color is recognized in common speech and conveys the juicy
metaphor of a surface soaked in pure hue.

Chroma or saturation varies from dull for weakly tinted

sensations to intense for pure hue sensations. The terms
neutral or achromatic apply to colorless (white, gray or black)
surfaces. (Note that lights can never appear gray or black, but
only as a bright or dim.) For a chroma naming system and visual
examples, see my Handprint chroma/saturation categories.

In visual colors (and by extension, in the material colors that

stimulate the visual colors), hue purity is defined as the
proportion of black, gray or white in a color relative to the
proportion of "pure hue" (in materials, the pigment or dye) in
the color. Colors with low chroma or saturation appear very
similar to a white, gray or black. The perception of chroma forms
a scale anchored in achromatic colors at one end and extending
to the most chromatic stimulus at the other. In modern color
models, chroma is measured from zero (achromatic) to a
maximum value at the perceptual or physical chroma
boundary.

perceptions of chroma are anchored on achromatic

surfaces matching the white point

The perception of achromatic or zero chroma surfaces is strongly

affected by the chromaticity (the combination of hue and hue
purity) of the illumination. Our visual system naturally adapts to
weakly tinted illumination so that it appears as "white" or
achromatic light. It is then the white point or standard of zero
chroma. Any surface tinted with the same hue will appear
achromatic (white or gray), but this judgment will change if the
color of the illumination changes.

There are two language pitfalls to avoid when talking about

gradations in chroma or saturation. The first involves color
adjectives that can mean either quantity of light or
concentration of color — these include intense, brilliant, shining,
glowing, bright or luminous. If you say the setting sun is a more
brilliant red than an apple, it is unclear whether you are pointing
at brightness or saturation or both.

The same pitfall involves adjectives borrowed from the material

connotations of purity — such as pure, clean, concentrated,
fresh or strong and their antonyms impure, dirty, diluted, faded
and weak. Here the ambiguity is material — a faded color may
be inherently drab, or mixed with white; a diluted color may be
inherently dull, or diluted with water. These terms also introduce
a judgmental tone that is pointless when talking about color.

• Warm and Cool. Trades that use color for artistic, design or
decorative purposes commonly use two terms to denote a
"metacomplementary" hue contrast across the hue circle.

7. Artists use warm to refer to red, orange and yellow

hues, and cool to refer to blue green and blue hues.

These terms are used to describe hue contrasts in two

different ways:

(1) as a fundamental contrast between hues that are yellow,

orange, red without a tint of green or blue (warm) as opposed to
hues from green to blue without a tint of yellow or red (cool).

(2) as a relative contrast between two similar or analogous

hues, where one of the hues appears to contain more yellow or
red (is warmer), or more green or blue (is cooler), than the
other.

The fundamental warm/cool contrast is typically anchored on the

hues red orange and green blue, or more simply between
orange and blue. Either way, the warm/cool axis is not placed
through the centers of the warm and cool hue groups, because
the spacing of the warm and cool hues is unequal (although
each group contains about a half dozen hue categories).

the warm/cool contrast

Most color theory texts categorize greens and purples as either

warm or cool. This is inaccurate. The hues from green yellow to
green, and from violet blue to violet red, are neither warm nor
cool. In these hues blue and red, or yellow and green, visibly
mix, so violet and yellow green are warm/cool hybrids. Note also
that the complementary contrast between yellow green and
violet is not as strident as the contrast between red and green
or yellow and violet blue.

However, a minority of artists anchor the contrast on orange

yellow and violet blue: in that case orange is warmer than red,
and blue is cooler than blue green. This usage corresponds to
the contrast between optimal orange (the color produced by all
long wavelength light above 570 nm) and optimal blue (the color
produced by all short wavelength light below 485 nm), as
identified in the synthesis of color vision. These colors are
most closely matched by the pigments nickel dioxine yellow
(PY153) and ultramarine blue (PB29). Visually, this preference
is strongly justified by the importance of the yellow/blue axis as
the major dimension of variation in the chromaticity of natural
light and in particular in the atmospheric and diurnal variations
of landscape light.

Many artists also use warm and cool to describe a relative

chroma contrast between warm or cool hues: brown is warmer
than gray but cooler than red orange, and iron blue is warmer
than cobalt blue but cooler than gray. These distinctions are
especially useful to analyze subtractive color mixtures, because
blue can be made into indigo, or gray into brown, by mixing
them with red or orange paint (or colored light), and red orange
can be made into brown, and gray into indigo, by mixing with
blue paint (or colored light). This highlights the benefit,
mentioned in the labeling of hue categories (above), of matching
color labeling to the logic of color mixtures in paints.

Other Material Color Terms. Although the colormaking attributes are

necessary to specify a visual color, they are not sufficient to describe
certain physical attributes of a colored substance.

8. Physical or surface qualities of color materials are

described with the terms gloss, translucency or
transparency, fluorescence, and iridescence or
pearlescence.

These additional color attributes are defined as follows:

• Gloss. All materials reflect some light from their surfaces

much as a sheet of glass does. This light does not get absorbed
or reflected by any colorant within the material, so the reflected
light is effectively "white". High gloss materials have the
property of reflecting most or nearly all of this "white" light in
one direction, which produces a highlight or image of the light
source on the surface. Low gloss materials reflect this "white"
light in all directions, producing a nonreflective, matte or "flat"
surface color. In matte surfaces we always see some of this
diffuse white light mixed into the surface color, so a material
with a matte surface always appears both duller and lighter than
the same material with a gloss finish.

• Translucency/Transparency. Many materials allow light to

penetrate below the surface, or even pass through an object
entirely: they transmit light. If a material transmits so much
light that a bright, clear image can be seen through it, the
material is transparent. If the material transmits light only as a
diffuse glow or vague image, then it is translucent. If a material
transmits no light, it is opaque. (Note that paint attributes are
described differently, using the separate concepts transparency
and hiding power or hiding.)

• Fluorescence. Surfaces seem to glow or fluoresce if they

appear to emit more light than is shining on them. This usually
occurs because the substance absorbs light in the invisible short
(ultraviolet) wavelengths, then emits the energy as light in the
visible wavelengths, or because it absorbs light in the bright
("green") wavelengths, and emits it in the dim ("red")
wavelengths.

• Iridescence and Pearlescence. These terms describe the

appearance of different colors in the same spatial location, or
colors that change depending on the angle between the object
and light or the object and our point of view. Both are usually
produced by some form of diffraction or refraction — which is
the production of spectral hues by reflection from a complex
surface (as from a compact disc, or a film of grease on water) or
by optical bending within a transparent material (as by a lens or
prism).

A Basic Color Vocabulary. The colormaking attributes provide

the artist with a clear and simple way to talk and think about
color. Every artist must understand how to describe any color in
terms of:

• relative luminance, which is lightness in surfaces (from light

to dark for chromatic colors and white to black for achromatic
colors), and brightness in lights (from bright to dim, whether
chromatic or not).

• hue as either red, orange, yellow, green, blue or violet; or any

compound of two adjacent hue words, with the dominant hue
named after the subordinate hue (as noun after adjective): red
violet is a violet tinted with some red.

• hue purity as either chroma or saturation and using the

adjectives near neutral or dull (for low chroma color) and
intense (for high or maximum chroma color).

• warm vs. cool — warm colors are hues of yellow, orange and
red that contain no visible blue or green; cool colors are hues of
blue and green that contain no visible yellow or red; warmer
colors are closer to red orange, and cooler colors are closer to
green blue.

• physical attributes, either of the surface texture or of the

internal transmittance and/or refraction of light, can be
described with terms such as gloss, transparency, translucency,
pearlescence, iridescence and fluorescence.

The Color Space. The colormaking attributes are useful

because they correspond to the visually most important
differences among colors, and because they can be arranged to
define a three dimensional color space, the geometrical
framework for all modern color models.

9. All colors can be uniquely identified and related to each

other as locations within a color space, specified by the
dimensions of brightness/lightness, hue and hue purity.

The figure below shows how a color space is put together.

the geometry of colormaking attributes

in a modern color space

The vertical dimension is the lightness or value of a color; by

itself, this dimension defines a gray scale of values from black
to white. The circumference of the horizontal disk, perpendicular
to the lightness dimension, is the hue of a color; this defines a
hue circle that places hues in their spectrum order. The lateral
distance or radius on this disk, measured from the center
outward, is the hue purity of a color, usually stated as its relative
chroma or absolute colorfulness.

You will find color models in many different shapes, proposed by

different color experts. However, modern color spaces are
generally of two types (diagram, right):

10. Modern color spaces are of two types: a colorant space is based on
mixtures of real or imaginary "primary" colors, and a perceptual color
space is based on the visual colormaking attributes.

• The colorant color spaces (for example, the Swedish Natural

Color System or the RGB color space) all stipulate that (1)
the color space will have a simple geometrical form; (2) the
geometrical distances between three or four "primary" colors are
equal; (3) colors are defined as the proportional mixture of
primary colors necessary to match the color.
characteristic geometry of
• The perceptual color spaces, (for example, the recent CIE color spaces
models CIELAB or CIECAM, Manfred Richter's DIN, the OSA UCS colorant spaces typically have a
system) do not impose colorant boundaries or a specific double cone structure (left);
geometrical shape on the distribution of colors. They only perceptual spaces have a cylindrical
structure (right)
require the hue circle and chroma to be perpendicular to the
lightness dimension: colors are located by measuring their
actual lightness, hue and hue purity.

Peceptual color spaces describe all visual colors, either of light or

of materials or both, and are standard in color vision research.
Colorant color models are not visual color spaces, because
lightness/brightness, hue and hue purity are not defined within
them. Instead they are schematic gamuts — geometrically
simplified diagrams of the colors produced by all possible
mixture proportions among the primary colorants used in
subtractive (paints, inks) or additive (phosphors, lights) color
reproduction media.

For the purposes of the study of color harmony and contrast, it

is useful to understand all color models or color spaces can be
categorized into one of two categories — colorant spaces and
perceptual spaces:

two types of color space

Colorant Spaces Perceptual Spaces

Boundaries mixture gamut perceptual limits

additive

Luminance Brightness Brightness

Hue Primary Lights Opponent Dimensions
Hue Purity Saturation Chroma
CIE Yxy CIELUV
Examples
RGB CIECAM (with Q)

subtractive

Luminance Black Lightness

Hue Pure Pigment(s) Opponent Dimensions
Hue Purity White Chroma
NCS, DIN, CIELAB
Examples
CYMK CIECAM (with J)

The fundamental difference is whether the color model first

chooses a limited set of "primary" colorants — real or imaginary,
additive or subtractive — and generates all color combinations
from all possible mixture proportions of those primaries within a
mixture gamut, or first defines fundamental perceptual
dimensions of equal color difference, then locates colors within
the perceptual limits of normal (average) color vision.

These models tend to have a characteristic form, as well.

Colorant models are often represented in a double conical
geometry, in which the hue circle is mixed with various
proportions of white and/or black. In contrast perceptual
models, as they enclose the irregular shape of perceptual color
limits, choose instead a cylindrical form that does not impose
any arbitrary geometry on the distribution of colors.
 anatomy of a colorant model

The diagram (above) shows the logical structure of a pigment

color solid of white (W), black (K) and "pure color" pigment (C).
(Note that the "pure color" C must often be a mixture of two
other pigments, which is necessary to produce the hue variety
around the hue circle.)

The upper figure shows how the proportions of W and K are

varied across a hue slice, each contributing from 0% to 100% of
the total mixture and their combined percentages ranging from
0% at the side apex to 100% along the central axis or gray
scale. The "pure color" is increased from 0% at the gray scale to
100% at the side apex of the hue slice. When the three
pigments are combined according to these percentages, along
with the complementary color opposite, the result is a diamond
shaped slice through the color solid (lower figure). Equivalent
slices are produced for incremental complementary hues all the
way around the hue circle.

When a pigment color solid (indeed any media color solid,

including the RGB color space of your computer monitor) is
located within a uniform color space (such as CIELAB or
CIECAM), the tidy triangular geometry appears significantly
altered (diagram, below).

the colorant model in a uniform color space

(CIELAB)

In this example, the perceived differences among the orange red

mixtures are much greater than those among the green blue
mixtures; the pure green blue, orange red and middle gray are
all of a different value (lightness); and the contours of the K, W
and C mixtures are curved rather than straight. These three
differences are the inevitable result of producing a color solid
through material pigment mixtures, and they are disguised by
displaying the pigment mixtures within a rigid geometrical
framework. The distortions result from differences in the
lightness and chroma of the two pigments (or pigment mixtures)
used to define complementary "pure" colors, and from
differences in the relative tinting strength of the pigments in
relation to black and white.

The variety of mixture models is enormous — including the CIE

Yxy model based on imaginary (invisible) primary lights, the
electronic RGB standard based on real phosphors or lights, the
Natural Color System (NCS) based on imaginary (visualized)
pure hues, or the various print regimes based on real CYMK
inks. These models are generally developed for specific color
reproduction applications (which use the specific primary colors
in the model), are easy to implement, and have high practical
utility.

The uniform color space (UCS) models, in contrast, , pigment

models include the Runge and Chevreul color solids and the
Ostwald and Swedish NCS color models. These are generally
closer to the painter's traditional conceptions of color mixing;
saturation is the preferred measure of hue purity, and hues are
proportional mixtures of "pure colors" that are commonly either
the painter's primaries (CYM) or artist's primaries (RYGB).

What is a color space good for? First, it provides an

unambiguous way to systematically label and display colors
using the colormaking attributes: any possible combination of
lightness, hue and hue purity (chroma or saturation) locates a
specific point in the color space, and that point represents every
surface or object with those three color attributes. Second, a
color space provides an explicit way to compare colors: similar
colors will be located near each other in the color space, and
very dissimilar colors will be located far apart, so we can use
distance within the color space to specify the perceived
difference between any two colors. Third, the color space allows
the conceptual description or grouping of colors according to
their relative position within the color space — such as
complementary, triadic, analogous, nuance, shade, tone or tint.
Of course, this third purpose is how the hue circle, as a color
wheel, has been used in traditional color theory.

misconceptions in traditional color theory

A large portion of the color theory taught to artists
today is traditional color knowledge. Traditional means,
established a long time ago — in the 18th and 19th centuries, in
fact. As with many ideas commonly believed in the 18th century
(such as the inferiority of women, or the divine right of kings),
most of these ideas are either patently false or useless as a
guide to painting technique.

Before we can lay out a modern color theory, we have to

address and dispell the most significant of these traditional color
misconceptions. The most important, and the most enlightening
to explore, involve "primary" colors and color mixtures.

12 misconceptions in traditional color theory

• "Color" is either in light or in pigments.

• All color is created by the mixture of three "primary" colors.

• The three primary colors of paint are red, yellow and blue.

• You cannot mix a primary red, yellow or blue using any other
colors.

• Saturated hue is the defining or "pure" color attribute.

• The color of a paint is identical with the color of light it

reflects.

• Primary colors of paint cannot mix all possible colors, because

paints are impure colors.

• A "split primary" palette overcomes the impurity of paint

colors.

• With a split primary palette, do not mix colors "across the line"
of a primary color.

• Transparent watercolors achieve pure color because light is

reflected from the paper through the pigments, "like light
through a stained glass window".

• Secondary colors are 1:1 mixtures of two primary colors, and

tertiary colors are 1:1 mixtures of two secondary colors.

• Painters use the primary color framework to analyze visual

colors and paint mixtures.

I will address each misconception in turn, and either explain or

demonstrate factually why it is wrong.

1. "Color" is either in light or in pigments.

We start with the traditional conception of what color is. To

unravel this conception, ask yourself: "what kind of color is a
primary color?" Is the color in a paint, or in the light, or in the
mind? Can we have an ounce of yellow, or a lux of yellow, or a
sensory unit of pure imagined yellow? Where is the yellow we
are talking about?

Though references to three "primary" or "primitive" colors can

be found as far back as the writings of the ancient Greeks and
Romans, the primary color dogma as we have it today was first
explicitly advanced in the early 1700's. The entrepreneurial
German printer Jakob Christoffel Le Blon (1667-1741) stated
the basic principles clearly in his Coloritto: or the Harmony of
Coloring in Painting Reduced to Mechanical Practice (1725):

Painting can represent all visible Objects with three Colours,

Yellow, Red and Blue; for all other Colours can be compos'd of
these Three, which I call Primitive. ... And a mixture of those
Three original Colours makes a Black, and all other Colours
whatsoever. ... I am only speaking of Material Colours, or those
used by Painters; for a mixture of all the primitive impalpable
Colours [of light], that cannot be felt, will not produce Black, but
the very Contrary, White, as the great Sir Isaac Newton has
demonstrated in his Opticks. White, is a Concentration, or an
Excess of Lights. Black is a deep Hiding, or Privation of Lights.

Although LeBlon emphasizes the distinction between colors of

paint and colors of light, traditional color theorists quickly
agreed that all color is in the light, as "colored light". They
simply ignored the fact that Isaac Newton, in his Opticks (1704),
carefully dismissed this idea, stating instead that color is a
sensation in the mind: "For the Rays [of light] to speak
properly are not coloured. In them there is nothing else than a
certain Power and Disposition to stir up a Sensation of this or
that Colour."

Well, how does light create the color sensation? The answer
turns out to be both incredibly complex and still in part
unknown. But artists can be guided by three basic concepts:

11. Color displays the relationship between light and light

reflecting surfaces in space.

12. The five components of visual color context are:

(1) the total illuminance level, (2) the illuminant
(chromaticity of the illuminance), (3) the illuminance
contrast between color areas, (4) the colormaking
contrasts between color areas, and (5) spatial factors
(size of color area, pattern, location in space).

the five components of visual color context

The five components are:

• total illuminance level - this is the total quantity of light

incident on (falling on) the colored surfaces or objects; a portion
of this light is reflected by the surfaces to create their luminance
or quantity of radiated light, which in turn affects the
luminance adaptation of the eye, the apparent brightness of
the surfaces, and the range of lightness contrast.

• illuminant - the combined hue and saturation (chromaticity)

of all the light incident on the colored surfaces; this affects the
chromatic adaptation of the eye, the color rendering
properties of the light, and the range of apparent chromatic
contrast.

• illuminance contrasts - the quantity of light incident on the

colored surfaces relative to the light incident on surrounding
surfaces; a disparity between the two will increase or
decrease the lightness and chromaticity contrast between the
color area and the surround.

• colormaking contrasts - the visual color difference in

lightness, hue and hue purity between the color area and the
surround when both are viewed under the same "white"
illumination; this may cause a variety of localized chromatic
induction and chromatic adaptation effects.

color changes induced by simultaneous contrast on

lightness

The example above illustrates the Bartleson-Breneman

effect, or the change in lightness contrast induced by the
lightness of the background. The gray panels in each row have
exactly the same lightness, from light to dark, but the column
on the far right appears to show the full range of lightness (from
white to black) because it is on a light background; in the
column on the far left the lightness contrasts appear condensed.
This is why paintings and photographs are generally mounted on
white, not black, mats.

• spatial factors - the spatial interpretation of the color area

in relation to the total visual field; these include the visual size
of the color area, its location within a surface pattern, and its
location in three dimensional space — relative to the viewer, to
the light source, and to other surfaces or objects that may
shadow or reflect light.

color changes induced by surface color patterns

The three examples (diagram above, top row and lower left)
show the remarkable color changes that can occur in the same
green color of "background" when overlaid by different colors of
bands; the fourthe example (lower right) shows that these
effects extend to achromatic contrasts as well. These complex
and visually powerful pattern effects, as they appear in textile
patterns, were the original impetus for the famous 19th century
color studies by Michel-Eugène Chevreul.

Our natural way to talk about color is that it is in something — in

light or in paints. In fact, it is in both lights and materials, and in
their spatial relationships as well.

What is color for? — to reveal the world.

13. Color vision compensates for illuminance variation,

minimizes illuminant color and enhances colormaking
contrasts as necessary to make light and color consistent
with spatial factors (objects in space).

There are many striking and delightful illustrations of the effect

that spatial factors can exert on color appearance, and these are
explored below. For now, the example of an illuminated cube
(image, right) will demonstrate the basic effect.

Vision interprets this image as a cube under illumination that

falls unequally on the three visible sides; and it construes the
three sides as showing an identical tiled pattern consisting of 1
very dark central tile, surrounded by 4 dark tiles, surrounded by
8 light tiles, in a field of 12 white tiles. Color vision adopts the
perception of a uniform pattern on each face of the cube to
compensate for the variations in illumination, so that the pattern
on each face seems to consist of the "same" four colors.

However, if we eliminate the illumination cues from extraneous

tiles, we discover that the very dark tile in the top pattern is
actually the same digital color as the 4 dark tiles on the left side
and the 12 white tiles on the right side! In other words, color
vision has taken perceptually dark color areas and subjectively
lightened them so that the are consistent both with an identical
surface pattern on each face of the cube and with differences in
illumination across different faces of the cube.
spatial interpretation strongly
14. Surfaces in space define areas of reduced color affects color appearance
contrast separated by edges and colors of enhanced color
a cube tiled in four colors (top); tiles
contrast. that are the same digital color
(bottom)
Color adheres to our world, it appears firmly woven into
materials and light. It is an essential dimension of our
experience of space. All of this is the result of complex processes
of adaptation, anchoring and contrast.

Despite the complexity, much of color perception is implicit. We

are rarely conscious of the judgmental process that goes into
defining color in a specific situation, under a specific kind of light
in a specific spatial location. We simply see the color as
illuminated objects in space.

The color of surfaces and objects is fundamentally sensitive to

the light illuminating them — the intensity of the light, and its
color.

Color changes radically as the intensity of illuminance changes

from faint (such as moonlight) to bright (such as noon daylight).
As light increases, colors become more saturated, hues expand
into subtle shades, and the contrast between lights and darks
increases. In darkness, all colors are reduced to gradations of
gray.

The color of the light mixes subtractively with surface colors.

Under yellow light, green blues appear green, reds appear
orange, grays appear yellow, and blues appear gray.

The eye preserves these color changes but the mind disregards
them.

Color vision is designed to create a clear image of the physical

world. To do this, it contains numerous processes that adjust
color appearance to match a sensible idea of what we are
looking at.

As objects recede in the distance their color variations average

out and their edges become more indistinct. As objects
approach, their surface color variations increase and their edges
become more distinct.

2. All color is created by the mixture of three "primary"

colors.

An artist aware of the first three color principles immediately

understands how "color is created by primary colors" is an
inadequate description of color experience.

But, even if we limit the discussion to how colors can be mixed,

or duplicated, or perceived by the eye, the belief that "primary"
colors can create all colors is false.

15. All "primary" colors are either imaginary concept

colors or imperfect material colors. No visual color is
"primary".

If we chase primary colors down to their fundamental nature, we

find there are actually two kinds of primary colors: the "primary"
colors we use to explain color mixtures (for example, "red,
green and blue primaries mix all colors of light"), and the
primary colors we use to actually make color mixtures ("to
match that orange color, mix three parts yellow and one part red
paint").

And if we examine the behavior of these two different kinds of

primary colors, we discover a remarkable primary color
paradox:

The three primary colors we use to EXPLAIN COLOR MIXTURES

are all imaginary: they are invisible to our eyes and have no
physical reality.

The three primary colors we use to MAKE COLOR MIXTURES are

all imperfect: they cannot mix all colors.

The detailed explanation of this paradox is provided on another

page, but both these facts arise from the design of the eye:
specifically, the way our L, M and S cone sensitivity curves
overlap in responding to light wavelengths.

This is easiest to see if we look at the proportion of the eye's

total color response that comes from each of the three types of
cones, for each single wavelength (hue) across the visible
spectrum (diagram, below).

L, M and S cone responses to light

proportion of total color signal from each type of cone produced by a
single spectral wavelength, across the visible spectrum; every
wavelength stimulates at least two types of cone

Single wavelengths of light create the most saturated color

sensations possible. Yet, as the diagram shows, any single
wavelength of light will stimulate at least two and (at
wavelengths less than ~570 nm) all three cones at the same
time. There is no wavelength that stimulates one cone 100%
and the other two cones 0%. So we never see a "pure" response
from any single cone, and we never see "pure primaries" in our
visual experience. We always see only visual color mixtures.

When we map these proportional L, M and S cone outputs in

what is called a trilinear mixing triangle, we discover that
these overlapping cone responses to single wavelength light
create a curved limit on the maximum chroma possible across
hues from yellow green to blue. This curved boundary encloses
the area of all possible hue and chroma combinations, called a
chromaticity diagram (diagram, right).

This curved boundary makes a visible primary color that can

mix all other colors impossible. Here's why:

• If we choose three real primary colors of light (R, G and B,

diagram right), the mixtures possible with those three
"primaries" create a mixing triangle (an RGB gamut) that does
not contain the entire chromaticity space — the real primaries all primary colors are either
cannot mix all colors. imaginary or imperfect

spectral primaries RGB, which are

• If we define three mathematical primary colors (X, Y and Z,
visible, can't mix all colors;
diagram right), whose XYZ gamut contains the entire mathematical primaries XYZ, which
chromaticity diagram and therefore explains all possible colors, explain all color mixtures, are
then these imaginary "primaries" must be located outside the invisible
chromaticity diagram, and are therefore invisible. And how can a
color be a color, if you can't see it?

Because it is impossible to create a primary color that is both a

real (visible) color and that can mix all other colors, all color
theory primary colors are either conceptual or material:
either imaginary or imperfect.

Again, when it is important to keep this distinction in mind,

conceptual color identifies an abstract or ideal color instead of a
real or physically possible color, and material color identifies a
physical colorant or light that can or does create a color
perception in actual experience.

3. The three primary colors of paint are red, yellow and

blue.

The first misconception to set aside is the old "red, yellow and
blue" nursery rhyme. As I explain below, the subtractive (paint
mixing) primaries can be precisely defined:

16. The ideal subtractive primary hues are red violet

[magenta], yellow and green blue [cyan].

Red and blue cannot be primary colors because they lack the
"blue" or short wavelength reflectance (for red) or "red" or long
wavelength reflectance (for blue) that must be present in both
colors to allow red and blue to mix a violet color. Blue also lacks
the "green" or mid wavelength reflectance necessary to mix a
saturated green with yellow. As Moses Harris pointed out 260
years ago, "red and blue will not make a fine purple, which
every painter knows".

It will be helpful to understand the double life of primary colors,

as conceptual colors and material colors, over the past three
centuries. On the one hand, "primary" pigments, inks or dyes
must be available to be used, and the availability of colorants
has depended on pigment manufacturing technology. On the
other hand, the choice of primary colors has always focused on
practical considerations — colorant cost, physical attributes, and
the color mixtures that result.

Available Colorants. There have been truly amazing advances

in pigment chemistry over the past 300 years. (For a history, see
Bright Earth: The Art and Invention of Color by Philip Ball.)
Adapting to these changes in art materials, traditional color
theory has fixed on very different choices of "red", "yellow" or
"blue" primary paints.

In the earliest subtractive color printing system, devised by Le

Blon in the early 1700's, the primary colors were a mixture of
carmine, madder lake and vermilion (mixed to make red), yellow
lake, and iron blue (PB27) — the best pigments for the job
available in the early 18th century. The artists' color wheel
proposed by Moses Harris in 1772 used vermilion, orpiment
and natural ultramarine blue; Johann Lambert in 1785
preferred gamboge, carmine and iron blue. Charles Winter's
20th century mixing triangle used alizarin crimson, cadmium subtractive primaries as optimal
lemon and phthalo blue. Contemporary painters and printers colors and as available pigments
would probably prefer a benzimidazolone yellow, quinacridone as located on the CIELAB a*b* plane
magenta, and phthalo cyan.

As a reference, the diagram (right) shows the location of the

"ideal" subtractive primaries magenta, yellow and cyan,
defined as optimal colors (the most saturated surface colors
possible) located on the CIELAB a*b* plane.

Painters and color theorists since the 18th century have chosen
their primary triad palette from among the labeled pigments.
Thus, the "true" primary red was originally either vermilion
(PR106) or a lake of cochineal or madder (NR4). Late in the
19th century the primary red became alizarin crimson (PR83),
and today the most popular recommendation is a violet red
quinacridone (PR122 or PV19). Notice that all these primary
colors are very far from the ideal magenta hue.

The ultramarine blue primary chosen by Harris is actually closer

to the ideal magenta than to the ideal cyan, and since his time
the pigments used for primary blue have evolved only about half
way toward the ideal cyan hue. And while the primary yellow
pigments have always been closest to the ideal, they are still
shifted toward the red primary by a significant amount.

Practical Considerations. Pigment availability is not the only

reason for these shifts away from the ideal subtractive primary
colors. The "ideal" pigments cobalt violet (PV49), cobalt teal
blue (PG50) and bismuth yellow (PY184), underlined, are
commonly available today: why don't artists and printers use
them?

One issue is cost. Cobalt violet, which appears to be the "ideal"

subtractive primary magenta, is one of the most expensive
pigments available — even when compared to micronized
quinacridone pigments.

A more important issue is handling attributes. Cobalt violet has

a weak tinting strength, and it only appears to have a strong
saturation when the particle sizes are relatively large (when
ground into fine particles, the color becomes weak and
whitened). To get a strong color, a dense, thick application of
coarse pigment would be required, and this would appear
unpleasantly crusty on a printed page. Cobalt teal blue and
bismuth yellow have a similar gritty, grainy texture, so all three
would clog up a printing press and intrude in a printed texture.
They are also opaque, which would make overprinted colors
hard to control and turn their subtractive mixtures muddy.

A third issue is lightfastness. While painters and printers

historically have been nonchalant on this issue, by the 20th
century they had learned to avoid the most fugitive dyes
available, and have generally migrated toward more lightfast
pigments as soon as they became available. Thus, 18th century
carmine lakes provide very handsome violet reds, but those
colors faded relatively quickly, and by the 19th century
substitute pigments were being used instead.

But the most important issue is the color mixtures that pigment
choices can produce. Even if a physically ideal (transparent,
finely divided, intensely saturated, light valued) red violet
pigment were available, the orange mixtures it would make with
yellow would be relatively dull, compared to oranges mixed with
a violet red. For these reasons, painters happily use a hue of
"primary" yellow that is theoretically too red, and a "primary"
magenta that is theoretically too yellow, because the resulting
range of color mixtures is, on the whole, the most satisfying to
the eye. Printers and painters focus on the entire range of color
mixtures that a subtractive palette can actually create, not on
the theoretical or ideal color of the paints or inks by themselves.

What makes these tradeoffs feasible — and often unnoticeable in

practice — is the remarkable ability of our color vision to accept
different color images as equivalent or identical, provided
the gamuts used to reproduce the images retain the relative
relationships between all the colors in the image, especially the
relative differences in lightness and hue.

And pigment innovation is still creating new primary palettes

and new systems of color mixing. Thus, violet red (magenta)
was not standardized as a subtractive primary color until the
CMYK printing system was invented by Alexander Murray in
1934. The CMYK system, in turn, cannot reproduce many
saturated oranges, violets, blues and yellow greens, and in
specific applications where brighter colors are required, newer
printing systems with larger gamuts — Hexachrome™ (six
primary colors of ink) or Heptatone™ (seven primary colors) —
can be used instead.

17. The choice of primary colors is arbitrary; colorant

selections depend on cost, availability, convenience,
medium and image quality.

It is remarkable how hidebound traditional color theorists have

become. A case in point: Betty Edwards recommends the use
of the 19th century pigment alizarin crimson (PR83) because,
she claims, there is no better red violet pigment available. This
is factually false: there are several quinacridone pigments,
including quinacridone rose (PV19) and quinacridone magenta
(PR122), that produce far more saturated and variegated
mixtures than alizarin crimson — and are far more lightfast.

As another example, some traditional color theory texts assert

that there is one set of primary colors used in printing and a
different set used in painting. This is a remarkable
misconception, because modern paints and printing inks are
manufactured using exactly the same chemical pigments. The
real constraint here is that modern printers have adapted to use
pigments that mix the widest range of colors, while painters
cling to the primary pigments that were used a century ago.

18. The subtractive primary hues are the same in all

printing, painting and photographic media. The optimal
subtractive primary pigments are identical in painting and
in printing.

The missing qualification is, of course, ... for painters that

actually use a primary color palette. I know of no living painter
who does so exclusively. Even in the 18th century, painters used
as many different pigments as they could afford to lay their
hands on, and that is still true today. In modern color theory
there are only palette primaries, and these can be literally any
number and color of paints an artists prefers.

4. You can't mix a primary red, yellow or blue using any

other colors.

The keystone belief in traditional color theory has always been

that it is not possible to mix a "primary" color using other colors.
This has been for three centuries the ultimate guarantee that
primary colors really are "primary".

As you might guess by now, this claim too is false. Every painter
knows that it is possible to mix a very fine turquoise from
ultramarine blue (PB29) and phthalocyanine green (PG7), or a
decent red from cobalt violet (PV14) and cadmium orange
(PO20) (image, below).

traditional color theory has decreed it

matching violet blue ultramarine (PB29) or red orange pyrrole
(PO73) is "possible"; matching cadmium red deep (PR108) or
phthalo green blue (PB17) is "impossible"

Certainly these mixtures are somewhat dull, but not any duller
than the orange one gets by mixing "primary" quinacridone
magenta (PR122) and "primary" cadmium yellow (PY35), or
the violet blue one gets by mixing "primary" quinacridone
magenta with "primary" phthalocyanine blue (PB15). When we
compare these mixtures to single pigment violet blue, green
blue (PB17), red (PR108) or orange paints (PO73), the
"possible" and "impossible" mixtures look pretty much the same.

If we believe traditional color theory, then certain dull or dark

mixtures are just fine, whereas other dull or dark mixtures are
"impossible". We confront the special pleading, or outright
misconception, that is necessary to keep the shaky "primary"
color dogma on its feet. Modern color theory simply sticks to the
facts:

19. Every hue can be mixed by two other hues, provided

the two hues are not directly opposite each other on the
hue circle, and the hue to be mixed is located within the
shorter distance between them.

Yellow is a special case, because a mixed yellow will appear dark

and greenish, as a raw umber or green gold. However this is
because our visual system distinguishes between a saturated
and unsaturated yellow with a visual contrast that does not
appear in magenta or cyan hues, as explained below.

5. Saturated hue is the defining or "pure" color attribute.

The rigamarole about what can or cannot be mixed with primary

colors reveals a subtle but important prejudice in traditional
color theory: that "color" is synonymous with saturated hue.

This is most apparent in the abbreviated way that colors are

specified in traditional color theory discussions of color design.
When the color crank Johannes Itten announces that "yellow
against purple provides a very large contrast between light and
dark" he visualizes a saturated (light valued) yellow and a
saturated (dark valued) purple. Dark valued yellows are
blackish, and light valued purples are whitish, but he ignores
those variations.

As we've seen, color is defined by at least three attributes

(lightness, hue and chroma/saturation), but color theory
generally uses hue labels alone — primary yellow, pure yellow —
to denote colors. This code works as follows: designate a hue,
then find the lightness that produces the maximum chroma
in that hue, and that is the hue, lightness and chroma that is
intended. "Yellow" means a light valued, high chroma yellow
hue.

This seems sensible, because it is how we naturally talk about

color. If someone says "she was wearing a red dress", you do
not imagine the dress as maroon or pink, which are also red
hues. But the code is unproductive when only saturated hues are
used to generalize about color design, for example as a contrast
between yellow and violet. In modern color theory, any
meaningful statement about color relationships has to specify all
three color attributes.

20. All three colormaking attributes — lightness, chroma

and hue — are equally important to evaluate visual colors
and create color designs.

Much of the traditional color theory design recommendations

depend on the preference for saturated color and a distaste for
"mud" or dull color, but these prejudices get in the way of
choosing the best color design for a specific application.

21. The relative importance and optimal values of color

lightness, chroma and hue in a color design depend
entirely on visual style, the materials used, the purpose of
color choices and the context in which color will be
viewed.

Traditional color theorists are fond of using the term "spectrum"

to denote a color, as in "spectrum yellow" or "spectrum red".
This means, apparently, either a "pure" yellow or red, or a
yellow or red of a specific hue. The usage is silly, as all hues of
yellow are present and equally at maximum saturation or hue
purity in the light spectrum, and because a "pure" red is actually
not visible in the spectrum at all — it is an extraspectral mixture
of "red" light tinted with "violet" light. But spectral hues are the
most saturated color stimuli possible, and (for traditional color
theorists) saturated color is the defining color attribute.

6. The color of a paint is identical with the color of light it

reflects.

Mention of the term "spectrum" takes us in a different direction

and introduces the story of color itself. Why do paints have the
colors they do? The traditional color theory answer is that the
color of the paint is identical with the color of light it refects.
Here Isaac Newton is the 18th century authority:

All colour'd Powders do suppress and stop [absorb] in them a

very considerable Part of the Light by which they are
illuminated. For they become colour'd by reflecting the Light of
their own Colours more copiously, and that of all other colors
more sparingly." (Opticks, Book I, Part II, Experiment 15)

This is true in a figurative sense: materials differ in the light

they reflect, and these differences are the material cause of the
visual color. For that reason radiant color is described with a
spectral reflectance profile or reflectance curve, which shows
the proportion (between 0% to 100%) of "white" light that is
reflected by the material at each visible wavelength.
 reflectance curve of a violet red paint

The error is that different sections of the spectrum appear to

have different visual color, but these are not the same as the
visual color of the same light as reflected from material surfaces.
The difference arises in the complex processes by which our
eyes and mind interpret light as visual color. This interpretation
frequently causes the color of materials to differ from the color
of the light they reflect.

For example: Michael Wilcox adopts the 19th century

explanation of color mixure in terms of six complementary hues,
but to make this explanation plausible he must describe yellow
paint as a material that reflects primarily "yellow" light
(diagram, below).

"colored light" reflected from a greenish yellow

paint
the Michael Wilcox story using six basic hues (left), and the way it
really is (right)

Why would Wilcox describe the light mixture reflected from

yellow paint ("red" and "green") as if it were a paint mixture
(yellow mixed with some green)? Because he is quoting a
traditional color theory paint mixing calculus. To operate this
calculus, the artist "deconstructs" the visual color of the paint
into six traditional complementary colors (the six colored bars
in the diagram). These hues are mutually exclusive: yellow
cancels violet, orange cancels blue, red cancels green, in each
case resulting in a gray mixture. The calculation is done from
the verbal labels: if the artist mixes an orange yellow with a
green blue, he can assume that the orange cancels the blue to
produce gray, and this gray will dull the mixture of green and
yellow that remains.

However, "yellow light plus some green light" is not what

appears in the reflectance curve of a saturated yellow paint
(diagram, above), which reflects nearly all the incident "red",
"orange", "yellow" and "green" light. This is necessary for the
yellow to create attractive subtractive color mixtures.

If we take traditional color theory at its word, then some ideal

material that reflects only visual yellow light should appear to be
a remarkably pure yellow. Although such a material apparently
does not exist, it is possible with the tools of colorimetry to
specify what such a "perfect yellow" material would look like.
And this color theory yellow turns out to be — a dark umber or
dark green gold (diagram, right)!

The problem here is that the eye places a special requirement on

yellow hues: they must not only reflect red, orange and yellow
light, they must reflect nearly all the red, orange and yellow
light that falls on them. Materials that reflect only some of the
light fall in the unsaturated color zones and appear instead to
be umber or green gold. The problem is not in the color of the
reflected light, since this is almost identical between a saturated
color theory yellow
and dull orange yellow:
the color appearance of a "pure"
yellow paint that reflects 100% of
"yellow" light

reflectance curves of two orange yellow paints

(left) cadmium yellow deep, PY65; (right) quinacridone gold, PO49,
with visual color samples matched in Lab color space

Instead, the most important factor is the luminance contrast

between the color and surrounding surfaces. The quinacridone
gold reflects marginally less light than the cadmium yellow deep,
and therefore appears darker. This is enough to make the color
appear quite different, as shown by the visual color samples.

22. The color of a paint is not in the reflected light, but in

the visual interpretation of the reflected light.

The yellow example highlights the three major reasons visual

color differs from radiant color:

• the light is interpreted by the eye as an additive mixture,

which has its own peculiar rules: among them, that "red" light
and "green" light make yellow, or that "red" light and "violet"
light make magenta.

• the additive mixture in surface colors is interpreted not as a

quantity of light, but as a proportion of incident light: in some
cases, as in difference between yellow and ochre, a material
reflects most of the incident light and still appear to be a
different color than a material that reflects almost all the light.

• the proportion of incident light is interpreted as a contrast

within the light environment: regardless of the proportion of
light it reflects, the same surface can appear orange, brown or
black depending on the contrast between its luminance (total
reflected light) and the average luminance of the surfaces
around it.

These issues get us ahead of the story and into the problems of
visual color relationships. For now, let's pursue the causes of
color as these are explained in traditional color theory.

7. Primary colors of paint cannot mix all possible colors,

because paints are impure colors.

The previous error exposes the fundamental strategy in

traditional color theory: to rationalize rather than explain color
mixtures. This appears clearly in the next error: that "primary"
paints cannot mix colors as they ought to because paint colors
are impure or imperfect.

This assertion also goes back to the misconceptions of the 18th

century. It is alluded to in the color wheel text by Moses
Harris, and it is repeated without challenge in Michel-Eugène
Chevreul's Principles of Color Harmony and Contrast
(1839):

We know of no substance [pigment or dye] that represents a

primary color — that is, that reflects only one kind of colored
light, whether pure red, blue or yellow. ... As pure colored
materials do not exist, how can one say that violet, green and
orange are composed of two simple colors mixed in equal
proportions? ... Instead we discover that most of the red, blue
or yellow colored substances we know of, when mixed with each
other, produce violets, greens and oranges of an inferior
intensity and clarity to those pure violet, green or orange
colored materials found in nature. They [the authors of color
mixing systems] could explain this if they admitted that the
colored materials mixed together reflect at least two kinds of
colored light [that is, two of the three primary colors], and if
they agreed with painters and dyers that a mixture of materials
which separately reflect red, yellow and blue will produce some
quantity of black, which dulls the intensity of the mixture.
[1839, ¶¶157-158; my translation]

There are three answers to the traditional color theory

accusation that material or radiant colors are "impure" or
"imperfect". The first answer is: yes, all primary colors are either
imaginary or imperfect — as explained above. However the
fault here is not in any way connected to the materials, or to the
fact that they reflect "different kinds of light", but in the overlap
among the L, M and S cone sensitivity curves.

The second answer is that radiant colors must be "impure", to

make attractive color mixtures. The subtractive color mixture
of two paints only reflects the light that both paints reflect
separately. This is because subtractive mixture increases the
light absorptance of the materials that are mixed: any
reflectance that is lacking in one of the paints will also be
substantially lacking in the mixture. As a result, yellow and blue
must both be high in "green" reflectance to make a saturated
green mixture; yellow and magenta must both be high in
"orange" and "red" reflectance to make a saturated orange
mixture. So subtractive mixture requires the primary
colors to be "impure" in order for them to be "primary". Each
primary must reflect light from most parts of the spectrum.

There is, however, a pervasive kind of "impurity" that does

reduce the lightness and saturation of all material colors. But it
is not a kind of impurity that is described in traditional color
theory.

the three components of material color

The diagram (above) shows how three components of color arise

in the three separate outcomes that occur when a light photon
strikes a material surface:

• scattering: when light strikes any surface, some amount of it

does not affect a change in the electron distribution within the
molecules that compose the material. The light is simply
reflected back into the environment, in random directions that
depend on microscopic variations in the surface. This is surface
scattering of light, and it adds whiteness to the visual color.

• chromatic reflectance: a substantial portion of the light does

throw its energy into the molecules that compose the material,
which disrupts the electron energies within the molecules that
compose the material. This light promptly emitted at specific
wavelengths that aggregate into the chromatic reflectance of the
material. Some materials produce better chromatic reflectance
than others, but many synthetic red, orange and yellow
pigments produce chromatic reflectance with a hue purity that is
very close to the physically possible maximum.

• infrared reflectance: the remainder of the light is

transformed by interaction with the material molecules into
heat. Some of this heat is held in the material, the rest is
emitted back into the environment. However heat is invisible to
the human eye — light goes in, nothing visible comes out — so
the reflected heat adds a component of blackness to the visual
color.

This is the accurate statement of the "impurity" in material

colors:

23. All visual colors originating in materials comprise a

proportion of chromatic reflectance (C), a proportion of
whiteness (W) caused by surface scattering, and a
proportion of blackness (K) caused by the loss of light as
heat:

visual color = W + C + K

Nearly all double cone color models, such as Wilhem

Ostwald's Farbkörper (1919) or the Swedish Natural Color
System (1981) require the sum of W (including white scattering
and whiteness increased with a white pigment), C and K
(including blackness increased by a black pigment) to equal a
constant (1 or 100) for all colors.

Finally, with reference to the material surface attributes:

24. The proportion of white light scattering is decreased

by surface gloss; the proportion of black absorptance is
increased by a transparent vehicle.

Materials generally present both darker and more saturated

visual color when they are enclosed in a transparent medium
(such as acrylic or water) than when they are viewed as dry
powders or embedded in an opaque vehicle. The transparent
medium tends to trap the light and permit it to interact with
more of the colorant molecules, increasing the probability that it
will be transformed into heat or chromatic reflectance; it also
presents a smoother surface, which greatly reduces surface
scattering.

Although W, C and K are aspects of material color, they only

become recognizable as attributes of visual color through
properties of reflected light within the light environment,
specifically through the interaction of luminance contrast and
chromaticity contrast.

25. The visual color attributes W, C and K are perceived

through luminance and chromaticity contrasts within a
light environment, and therefore can be mimicked by
contrasts between light stimuli presented as contiguous
color areas.

This is how we can perceive blackened or whitened surfaces in

an image presented on a computer monitor, television screen or
projected transparency. The overall luminance of the image is
interpreted as the light environment in much the same way as it
would be in a physical environment, and the luminance and
chromaticity contrasts are interpreted in the same way as they
would be in surfaces.

However, the fact that we can simulate surface color attributes

in the pure spectrum colors held in such high esteem by
traditional color theorists only demonstrates that the
imperfections we can simulate are also inherent in our visual
response to the world, and therefore — once again! — are due
to our eyes and mind, which anticipate the three part "impurity"
of material colors.

8. A "split primary" palette overcomes the impurity of

paint colors.

We've seen that the "impurity" of material color is inherent in

material colorants, is essential for subtractive mixture to work
properly, and is even essential to the visual color of a saturated
yellow. Nevertheless, traditional color theory has attempted to
fix this impurity. Let's see how.

The passage from Chevreul's The Principles of Color

Harmony and Contrast, quoted above, continues this way:

It is also certain that the violets, greens and oranges resulting

from a mixture of colored materials are much more intense
when the colors of these materials are more similar in hue. For
example: when we mix blue and red to form violet, the result
will be better if we take a red tinted with blue, and a blue tinted
with red, rather than a red or blue leaning toward yellow; in the
same way, a blue tinted with green, mixed with a yellow tinted
with blue, will yield a purer green than if red were part of either
color. (1839, ¶¶157-158; my translation; emphasis in original)

According the Chevreul, a yellow primary paint must reflect

"yellow" light mixed with some "blue" or "red" light, which dulls
the pure yellow color. As we can't avoid this color pollution, we
minimize it by mixing colors tinted with each other — so the
thinking goes.

This is the basis for the traditional color theory remedy for dull
paint mixtures — the split "primary" palette. It is based on
Chevreul's concept of "taint". The strategy is to increase the
taint by splitting the paint primary colors into a "warm" and
"cool" pair that are "tainted" or lean toward each of the other
two primaries.

Thus we split primary yellow into a "warm" orange yellow

(tainted with some of primary red) and a "cool" green yellow
(tainted with some of the primary blue); we split primary red
into a "warm" orange red (tainted with some of primary yellow)
and a "cool" violet red (tainted with some of the primary blue);
and we split primary blue into a "warm" violet blue (tainted with
some of primary red) and a "cool" green blue (tainted with some
of the primary yellow). The primary palette of three paints
becomes a split primary palette of six paints.

Then, by mixing the primary paints that lean toward each other,
taint mixing with taint is the same as color mixed with color. In
theory, then, this solves the problem of dull orange, green and
purple mixtures in a primary triad palette.

So let's hold the split primary palette to its key claim: that
splitting the paint primary colors into a "warm" and "cool" pair
allows us to mix the most vibrant secondary colors (orange,
purple and green).

We evaluate the "vibrant color" justification for the split primary

palette by comparing it to any other palette of six paints, for
example the secondary palette, to see which paint selection is
superior. There are two ways to do this.

A simple "back of the envelope" approach is to print out a copy

of the pigment map presented on the CIECAM aCbC plane,
identify on this map the location of the pigments used in all
paints in the palette (use the complete palette to identify
pigments from the color index name printed on the paint tube
label), then connect these pigment markers to form the largest
possible, straight sided enclosure (see examples below). The
enclosed area is approximately the gamut of the palette — the
range of hue and saturation that it is possible to mix with that
selection of paints. The palette with the larger gamut will create
a wider variety of color mixtures.

comparing the gamut of two palettes

split primary palette (left) and secondary palette (right)
on the CIECAM aCbC plane

This comparison shows that the split primary palette (at left)
creates a lozenge of color mixtures that is skewed toward the
"warm" colors of the palette, and creates dull mixtures in the
greens and violets (the boundary lines of the palette pass close
to the gray center in these hues). In contrast, with the more
equally spaced secondary palette (at right), we get a
substantially increased range in color mixtures. This is because a
single intense pigment anchors each primary and secondary
hue, which pushes back the limits of the color space as far as
possible (particularly on the green side).

The alternative (and better) way to compare palettes is to use

each one to mix the twelve colors of a tertiary color wheel.
Display these mixtures either side by side or as matching paint
wheels (below), and see what you get.

comparing paint wheels made with two palettes

split primary palette (left) and secondary palette (right)

This side by side comparison confirms the gamut differences

identified with the palette schemes. The mixed red orange in the
split primary palette (left) is so dull it is close to brown; the
purple is dark and grayish, and the mixed greens are drab
across the entire range. In contrast, the secondary palette (at
right) is obviously much brighter in the greens, produces a more
evenly saturated range of warm hues, and gets juicy purples as
well.

The problem here is saturation costs. Assuming two paints are

both saturated to begin with, then the rule of saturation costs is:
the farther apart on the hue circle two paint colors are, the
duller their mixture will be. The obvious solution to saturation
costs is to use a larger number of saturated paints, spaced
equally around the hue circle.

26. Given an arbitrary limit on the number of paints or

inks in a palette, the largest variety of saturated color
mixtures is obtained by choosing the most saturated
pigments in hues equally spaced around the hue circle.

Choosing two paints or inks that are more similar in hue does
increase the intensity of their mixture, as Chevreul says. But
these saturation costs again have nothing to do with the
contamination of one primary color with another. They appear
even when we mix two monochromatic (single wavelength)
lights that are completely free of tint by any other hue. In fact,
mixing spectral lights was originally how Newton discovered
saturation costs, and devised the hue circle to explain them!

9. With a split primary palette, do not mix colors "across

the line" of a primary color.

The modern prejudice in favor of high chroma color became

potent in the late 19th and 20th centuries, and watercolor
tutorials that advocated the split primary palette began to
disparage dull color mixtures and warned painters to avoid
them.

Among practitioners of the split primary palette, the "taint mixed

with taint" rationale developed a complementary prohibition: do
not mix colors on opposite sides of a "primary" color. This was
called "crossing the line" and the mixture was called "mud".

"crossing the line" in a split primary palette

In the examples, we mix the same hue of color (yellow green,

orange or violet) using two split primary paints with the same
"taint", or two primaries with a taint fromt the third primary. In
each case, the result is a duller color mixture, a color closer to
or even equal to "mud".

However, once the painter understands saturation costs, and

chooses paint colors that are equally spaced around the hue
circle rather than split from the three primary colors, this
prohibition is irrelevant. And certainly dull, dark colors are too
often useful to prohibit them in painting styles — the "mud"
green in the diagram (above) is actually a handsome landscape
foliage color.

27. "Mud" is a perjorative label for color mixtures that

occur widely in nature and are indispensable in all
historical and most contemporary painting styles.

Traditional color theory teaches color mixing rules and an

antiquated, judgmental approach to color mixtures. Modern
color theory teaches color mixing skills and the insights
necessary to create whatever color is needed for any purpose.

10. Transparent watercolors achieve "luminosity"

because light is reflected from the paper through the
pigments, "like light through a stained glass window".

A very popular misconception in traditional color theory is that

watercolors present a special "luminosity" that is due to the
stained glass action of the watercolor pigments.

These two metaphors arose in the 19th century as part of the

rivalrous disputes between watercolor societies — or rather,
between painters who used "muddy" gouache or body color, and
those who insisted on using only "pure" transparent paints.
Given the traditional color theory emphasis on color "purity", the
churchly image of a stained glass window should arouse
immediate suspicion. And, as I explain in detail elsewhere, the
metaphor is false.

If a pigment particle absorbs light to create chromatic

reflectance, then that light is not available to be absorbed a
second time. Light does not pass through a pigment particle — it
is either absorbed as heat, reflected as color or scattered as
"white" light — so light that is reflected from the painting to the
viewer that has not been affected by pigment is only reflected
from the paper.

This paper reflected light also does not pass through pigment
particles, though it can hit a pigment particle on its way out. But
this action will not be different from the light that is reflected
from a gessoed canvas back through an acrylic or oil paint layer,
so it can't be an advantage that watercolors have over other
paint media.

In fact, watercolor paints do not form a paint layer, but scatter

pigment particles around on the surface of the paper like gravel
on a shag carpet (image, right). It's apparent in the photo that
the paper fibers are as likely to scatter or block light as they are
to send it back to the viewer, because there is no paint layer
in watercolors — the gum vehicle has dried around the fibers
and pigment particles and sunk into the paper pulp.

Acrylic and oil paints do form a transparent layer. Light reflected

within this layer can strike pigment particles twice, and has a
greater chance of hitting a pigment particle once before it leaves
the paint layer, which (along with reduction in white light
scattering from the transparent binder surface) is why pigments
in acrylic and oil paints can achieve a higher chroma than the
same pigments in watercolors.

So what explains the special color appearance of a watercolor microscope image of an

painting, or its apparent transparency? The fact, as shown in the ultramarine blue wash on cold
pressed watercolor paper
photo, that so much bare paper can reflect light. This adds
whiteness and brightness (luminance, not chroma) to the color,
reducing the chroma and reducing the contrast ratio between
the white and the darkest values. To see this contrast reducing
effect more dramatically, hold a watercolor painting against the
sun and observe light actually passing through the paper.

Watercolors also show the paper texture in the paint surface,

instead of a shiny, obviously material layer, so that the image
appears insubstantial and somehow floating in front of the
paper. In fact, letting paint build up until it "bronzes" or acquires
a shiny surface is considered a painting flaw. The visible paper
surface, or the lack of visible paint layer, creates the impression
of something transparent like a stained glass window, but it is
not a special form of "luminosity".

28. The "luminosity" in watercolors arises from the

reflection from the white paper, which reduces the
contrast ratio and increases the brightness of the painting
surface; it does not come from light passing through
pigment particles.

The fixation of some watercolor painters on "transparent"

pigments is also misdirected. All pigments can appear
transparent, if they are diluted with enough water and applied as
a smooth, seamless wash. Transparency happens between
pigment particles. The key is to avoid a buildup of paint that
appears as a paint layer (the real objection to gouache), or to
soak the paper so much that the pigment particles migrate into
the paper, where they are shadowed by the paper fibers.

29. The "transparency" in watercolors is not in the

pigments, but in the spacing between the pigment
particles: opaque or "sedimentary" paints can be made
transparent by diluting them, applying as a seamless
wash, and avoiding paint buildup into a visible paint
layer.

Use thick paint sparingly, and work as much as possible on dry

or freshly wet paper, and you'll have all the "luminosity" you can
handle.

11. Secondary colors are 1:1 mixtures of two primary

colors, and tertiary colors are 1:1 mixtures of two
secondary colors.

Most of the hallmark concepts of traditional color theory have

been antiquated by the progress in color science, colorant
manufacture, media technologies and painting styles. A simple
example is the change that has occurred in the definition of
tertiary colors.

Traditional color theory starts with the three primary colors,

secondary colors are produced by the equal mixture of two
primary colors. These are orange (O), green (G) and violet (V),
as shown in the diagram (below).

color theory tertiary colors

the traditional tertiary colors (left) and the modern tertiary hues
(right)

In the traditional concept (based on the 18th century red, yellow

and blue primaries), tertiary colors are produced by the equal
mixture of two secondary colors, which creates the three
tertiaries maroon (dull red), olive (dull yellow) and slate (dull
blue).

Dull color mixtures were fundamental to painting styles in 18th

century painting practice — so much so that the English
entomologist Moses Harris, in his Natural System of Colours
(1766), devoted a separate color wheel to them, as mixtures of
orange, green and purple (image, below).

the color wheels of moses harris (1766)

a 20th century reconstruction of the Harris color wheels; (left)
mixtures of the "primitive" colors red, yellow and blue; (right)
mixtures of the "compound" colors orange, green and purple

These traditional tertiaries anchored the useful dull color

mixtures in relation to the primary colors, using secondary
colors as a bridging framework. This integrative role of the
traditional tertiary colors appears in the three alternative
formulas for a tertiary mixture. The equal mixture of two
secondary colors amounts to a 2:1:1 mixture of all three
primaries, for example in olive:

2 O[1Y+1R] + 2 G[1Y+1B] = 4 OLIVE [2Y+1R+1B]

Simply by rearranging the mixture components, we prove that

the same tertiary color is equal to a 1:1 mixture of yellow and
its complement, violet:

2 O[1Y+1R] + 2 G[1Y+1B] = 2 Y[2Y] + 2 V[1R+1B]

or to a 1:3 (!) mixture of a primary color with the darkest gray

(near black) that can be mixed with the three primaries:

2 O[1Y+1R] + 2 G[1Y+1B] = 1 Y[1Y] + 3 K[1Y+1R+1B]

... the last formula showing that the three traditional tertiaries
are simply dulled versions of the three primary colors, creating a
muted, dark, "minor key" primary triad palette.

This is all "in theory": to use these recipes in practice, we must

have three primary paints of matching tinting strength, which
we get by first diluting the blue and red paints until an equal
mixture with yellow produces an achromatic dark gray.

And there theory ends. We cannot duplicate these results by

using these proportions in three primary paints out of the tube,
and we certainly cannot get these results by using separate
colors of yellow, orange, green, black and violet paint. For
example, 3 parts carbon black will overwhelm 1 part yellow, and
1 part dioxazine violet will overwhelm 1 part yellow, because the
black and violet are very dark and strongly tinting paints.

However, by the early 20th century, vast improvements in

synthetic pigment manufacture, and the use of strongly
saturated colorants in painting and advertising, had shifted the
color theory emphasis to the circumference of the color wheel
and to the most saturated version of all hues.

So in the modern concept (based on the 20th century magenta,

yellow and cyan primaries), tertiary hues became the equal
mixture of a primary hue and either of the secondary hues next
to it. This creates the six tertiary hues yellow orange (yo), red
(r), violet (v), blue (b), blue green (bg) and yellow green (yg).
This has been the usage taught in the Famous Artists' Courses
since the 1950's, and is the standard usage cited in the
American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (4th
edition).

In modern color theory there is no need for the tertiary label, as

a color in the "third rank" below primary, because we do not rely
on primary mixtures to create them (instead artists use single
pigment paints, and printers use spot colors); nor is there any
need for secondary to describe "second rank" hues such as
orange and green that are often more important and useful in
painting than red violet or green blue.

30. The designation of hues as "secondary" or "tertiary"

has no relevance in modern color theory.

In place of these archaic labels, artists use the six basic hue
categories and twelve compound hue categories described
above to denote hues. There is no ranking of importance among
hues; they are all equally important in color design.

12. Painters use the primary color framework to analyze

visual colors and paint color mixtures.

There are two final misconceptions necessary to clear up. The

first is that the traditional color theory framework is a powerful
way for painters to think about conceptual colors, analyze visual
colors, or guide paint color mixtures.

Analysis of Complementary Hues. Let's first test these claims

on one of the central color theory preoccupations: identifying the
complementary color to a given color — for example, a yellow
orange mixture (diagram, below).

identifying complementary hues

(top) using the traditional primary triad (left) requires insertion of
secondary hues (right); (bottom) using the modern opponent
dimensions

We start with the primary triad (C, Y and M), centered on the
achromatic mixture (K) of all three primaries in equal
proportions at equal tinting strength. We have created the most
saturated possible yellow orange mixture from some quantity of
yellow and magenta paint (y,m). What then is its visual or
mixing complementary color (C(y,m))?

Since any two complementary colors must mix to gray, the

answer is simply to subtract the primary quantities in y,m from
the c,y,m quantities in the achromatic mixture. To do that, we
only have to make the larger of the two quantities in the y,m
mixture equal to its quantity in the gray mixture. Thus, if we
know that:

K = 20(C) + 33(Y) + 27(M)

y,m = 60(Y) + 40(M)

then we standardize the larger quantity (60 parts of yellow) on

the matching achromatic quantity (33 parts of yellow):

33/60 = 0.55

we adjust the y,m proportions by that amount:

0.55*[60(Y) + 40(M)] = 33(Y) + 22(M)

and finally subtract those quantities from the achromatic

quantities to get the complementary mixture C(y,m):

C(y,m) = (20-0)(C) + (33-33)(Y) + (27-22)(M)

C(y,m) = 20(C) + 5(M).

Now, although Ogden Rood showed artists how to make similar

calculations within a visual color triangle using mixture
quantities from a color top, I believe very few artists ever
found their complementary paint mixtures by this kind of
calculation!

That is because Moses Harris mooted the problem when he

inserted the secondary or "compound" colors, the complements
to the primary colors, in his color wheel. Now we are no longer
working within a triangle but a circle, and the complement of the
mixture y,o is the mixture v,c in the same relative proportions.
And Harris explained that this is how his color wheel should be
used "if a contrast is wanting to any color or teint". The
complementary colors get us out of the calculations: we judge
colors visually instead.

Modern color theory goes one step further. It replaces the

traditional primary/secondary framework with two opponent
color dimensions, defined as visual hue relationships: violet
red/blue green (a+/a–) and yellow/blue violet (b+/b–). These,
along with a lightness/brightness (J/Q) or white/black (W/K)
dimension, are the modern primaries, descended by a long
and indirect path from ideas first proposed by Evald Hering.
They are more commonly known as the artist's primaries, and
were the primary colors identified in the days before traditional
color theory by painters such as Leonardo da Vinci.

In this color definition, the relative quantities of two visual

primaries in a color (qy and qr for the y,r or yellow orange
mixture) define, to a good approximation, the proportions of
yellow and violet red paints of equal tinting strength that will
create that hue as a material mixture. And these proportions are
simply applied to the opposing primaries (in the example, blue
green and blue violet) to mix the complementary hue.

However, with a modern artist's color wheel (the CIECAM

aCbC plane) even that indirection is not necessary. The hue
plane is populated with hue and chroma markers for all
important modern pigments used in art materials.
 click on image for a larger view

click here for a full page, printer friendly (Adobe

Acrobat PDF) version

To print the color wheel, set page orientation

to "landscape" and print at 50% size or to fit an 8.5" x 11" sheet of paper.

Simply by drawing a line from any chosen yellow orange

pigment (color) through the "black" center of the color wheel
and extending it to the opposite side, the artist locates the
closest pigments to the visual complement of the chosen color,
and can mix a perfect hue match from any two pigments on
opposite sides of the line. Thus, the perfect visual complement
of isoindolinone yellow (PY110) is ... cobalt blue (PB28),
phthalo blue RS (PB15:1) or prussian [iron] blue (PB27).

31. The a+/a– and b+/b– opponent dimensions of

modern perceptual color spaces are the most effective
framework for analyzing complementary color
relationships.

Consider, as an illustration, how the artist might analyze

warm/cool relationships in the color design or color harmony
in a painting.

The traditional primary triad palette includes a red (R) such

as cadmium red (PR108) or alizarin crimson (PR83) that
contains more yellow than a violet red, and a blue (B) such as
cobalt blue (PB28) or ultramarine blue (PB29) that contains
more violet than a green blue. As a result, the primary palette is
skewed to one side of the warm/cool dimension between red
orange and green blue; yellow (Y) is the only color anchor above
the line (diagram, below).

traditional and modern analysis of warm/cool

contrast
(left) traditional RYB triad, plus green; (right) modern primaries

Which brings us to green. Traditional color theory does not

usually explain the various ways to mix an orange or brown, or a
violet or maroon — but it always has quite a lot to say about
green. And this is because green is necessary to balance color
mixtures around the warm/cool axis.

In contrast, the modern primaries (R, Y, G and V) provide this

balance naturally, and considerable nuance in varying color so
that it is warmer either toward yellow or toward red, and cooler
either toward green or toward blue.

The traditional color theory prohibition against using premixed

greens, or having a green paint on the palette, is difficult to
understand if one is concerned with either mixing convenience
or color mixture variety. The prohibition against green pigments,
or convenience green paints made with green pigments, is
that they "pop out" of the primary triad as too chromatic or
colorful.

32. Adding a green "primary" in concept, and use of a

green paint in practice, is an efficient and accurate
framework for color analysis and paint mixing that is
sanctioned by a long painting tradition.

Medieval painters, supposedly encumbered by the false

Aristotelian theory of colors, understood this clearly, because
they remained much closer to their materials. For example, the
common portrait painting method was to lay down the modeling
of a face in a dull green paint, such as terre verte, then apply a
glaze of transparent carmine. The result, which is striking the
first time you try it, is that the color blossoms into a beautifully
glowing dull orange or deep yellow tone.

This dynamic arises because the eye is adept at compensating

for colored illumination (the illuminant) if it exists, or imputing
colored illumination to an image if the color balance appears
limited or skewed in some way. Because traditional color theory
assigns a separate set of "primary" colors (red, green and blue
or RGB) to the eye and the eye's response to light, radiant color
is detached from material color in a completely unnatural way.

Here for example is a painting of hands made entirely in red and

green paints (excepting the yellow and blue accents in the
colored bracelet): the pure paint colors (slightly different for the
hands and table background) are presented in the dowels inset
into the table surface.

a painting made entirely of red and green paints

(except for the bracelet); party chick by Bruce MacEvoy © 2006

How is it possible to mix a satisfactory painting using only two

colors? Simple: the eye supplies the "missing" color! We
interpret the painting as representing a pair of pale hands under
a "cool" greenish or bluish illuminant (color of light), not as a
pair of ghoulish green hands under a "white" illuminant. Finally,
the concern with the subtractive primary triad distracts painters
from It's really the eye, not the paints, that provides the color in
a painting.

I describe elsewhere the color transitions produced by natural

changes in daylight, weather and time of year, and the color
transitions in incandescent artificial light. When defined as
correlated color temperatures, these conveniently fit within
the modern primary framework where they can be matched to
specific paint hues.

color analogs to daylight spectra chromaticities

the hue of blackbody temperatures illustrated as spectral locations
on the CIECAM a*b* plane

Because chromatic adaptation occurs through changes in the

eye's RGB color sensitivity and through rebalancing of the ab
opponent dimensions, the modern primaries are a better
framework than the traditional RYB or modern CYM subtractive
primaries for analyzing the eye's response to landscape and
light.

33. Because the adaption of the eye to natural light is

organized around the a+/a– and b+/b– dimensions, the
modern primaries provide a comprehensive framework to
analyze the relations between illumination, visible color
and paint mixture.

We have identified the two fundamental problems with 18th

century color theory: a failure to embrace materials as the
focus of artistic understanding, and a misunderstanding of
color perception that begins with the idea of "color in the light"
and extends to the geometry of color relationships. These are
not complications or obstacles to a modern color theory: they
demonstrate that color theory has for centuries been talking
about color in the abstract, as conceptual colors and ideal color
mixtures. But color is not only a specific sensation, it is also
always in part a specific stimulus — a specific material, or a
specific mixture of lights.

additive & subtractive color mixing

The previous section has confronted the most important
color misconceptions foisted on painters by traditional color
theory. Now we start the process of building a modern color
theory, beginning with color mixture.

Painters mix their paints to shape the light reflected from a

painting, and the viewer's eye interprets this reflected light as
color under light in space. These two extremes of color
experience — the mixed paints, and the interpreting eye — are
described by two separate and unequal color mixing theories,
explained in full in the page additive & subtractive color
mixing.

There are two surprises when we learn about color mixture. The
first is that subtractive color mixture is nothing more than
additive color mixture, in an expanded form that tries to
compensate for the light absorbing effects of material mixtures.

The second is that additive color mixture is a rigorous

explanation of color vision, a true scientific theory; but
subtractive color mixture is only an idealized and unreliable
approximation of the actual complexity and diversity of material
color mixture.

Additive Color Mixing. Additive color mixing explains how

the eye interprets light wavelengths in the perception of color.

Additive mixture is always based on four primary colors, called

the four cardinal lights. These are most commonly red orange,
middle green, blue violet, and the white light defined by mixing
all three colored lights together. The white light defines the
relative brightness or tinting strength of the three chromatic
lights, so that they can be used to define color mixtures
precisely.

This trichromatic foundation is in turn the basis for all

modern chromaticity diagrams, the identification of visual
complementary colors, and the definition of modern
trichromatic color models.

Additive Mixtures Occur In The Eye. The beauty of additive

color mixing principles lies in their narrow scope. They focus on
a single sensory process — the average or typical responses of
the L, M and S photoreceptors to light — for the explanation
of color mixtures.

But wait ... isn't additive color mixture really a theory of how
light mixtures behave? No, it is not. This misconception arises
because light is obviously the only stimulus that the eye
responds to, and because lights of various colors are explicitly
manipulated in color matching experiments used to measure
additive color mixtures. But light is the stimulus, and additive
color mixing describes the response of the eye to a light
stimulus.

The RGB Additive "Primary" Lights. How do we illustrate,

verify or measure the rules of additive color mixing? Obviously,
by manipulating the outputs of the separate L, M and S cones.
How do we manipulate these outputs? By stimulating them with
three colored lights — red, green, and blue violet
(abbreviated RGB). Necessarily, these lights create a fourth
"primary": the "white" light mixture of them all.

The image below displays the "primary" RGB colors of your

computer monitor. Note that the green primary contains too
much yellow, and the blue primary not enough violet, which
dulls the purple and blue green mixtures, and sharply reduces
the number of visually different green mixtures possible on a
computer monitor.

The illustration (below) shows the typical demonstration of

additive light mixtures, made by shining three overlapping
circles of filtered light onto an achromatic (gray or white)
surface. If the surface is illuminated by both the red and green
lights, but not by the blue light, then the eye responds with the
color sensation of yellow. A magenta color results from the
mixture of red and blue violet light, and cyan from the mixture
of blue violet and green. In additive color mixing, yellow and
blue don't make green — they make white!

additive color mixtures

as demonstrated with filtered lights; note that each pair of RGB
primaries mixes one of the subtractive (CYM) primaries

It's handy to think of additive mixing as the "white" color

theory. Mixing light wavelengths from the "red," "green" and
"blue violet" parts of the spectrum adds luminosity and
negates hue to shift the mixture color of lights from dim pure
hues toward bright whites.

The key principle is that the eye always adds together all the
wavelengths of light incident on the retina — nothing is lost —
and it is this total light sensation that the eye interprets as color.

The foundation of additive color mixing is called trichromatic

metamerism: the color produced by any combination of light
wavelengths, no matter how complex it may be, can be exactly
matched by the visual mixture of no more than three lights. The
match can be created with three strongly saturated (single
wavelength or monochromatic) lights, or at most two
monochromatic lights mixed with a "white" light. All physically
possible light colors can be reduced to a specific mixture
of at most three lights.

This additive behavior leads to an important constant in color

vision: the chromaticity and brightness of lights predicts
the chromaticity and brightness of their mixture for
moderately dim to bright lights. This is true regardless of
whether the lights are monochromatic (a very pure hue, as we
see in a single wavelength of light) or complex (such as
daylight).

We will discover that equivalent subtractive metameric rules do

not exist in the many kinds of radiant color mixing, and that
lack of predictable consistency in substance mixtures is the most
important difference between additive and subtractive color
mixing.

As you may have guessed by now, the distinction between

conceptual colors and material colors also appears in the
difference between the invisible and therefore conceptual visual
primaries (the L, M and S cone responses) and the light
mixtures used to demonstrate or measure our color sensations.

The True Additive Primaries Are Invisible. The diagram at

right shows the location on the CIELUV chromaticity diagram
of three monochromatic lights (at 460nm, 530nm and 650nm)
that have frequently been used in color vision research to
analyze trichromatic color matches and opponent color mixtures.

The focus here is on the white triangle or gamut that connects

the three primary lights. This defines the range of actual additive
color mixtures it is possible to make with those three primaries.
This gamut encloses most, but not all, of the chromaticity area,
which defines the area of all physically possible light colors. A
significant portion of the chromaticity diagram is outside the
the gamut of RGB primaries
gamut. In other words, the visible RGB primary lights
used in color vision research
cannot mix all colors.
additive light mixing gamut defined
Thus, the "green primary" gives full mixing coverage along the by lights at 460, 530 and 650 nm
red to yellow colors, but it cannot mix (with the "blue violet"
primary) the most intense greens, blue greens and blues. In
addition, the "blue violet" and "red" monochromatic primaries
cannot mix the most intense purples and red violets.

The true additive primaries, the only "primaries" that can mix all
possible colors, are the outputs from the L, M and S cones. We
are never aware of these outputs directly and therefore they are
invisible. We only experience them as the tendency toward a
red, green or blue color sensation that results from the
combination and interpretation of these outputs in the visual
cortex.

How Do We Choose the RGB Lights? Some artists believe

that the RGB primary lights are the same hues that most
stimulate the three receptor cones. This is false. The cones are
actually most sensitive to "green yellow" (L) "green" (M) and
"blue violet" (S) wavelengths, as shown below.

additive primary colors are illustrative only

the wavelengths of maximum sensitivity for the L, M and S cones
(top) are unrelated to the colored lights used to simulate the cones
in additive color mixing demonstrations (bottom)

Red, green and blue violet lights are used by convention and
convenience, and it is from these color matching lights that
we get the names red, green and blue assigned to the additive
primaries.

There's a simple logic for choosing these primary lights. Almost

any light wavelength that stimulates one cone will also stimulate
one or both of the other cones, because the cone sensitivity
curves (especially L and M) overlap. To explain color mixing as
the result of three independent types of photoreceptor response,
we need three light wavelengths that each stimulate one cone
much more than the other two. In other words:

34. An ideal additive primary color must stimulate only

one type of receptor cone (L, M or S) as strongly as
possible, and stimulate the other two types of cone as
little as possible.

35. The optimal choice of physical lights for additive color

media are typically orange red (R), green (G) and violet
blue (B).

So, within each section of the spectrum where the L, M or

S cone is the dominant receptor, we pick a wavelength that
creates the greatest difference in response between that cone
and the other two.

Does Additive Mixture Require RGB Lights? Many artists

believe that red, green and blue violet lights must be used to
explain or demonstrate additive color mixing. Again, not true.
The choice of lights is arbitrary, and one selection of primaries is
better than another only if we require the mixture gamut to be
as large or comprehensive as possible.

We could just as easily demonstrate additive color mixing with

colored lights representing the subtractive primary colors cyan,
yellow and magenta, although most of the blues, greens and
reds that we could mix with these lights would appear quite
whitish or unsaturated.

The somewhat arbitrary procedures for choosing the additive

primary lights are acceptable because the real lights are not the
actual basis of additive color mixing. The true additive
primary colors are the photoreceptor outputs. We use RGB
colored lights to symbolize the LMS receptor outputs, because
they are also the most effective way to manipulate those
outputs.

A Scientific Theory of Color Vision. For many centuries, the

behavior of color mixtures was difficult to explain because
material color, which seemed to be anchored in "real" objects of
the external world, was conceptually distinguished from the
"illusory" colors in rainbows or prisms. The two types of
mixtures behaved differently, but the reason for the difference
was unknown.

The trichromatic theory provided the clarifying explanation and

prediction of all color sensations as arising in the behavior of the
eye. Because the L, M and S receptor responses can be
predicted mathematically from the summed intensity of all
wavelengths in a light stimulus, the additive primaries
empirically connect a measurable light stimulus to a measurable
(matchable) color sensation — at least, in experimentally
restricted viewing conditions. This is what makes additive color
mixing, in the scientific sense of the word, a theory of color
vision.

Subtractive Color Mixture. Subtractive color mixing is, in

comparison to additive color mixing, a flawed and
approximate attempt to describe the colors that result when
light absorbing substances are mixed.

The principles of subtractive color mixture are not a rigorous

theory at all. They are a description of the way colors should mix
in the ideal case — which never occurs.

Subtractive mixing theory imitates the main features of additive

color theory, and to understand the problems with subtractive
color mixing, we need to unmask these points of imitation one
by one.

Subtractive Mixtures Occur in Substances. First, let's get

clear on what subtractive mixing rules are trying to explain. All
subtractive color mixing occurs in the external world, in a
wide variety of material colors.

In principle, subtractive color theory ought to be able to explain

the color changes that occur in any kind of material mixture. It
also ought to explain the color changes that occur when a
surface is illuminated by different illuminants (colors of light).
And this is the fundamental difficulty with subtractive mixing
theory: it must explain the behavior of too many different
substances.

This problem does not arise in additive color mixture, thanks to

additive metamerism in lights. Even though two colored lights
may be constituted from very different combinations of light
wavelengths, so long as the two lights have exactly the same
color, they will behave exactly the same in all mixtures with all
other lights.

In subtractive color mixture, exactly the opposite is true: even

when two materials have exactly the same color, they may not
behave the same in mixtures with other materials.

This problem is minimized, but hardly eliminated, by limiting the

application of subtractive mixing principles to manufactured
colorants. Even here, the variety of materials includes light
reflecting substances (such as powders, paints, dyes or inks)
and light transmitting substances (such as photographic filters,
stained glass or tinted liquids).

I give the name substance uncertainty to this unpredictable

connection between a material's physical attributes and color
mixing behavior, and I explore the depth of this problem in the
next section.

For now, the essential point is that we cannot use the

measured color of two paints to predict the color of their
mixture. This is the most important point of difference with
additive color theory, where the measured color of two lights of
moderate brightness can accurately predict the color of their
mixture.

The CYM Subtractive "Primary" Colors. Subtractive color

mixtures have been recognized and used in dyers' and painters'
trades since ancient Greece. That long trial and error practice
fixed on red, yellow and blue as the subtractive primary colors.
This attained the status of a commonly accepted "color theory"
in the 18th century.

In fact, the traditional choice of primary colors was limited by

the historical availability of suitable pigments, which until the
late 19th century were comparatively dull and dark. these
traditional subtractive primaries are relicts of traditional color
theory.

Color choices today have been greatly expanded by modern

industrial chemistry, so that the modern subtractive
"primary" colors are cyan, yellow and magenta
(abbreviated CYM)

Here are exemplars of the three subtractive primaries in your

computer monitor colors.

There are many different material demonstrations of subtractive

mixture, but one of the most common and convenient is to
overlap different colored filters on a brightly lit white background
or diffusing panel, as illustrated in the figure below.

subtractive CYM color mixtures

as demonstrated in overlapping sheets of transparent colored plastic
(transmission or filter mixture)

These primaries produce the mixtures familiar to us in paints.

When we mix together a yellow and magenta paint, the
resulting mixture is scarlet or orange; the mixture of magenta
and cyan yields purples and blues, and green result from the
mixture of yellow and cyan.

However these subtractive cyan, yellow and magenta primaries

are presented as the basic or elemental conceptual colors in
subtractive color mixing, no matter what kinds of material colors
— in paints, inks, dyes, pigments or filters — are used to
actually mix those colors.

So we have to ask: what is the universal visual effect on color

that happens when we mix material substances? What is
primary about subtractive "primary" colors?

Subtractive Mixtures Always Increase Light Absorptance.

The first step to an answer is this: when we combine paints,
dyes or filters, we do not increase their light reflecting (or
transmitting) behavior but their light absorbing behavior.

A subtractive mixture absorbs all light wavelengths that

each colorant absorbs by itself. Subtractive mixture always
increases the darkness of material colors; if we mix a white
paint with a green paint, the white paint is darkened as a result.
If additive mixture is the "white" color theory, then subtractive
mixture is the "black" color theory.

Mixing all three subtractive primaries produces a dark neutral,

the opposite of white, because each paint subtracts or
absorbs light that might be reflected by the other. Subtractive
color mixtures can only be made lighter by diluting the amount
of pigment in the mixture with white paint or water; either
remedy weakens the color saturation. So subtractive mixture
almost always also reduces the hue purity (increases the
grayness) in the mixture color.

Multiplicative Darkness Mixture. Well, how do colors combine

in subtractive mixtures? This is always some form of
multiplication or product of the separate reflectance curves
(as shown below for two paints labeled magenta and yellow).

subtractive color mixing of yellow and magenta

white line shows reflectance curve of subtractive mixture; high
reflectance remains only where both paints reflect light

In this mixture, the yellow absorbance subtracts light from the

"blue" reflectance in magenta, and the magenta absorbance
destroys the "green" reflectance in yellow. The common
reflectance, the light reflected by both paints, is largely in the
"red orange" and "red" part of the spectrum, which is the
approximate hue of the mixture. It is specifically this mutual
antagonism among light absorbing substances that
subtractive color mixing tries to explain.

This mutual antagonism depends on many physical attributes of

the colorants, in particular (for pigments) on their tinting
strength, particle size and hiding power (see this explanation
of paint physical attributes). In general, pigments that have a
higher tinting strength, smaller particle size and greater hiding
power (opacity) will have a "weight" or impact in mixtures that
is greater than their physical proportion in the mixture.

However, as a general rule for most paints and dyes in most

applications, the reflectance resulting from a physical mixture of
pigments is usually close to the geometric mean of the
separate paint reflectance curves across each wavelength in the
spectrum. (The geometric mean of two numbers is the square
root of their product.) For example, if a white paint reflects 98%
of the light at 452nm, and a black paint reflects 10% of the
light, their mixture (in equal proportions at equal tinting
strength) will reflect approximately 31% of the light at that
wavelength.

We have to use a different mixing rule for filters, where the

mixture color is usually equal to the product of the separate
transmission profiles. That is, two filters that separately transmit
98% and 10% of a wavelength will transmit about 9.8% of the
light when they are combined.

When we apply these mixing calculations to the reflectance or

transmission profiles, we find that the mixture profile is always
closer to the darker profile in the combined total reflectance
curve, or darker than the darker profile in the combined total
transmission curve. Mixing white and black in equal proportions
does not reduce the luminance of white by half, but by more
than two thirds (in paints) or up to 100% (in filters).

One result is that sequentially (transmissively) combining two

filters always results in a darker mixture than physically mixing
the filter colorants as paints; and physically (subtractively)
mixing two colorants always results in a duller, darker color than
visually (additively) mixing the same colorants, for example on a
color top.

Double Cone Stimulation. We've identified the blackening and

multiplicative effects of subtractive color mixtures, but we still
haven't identified the attributes that define the subtractive
primary colors cyan, yellow and magenta. What is the material
attribute of "yellowness" that occurs in all yellow colored
materials?

The answer begins with the fact that subtractive mixtures always
destroy ("subtract") the material luminance, making color both
darker and duller. To compensate for this, painters should start
with colors that are both light and bright — light valued and
highly saturated.

If we experiment with various light valued, high chroma

colorants, as the ancient painters and dyers did with their much
duller and darker pigments, we discover that some do much
better than others as subtractive primary colors. Why? Because
the key to subtractive primaries is not in their light value or high
chroma alone. It's in how that color intensity affects the eye:

36. An ideal subtractive primary color must stimulate two

types of receptor cones (L and M, or L and S, or M and S)
as strongly and equally as possible, and stimulate the
third type of cone as little as possible.

In other words, the subtractive primaries are only an indirect

way to specify the L, M and S cone responses of additive color
mixing!

Traditional color theory texts often express this point in negative

terms, saying that each subtractive primary absorbs or
"subtracts" from "white" light the wavelengths representing a
single additive primary. This principle is often expressed as four
subtractive formulas, including both white (W) and black (K):

C=W–R
Y=W–B
M=W–G
K = W – (R + G + B)

Thus cyan paint (C) subtracts "red" light (R) from the total
"white" (W) light spectrum; magenta paint (M) subtracts
"green" (G) light from the spectrum, yellow paint (Y) subtracts
"blue" (B) light; black paint (K) subtracts all light from the
spectrum.

This way of defining subtractive primaries is inaccurate, both

because it implies the wrong complementary hues (yellow is not
the complement of blue, and red is not the complement of
cyan), and because it allows for dull and dark "primary" colors.
Thus, raw umber almost completely absorbs "blue" light, and
iron (prussian) blue almost completely absorbs "red" light, so
they can be used as a primary yellow and blue, even though
they also absorb light from other parts of the spectrum and
therefore appear relatively dull or dark.

Ideal Subtractive Primaries. The better way to define

subtractive primary colors is to specify the conceptual color that
produces the maximum possible stimulation in two types of
cones and the minimum possible stimulation to the third type of
cone. Then we can simply choose the colorants that achieve
those receptor effects as far as possible with a material color.

We define the conceptual color by means of an ideal

(conceptual) reflectance profile, called an optimal color.
Optimal colors always have the maximum possible saturation or
hue purity of any surface color at a given hue and lightness, and
the maximum possible lightness of any surface color of a given
hue and saturation. So they are the perfect "light, bright" colors
we want for our ideal subtractive primaries.

The diagram below (top row) shows the spectral reflectance

curves and cone responses produced by these three idealized
subtractive primaries.

ideal spectral reflectance curves for subtractive

primary colors
each subtractive primary reflects or transmits the light representing
two additive primary colors

In the top row of the figure are the reflectance curves for
optimal primary paints. The cone response profiles (middle row)
show how these optimal subtractive primaries affect the L, M
and S cone outputs. The bottom row shows the perceived colors
that result from the cone responses in additive color mixing.

Observe, in the ideal cone response profiles above, that all three
physically ideal subtractive primaries stimulate to a significant
degree the third or "unwanted" L, M or S cone. (Note in
particular the M response in magenta.) In each case we cannot
achieve a visually pure primary hue of paint, because of a
physiological limitation: the overlap between the M cone and
L cone fundamentals. We just can't stimulate the L cone with
"red orange" light, or the S cone with "blue violet" light, without
also stimulating the M cone, just as if we stimulated it with
"green" light.

It is instructive to compare the chromaticity of these ideal

subtractive primaries with the chromaticity of common pigment
choices for subtractive primary colors in watercolor paints or
printing inks, as shown above. We see that artists do not use
the "ideal" primary colors, and for a variety of practical reasons:
a colorant matching the ideal hue is not available, or its physical
attributes (lightfastness, chroma, lightness, transparency, tinting
strength) are inadequate, or its mixtures with other "primary"
colorants lack the saturation desired for the specific printing or
painting purpose.

Mixing Subtractive Primaries. Finally, what happens when

these ideal primary paints are mixed?

Because any two subtractive primaries will share reflectance in

either the "red," "green" or "blue" wavelengths associated with a
single additive primary color, any two subtractive primaries
share reflectance that stimulates a single photoreceptor.
Yellow and magenta share "red" reflectance that stimulates the
L cone, yellow and cyan share "green" reflectance that
stimulates the M cone, and magenta and cyan share "blue"
reflectance that stimulates the S cone.

mixing two ideal subtractive primary colors

reflectance representing a single additive primary remains high;
other parts of the spectrum also reflect light (white line shows cone
response to a 50:50 paint mixture), and this flatter cone response
profile is perceived as a grayer color
However, in any subtractive mixture, the remaining two
additive primaries must compete with each other. As
shown above for the mixture of yellow and cyan, the "red" light
that primarily stimulates the L cone is reflected by yellow but
absorbed by cyan; the "blue" light that stimulates the S cone is
reflected by cyan but absorbed by yellow. So both are
substantially darkened. Like a seesaw, as "blue" reflectance goes
up, "red" reflectance goes down, and vice versa.

These tradeoffs also mean that mixtures of two subtractive

primaries reflect light from all parts of the spectrum. The
result is a flatter cone response profile (shown in the middle
diagram of the figure), which creates the perception of a less
saturated color mixture — a color closer to gray. This is of
course the saturation cost in subtractive mixtures — the
tendency of paint mixtures to be darker and duller than the
original paints.

37. The choice of appropriate subtractive primary

pigments depends on the variety of colorants available in
a given medium, their price and physical attributes, and
the range of colors in the image to be reproduced.

These saturation costs — the unwanted third cone stimulation in

ideal colors and the added "white" reflectance in real colors —
are the fundamental reason why material primary colors are
always imperfect, as explained here. There is no
combination of three material primary colors in any medium
(dyes, paints, phosphors, filters) that can mix every possible
color in that medium.

Don't Confuse Additive & Subtractive Mixtures. I hope you

now understand why all color mixing involves the retinal
response to light; the only issue is whether or how we let
material substances interfere with our control of the light that
reaches the eye.

Because subtractive color mixing (in materials) is actually an

indirect manipulation of additive color mixing (in cone
responses), the two types of color mixture can be
demonstrated in superficially similar ways. To avoid
confusion, remember that the fundamental difference is whether
light wavelengths are excluded by the colored substances before
the light reaches the eye (the light mixing occurs in the external
world), or light wavelengths are separately able to reach the
receptor cones (the light mixing occurs in the eye).

With colored transmission filters, the additive color mixing

demonstration is produced by placing a colored yellow filter over
one beam of white light, and a blue filter over a second beam of
white light, then overlapping the two colored beams on a
reflective surface. Because each filter is placed over a separate
beam of light, the blue and yellow lights are both reflected to
the eye, where they both affect the receptor cones to create the
sensation of "white" light. In contrast, the subtractive color
mixing demonstration is produced with the same yellow and blue
filters, this time both placed over a single beam of light. The two
filters then act in combination to absorb light before it ever
reaches the eye; the only wavelengths that can pass through
both filters at the same time are in the "green" section of the
spectrum, so green is the color we see.

With paints or inks, the additive color mixing demonstration is

produced by spinning the two paints on a color top, or by
printing the two colors as closely spaced dots in halftone color
printing. In either case, each color of paint can still separately
reflect light to eye, even though they are optically blended
through motion blurring or visual fusion. When they are
physically mixed as paints or inks, they cancel reflectance in
each other to produce a subtractive color mixture.

Finally, it should be clear why red and blue are not

subtractive primary colors. A red paint reflects light only
from the "red" end of the spectrum; it stimulates primarily the
L cones, but not the M or S. Most blue paints reflect mostly
"blue" and some "green" light, stimulating the S and M cones,
but not the L. So their mixture creates a very dull purple,
because the two colors have no reflectance in common: most
wavelengths reflected by one color are absorbed by the other.

The same considerations explain why the RGB additive primaries

are effective only in light stimuli, such as televisions or computer
monitors, but not in paints or inks. There is no shared
reflectance in the reflectance curves of red orange, green and
blue violet paints, so these produce very dull, dark colors when
mixed subtractively. The additive primaries are only effective
when the mixing occurs in the retina.

By the same token, the CYM primaries are ineffective in

televisions or computer monitors. There is a large overlap in the
emittance curves of cyan, yellow and magenta lights, so that
their additive light mixtures appear whitened and bright — the
equivalent of dark and dull in subtractive mixing. The subtractive
primaries are only effective when the mixing occurs in materials.

Partitive Mixture. Finally, there is a hybrid case of color

mixture that occurs in an image composed of small, separate
but closely crowded color dots or pixels that are perceived by
the eye as a visually continuous color area. Exploring this
technology will clarify further the differences between additive
and subtractive color mixture.

The text and every image in this web page is generated on your
color monitor by thousands of tiny RGB lights that are too small
for the eye to resolve optically or retinally: the eye blends them
together as a textureless surface. This visual fusion is also the
reason why homogeneous color areas appear from a field of
halftone or overlapping colored dots in printed books and
magazines, and smooth colors appear from the millions of tiny
dye molecules impregnated in color photographic papers.

However, computer monitors use RGB primaries to create color

mixtures, but all photographs and printed color images use the
CYM subtractive primaries instead. So the question arises: why
aren't the additive RGB primaries used in printing and
photography just as they are in computer monitors?

To grasp the answer, it will help first to print the diagram below
on your color printer.

the subtractive primary colors as additive RGB lights

and as additive RGB pixels

In this image, the CYM color areas in the upper row are actually
created on the computer monitor by the visual fusion and
additive mixture of two of the three RGB monitor lights. These
are physically distinct but too small for the eye to resolve into a
dot pattern.

The color areas in the lower row are created by the visual fusion
of alternating RGB pixels. Each pixel contains three monitor
lights, so this doubles the amount of black (unilluminated) area
within each color. (Examine the two areas with a magnifying
glass.) This doubled black spacing between lights coarsens the
screen texture enough to make it visible.

the subtractive primary colors as pure CYM inks and

as additive RGB halftone dots

The printed copy looks quite different, especially in the yellow

(image above). The printer has silently substituted a pure yellow
ink for the "yellow" R+G monitor light mixture. However your
computer screen is fundamentally a light source, despite the
illusion (created by the subdued "white" luminance and the
slight blackening effect of the monitor light interstices) that it is
a surface. The printed paper is a true surface, and therefore the
inks printed on it have the absorptive grayness that
characterizes surface color perception.

If you hold the printed diagram next to your computer monitor

and illuminate the paper so that it appears as white as the white
of your computer screen, you will see that the inks appear to be
darker and less saturated than the monitor colors. So the first
difficulty is that absorbing inks are inherently a less effective
source of luminance than emitting lights.

If you next look at the printout by itself, you see that the yellow
created from the pure Y ink (top row) is much brighter than the
yellow created from the visual fusion of alternating, printed R
and G dots. Your printer renders the pixels without black space
between them, so the darkening is not the same as on your
monitor; rather, visual fusion averages the luminance
(reflectance) of adjacent dots; it does not add them together as
it does in blended light mixtures. The average lightness of red or
green inks is far lower than the lightness of a pure yellow ink, so
the visually fused and additively interpreted yellow appears
much darker and, therefore, closer to a dull ochre or brown. A
similar dulling and darkening occurs in the cyan and magenta
mixtures.

Thus, the RGB primaries suffer from three handicaps when

displayed on surfaces: (1) they lose the greater luminance
contrast possible in light sources, and (2) as surface colors, the
RGB inks are much darker than pure cyan, yellow or magenta
inks. This severely compromises their effectiveness in the
additive color mixing induced by visual fusion.

Because RGB inks make drastically darker subtractive mixtures

— think of mixing yellow from a red and green paint! — (3) RGB
inks would have to be printed as separate, nonoverlapping dots.
This would double the visual texture of a printed image and
greatly increase the registration (dot alignment) precision
necessary for a clear image.

Because subtractive colors can be overprinted in a single dot or

pixel location, to produce subtractive mixture with each other
and with the white paper, they produce a much finer visual
texture with less registration precision. The overprinting also
subtractively creates the span of orange, green and violet colors
necessary to complete the hue circle. These dots of subtractive
mixture are effaced by visual fusion, and averaged together by
additive color mixture. This provides an acceptable simulation in
printed surfaces and photographic papers of the brightness and
contrast experienced in the light images of monitor phosphors,
projective transparencies, and the surfaces of the real world.

Substance Uncertainty. In my explanation of additive and

subtractive color mixture (above), I stated that subtractive
color mixture is unpredictable and at best approximate, and that
this is because of the complexity of material color mixture.

Now we look at that problem using specific examples. These

highlight the differences between the four types of color —
conceptual color, visual color, radiant color and material color —
as we try to understand material color mixtures.

Visual Color vs. Material Color. To begin, let's clarify the

distinction between material color, the physical pigment or dye,
the radiant color the light wavelengths that a paint, dye or ink
reflects to our view, and visual color, the color of paint, dye or
ink we perceive in our experience.

The material color — the light absorbing and light reflecting

attributes of a pigment or dye — are exactly described by its
spectral reflectance curve or radiant color. For that reason
the guide to watercolor pigments provides the reflectance
curve of all major pigments, linked from the spectrum icon .

If we are only interested in the appearance of a pigment or dye

in isolation, then the radiant color in turn defines the
photoreceptor responses under normal viewing conditions, or
the material's visual color.

So long as we only consider the radiant color only, or the

mixture of separate radiant colors that stimulate the eye at the
same time (for example, when two beams of filtered light are
overlapped on a white surface, or two pigment or ink colors are
visually mixed with a color top), then we are in the domain of
additive color theory. Predicting these color mixtures using the
separate reflectance curves is straightforward and, as perceptual
prediction goes, remarkably precise.

But when two or more material colors are physically mixed (for
example, when a single beam of light is passed through two
separate filters, or two pigments are mixed in the same vehicle,
or two inks are overprinted on the same substrate), all the
physical qualities of the substances interact, which can cause
their radiant colors to combine in unexpected ways and produce
a very unexpected result in the visual color.

The most important of these physical mixture issues are:

38. Visual color cannot identify a unique material color

(physical substance) or radiant color (reflectance or
transmittance curve).

The same green visual color can be produced by many different

material colors and/or radiant colors, a perceptual ambiguity
known as material metamerism. Because material color
mixtures are highly specific in their effects on radiant color,
different material colors can appear to be the same "green
color," but will produce different blue colors when each is mixed
with the same purple paint. Unfortunately, the paint color
appearance (visual color), not the reflectance curve (radiant
color), is all that a painter conveniently has to work with.

39. The radiant color (reflectance or transmittance curve)

changes with the physical state of the material color.

A pigment such as quinacridone violet (PV19) does not have

fixed radiant color attributes. The reflectance curve, and hence
the apparent color under standard viewing conditions, changes
with the physical state of the pigment — the pigment may be
dry or wet, it may be suspended in water or oil, it may be
diluted or concentrated, it may be displayed as a thin or thick
layer (diagram, right). In most colorants, each of these physical
changes will alter the radiant and the colorant's subtractive
mixture behavior.

40. The separate radiant colors of pigments cannot

specify the visual color of their subtractive mixture.
reflectance curve changes
There are many more physical attributes to a colorant than its with physical state
reflectance properties. The same reflectance curve can be
the masstone reflectance curve of
produced by substances that differ greatly in particle size, quinacridone violet (PV19) changes
refractive index, transparency (hiding power) and tinting shape, not just overall level, when it
strength, and these all can affect how the colorants will appear is diluted into a tint
when dispersed in a vehicle, or which colorant will dominate
when used in a mixture with other dyes or pigments.

41. Subtractive mixing behaves differently in different

types of material mixtures.

The identical pigments or dyes will create different colored

mixtures when mixed in different media. Subtractive mixtures of
reflecting paints or dyes obey different mixing rules than
subtractive mixtures of transmitting filters; paints applied to
highly absorbent white paper appear duller and whiter than
paints applied to heavily sized white paper; pigments applied as
watercolor (which does not form a paint layer) appear different
from paints applied as oils or acrylics (which do form a paint
layer).

Each of these problems, taken separately, can create formidable

problems in describing or "predicting" material color mixtures. In
combination, they overcome any generalizations based on visual
or conceptual colors.

Even if we do know all the important physical attributes of the

colorants we mix, the prediction of their subtractive mixture
from their separate reflectance curves is mathematically
complex. As a color chemist in the automotive industry
explained to me, you mix the two pigments and look at what
you get. Or as I like to say, subtractive color mixing concepts
are only useful as a compass to color improvisation.

Visual Color Can't Predict Material Mixture. To clarify the

extent of these issues, for the moment let's limit the discussion
just to material metamerism. This dictates the modern color
theory rule that

42. The visual color of a paint does not predict the visual
color of mixtures made with the paint.

There is a conceptual and a factual way to demonstrate the

depth of the metameric problem. Let's start with a conceptual
illustration.

Imagine two idealized photographic gel (transparent) filters,

designed to pass either 100% or 0% of the light at each
wavelength. There are no limits on the combination of specific
wavelengths we are able to filter, except that in every case one
filter must make a "white" beam of light appear yellow, and the
other must make a "white" light appear orange.

We place the two filters in front of a single beam of "white" light.

Then the apparent color of the transmitted light is the additive
(retinal) mixture of all the wavelengths passed by the
subtractive (material) mixture of the separate spectral
transmittance profiles.

What color results from this mixture of a visual yellow and a

visual orange? As the examples below show, the answer is — it
is impossible to say!

subtractive mixtures of different yellow and orange

filters

In the five examples, each pair of ideal filters would appear

yellow and orange — they would all have the same hue, though
they would differ in lightness or chroma. Yet their mixture would
produce very different results depending on the specific overlap
in their transmittance profiles. Yellow and orange can combine to
make yellow, orange, red or black ... yellow and orange filters
could even mix to make green!

These conceptual examples demonstrate that there is no logical

or necessary connection between the visual color of two
substances and the color of their subtractive mixture. There can
never be universal or invariable color mixing rules in subtractive
color mixing — they simply don't exist.

Material Color Mixture in Paints. But let's get practical. The

extreme, idealized filters I've described are physically
implausible. And we certainly can't mix a red color from two
gray paints! In fact, very useful regularities or patterns often
appear in the way colored substances mix.

Those patterns occur because we live in a real world of atomic

substances, and the atomic causes of color follow the
organizing patterns of chemistry and physics. These tend to
produce transmission or reflectance curves in most substances
that follow more regular patterns, such as the "warm cliff"
profile typical of saturated red, orange and yellow paints and
filters. In addition, painters work with a very limited range of
colored substances — chemically pure and complex colorants,
the pigments in their paints — and modern colorants create a
fairly predictable domain of reflectance profiles.

So we have to turn to paint color mixtures to evaluate the

practical impact of the metameric problem for painters (or
anyone else mixing paints, dyes or inks).

To do that, let's see what happens with the most explicit paint
mixing test possible (and the one most beloved in traditional
color theory): making a pure gray mixture from two
complementary paint colors.

The test is simple (though tedious) to do. The results I will show
you here are described in detail on this page, but the logic
behind the test is easy to understand.

First, using the visual color only, arrange all the available
"warm" colored paints in a series, from green yellow to violet, on
one side of a page. Then arrange all the complementary "cool"
colored paints, from blue violet to yellow green, on the opposite
side. Align the paints up or down on each side until the mixing
complement pairs are directly across from each other — violet
blue across from yellow, blue across from deep yellow, green
blue across from orange, and so on.

Then mix all possible combinations of a warm paint with a cool

paint, and identify by eye the paint pairs that actually produce a
neutral (gray or black) mixture.

Finally, connect these visually verified mixing complement paints

with a dark line.

Now, if complementary paint mixtures are exactly determined by

the visual color of the paints, and if all the paints have regular,
simple reflectance curves, then lines connecting these
complementary pairs should be roughly parallel (diagram, right).
As the hue of the warm paint changes from deep yellow to
violet, the hue of its mixing complement should change from
blue violet to green by an equal amount.

This is precisely what does not happen, as shown below.

idealized subtractive mixing
complements in watercolor paint
mixtures

substance uncertainty in watercolor material

mixtures
mixing complementary colors as measured on the a*b* plane in
CIELAB: pigments that make "pure gray" mixtures are joined by
dark lines, "near gray" mixtures by light lines (see this page for
more information)

The mixing lines from each pigment fan apart, or skew up or

down haphazardly. And this is not just because there is a greater
number of pigments on the warm side, or the warm pigment
hues are more similar. Consider the examples (diagram, below)
where two pigments with very different visual colors make a
perfectly gray mixture with a third paint color. (The two
examples at far right show that two visually different pigments
can have the same mixing complements.)

visual color variety among material color

complements
the same pigment (top row) mixes a pure gray with either of the two
pigments enclosed by the box (bottom two rows); diagram matches
the pigment color appearance as measured in the CIELAB color
space with a spectrophotometer

This demonstration clearly shows why a mixing color wheel,

which arranges paints around the hue circle according to their
complementary mixtures, can never accurately define the mixing
behavior of pigments or paints. If we align cobalt teal (PG50)
directly opposite its mixing complement pyrrole orange (PO73),
then it will not be opposite its other mixing complement,
perylene maroon (PR179). If we place cobalt teal at some
average position, opposite the middle hue between pyrrole
orange and perylene maroon, then we would have to place
viridian (PG18) in exactly the same position, because it has
exactly the same mixing complements!

The diagram also shows the limitations of using conceptual

colors, such as the traditional color theory "primary" colors, to
explain color mixing. For example, cobalt teal blue (PG50)
mixes a pure gray with both pyrrole orange (PO73) and
cadmium red deep (PR108). But pyrrole orange has a distinctly
yellow component in its hue, and therefore has substantially
more "yellow primary" in it than cadmium deep red. So then
how can a paint with more "yellow primary" in it mix the same
gray with the same green blue paint? The conceptual "primary"
colors have no logical or necessary connection to the visual color
of two material colors, or to the color of their physical mixture.

The limiting rules of physics and pigment chemistry do take us

out of those idealized transmission filter examples, where
subtractive color theory doesn't exist at all. But they don't take
us all the way to a perfect world where pigments with the same
visual color mix in a consistent way. We end up somewhere in
the middle — in a fuzzy, messy real world where subtractive
color mixing is a real fuzzy mess.

Other Factors in Material Mixtures. Couldn't we avoid

substance uncertainty if we were somehow able to use only
colorants that had regular and simple reflectance curves? The
answer is no: because the substance uncertainty arises from the
many invisible differences in pigment material attributes —
refractive index, particle size, crystal form, hiding power and
tinting strength. Thus, the pigments cadmium yellow medium
(PY35) and hansa yellow medium (PY97) have almost identical
reflectance curves, yet they produce visibly different mixtures
with other paints because their refractive indices (appearance
in paint vehicle) are so different.

What if we could somehow make paints so that every apparent

color had the same reflectance curve, and made sure every
paint had exactly the same material attributes — wouldn't that
solve the problem? Again, the answer is no: because all the
material attributes of the mixture are involved, and that includes
the material attributes of the support and the paint application
methods.

The qualities of different paper or canvas supports have a

significant impact. A glossy, highly reflective white paper can
show up to 24,000 distinct color mixtures using modern CYM
process inks. The same inks, printed on ordinary newsprint,
generate a much smaller range of perhaps only 2,000 distinct
colors — and these are all significantly duller and darker. In
watercolors, a highly absorbent paper (which pulls the pigment
particles between the cellulose fibers) will produce lighter, duller
color mixtures than a heavily sized, hot pressed, nonabsorbent
paper. Applying paints to paper effectively mixes three light
reflecting substances — the two paints in the mixture and the
paper — so the material attributes of all three will determine the
apparent color.

Color mixtures also depend on how the paints are applied. A

familiar example for watercolorists occurs when paints are mixed
by glazing or layering one color over another: cadmium yellow
over phthalo green is a lighter and less saturated mixture than
phthalo green glazed over cadmium yellow, even though we
have put the same paints, in the same quantities, on the same
paper.

These complications of material metamerism, physical

attributes, support attributes and application methods all
contribute to the same modern color theory principle: visual
color does not predict material mixture color. Subtractive
color mixing "theory," by trying to imitate additive color mixing
theory, bites off much more than it can chew.

The Color Is In the Mixture. Substance uncertainty is such a

difficult problem that traditional color theory deals with it the
only way it can — by ignoring it! Or, even worse, by denying it
and organizing color mixtures within idealized triangles or
circles.

The artist tries to mix paints according to these idealized,

perfect color theory rules is guided to some degree, but is often
also confused by the many mixture exceptions that result.
Painters who learn color theory in terms of the visual colors of
paints arranged on a color wheel learn how to mix conceptual
hues — "yellow and blue make green" — rather than paints.

If visual color really is separate from material color, how can we

manage color as basic principles? Which form of color should we
think about? For now, we seem to have another modern color
theory rule:

43. The material color of a paint is defined by the visual

colors it makes in mixtures with all other paints.

But this raises the problem: how do we define the conceptual

color of a paint? If two "blue" paints mix differently, or a teal
and blue green paint mix similarly, then we need to have a color
space, or a color language, that can express those differences.

To create this kind of conceptual color language, we must

examine the color relationships that have, in traditional color
theory, been expressed as simple geometries of circle or
triangle. And we must learn the concepts of a colorant gamut
that help us visualize the behavior of specific paints.

visual color relationships

The previous two sections have used additive and
subtractive color mixing, and the problems of substance
uncertainty, to illustrate the differences among conceptual,
visual and material color.

Now we turn to the issue of color relationships in general, or

how the artist can best "think about" color.

It will be clear that the appropriate form of color to use in this

area is the visual color. Material color is too unreliable, or too
variable, to serve as a basic framework for color relationships,
and conceptual color represents ideas that must be developed
out of experience.

44. Visual color, the domain of color experience, is the

foundation for all conceptual color relationships.

The Concepts of Illuminance & Luminance. The

fundamental visual color relationship is produced by the
appearance of colors under different levels of illuminance or
luminance, two concepts that all artists and photographers
should understand clearly. Their effects on visual color are
profound.

The diagram (right) shows the relative relationship between

benchmark illuminance and luminance values across the range
of common light environments. The chart is designed so that
an illuminance level is directly across from the luminance it
would create on a white surface.

Illuminance is the quantity of light incident on (falling on) a

surface area. In most environments there are many different
surfaces in view, and they all receive different amounts of light;
the average illuminance across all surfaces that are not in
shadow is the light environment.

Illuminance depends on distance. Illuminance decreases by the

inverse square of distance — if you are 2 times farther from a
light then its illuminance decreases to 1 divided by 2 squared, or
1/4; or, if you reduce the distance to a light by 1/2, you increase
its illuminance by 1 divided by 1/4, or 4 times (the inverse
square law). Using the chart at right, we can calculate that a
single wax candle at 32 meters provides the same illuminance as
a starry night sky.

Paradoxically, illuminance is always invisible: we cannot, by eye

alone, judge illuminance in any light environment. Instead we
judge it indirectly, through the luminance that appears in the
light reflected from objects and surfaces.

Luminance is the illuminance received from a light source

averaged across its visual area.

Luminance depends on physical size of the light source, not its

distance from us. If two light sources provide the same
illuminance at the same distance, the physically smaller source
will appear more luminous (brighter). If we move away from a
light source, the visual size of the source decreases in the same
inverse square proportion as the illuminance received from it, so
the luminance remains constant.

The diagram (right) illustrates the relationship between apparent

size, luminance and illuminance. But the luminance of the source
of the illuminance depends on its size. Because the moon is
visually small, it appears much brighter than a sheet of white a comparison of common light
paper it illuminates. Because the sky is visually very large, it is environments (log scales)
only as luminous as the paper it illuminates. This is the rationale
at 1 lux = 0.31 candela/m2, the
for large diffusing light panels in modern office spaces: they luminance of a white sheet of paper
provide lots of light without the apparent brightness that can matches the illuminance falling on
cause eyestrain. the paper

The amount of light that can affect a receptor surface depends

on the surface area receiving the light, or the area of its opening
to light (aperture). Contraction in the size of our pupils makes
lights appear less bright, and closing the diaphragm in a camera
increases the exposure time of the film; the brightness of lights
we see depends in part on the diameter of our pupil.

Across different adaptation levels (day vs. night) and illuminance

regimes (a room interior in shadow and, through a window, a
landscape exterior viewed in daylight), the human eye can
accurately report luminance differences within a relatively
constant luminance range of about 5 log units, or a ratio of
1:100,000 (diagram, right). This is its contrast ratio.
Luminances outside this range appear either as black or
undifferentiated dark areas, or as glaringly bright lights.

All photographic and painting media have similar but much

smaller luminance contrast ratios, generally in the range of
1:100. (Media contrast ratios, such as dye pigment densities or
monitor light steps, are often larger than the visible contrast
ratio.) If we want to include the stars in our image, then we
cannot accurately render anything much brighter than the moon
in the same image. If our brightest white is white surface in
sunlight, then our blacks are actually brighter than a white
surface under office lights (image, right).

The process of rendering the visual range of luminance and

chromaticity values within the smaller contrast range of material
(photographic, painting and digital) colorants is called gamut
mapping or tone mapping, a procedure explained in the page luminance rendering within a
1:25 (~5 photographic stops)
on tonal value. imaging contrast ratio

Visual Color & Luminance Adaptation. As illuminance goes

up or down, the luminance of the surfaces goes up or down in
exact proportion. The eye adjusts its sensitivity so that the
visual response range brackets the average value of surface
luminances: this is luminance adaptation. To sustain this
adaptation range, we avoid looking directly at luminous light
sources.

Visual color changes substantially across different levels of

luminance adaptation. The three basic adaptation regimes are:

• photopic (above ~1000 lux) - color perception is present and

lightness, hue and chroma contrast are at their peak; contrast is
enhanced in darker values, and the chromaticity of light sources
is obscured by their brightness.

• mesopic (~0.1 to ~1000 lux) - color perception is present,

but lightness and chroma contrast are reduced, especially in
darker colors and at lower light levels, hue contrast is reduced in
greens and blues; the chromaticity of light sources is accented
by their dimness.

• scotopic (below ~0.1 lux) - color perception is absent, and

replaced by gradations of lightness only; lightness contrast is
greatly reduced, and disappears across darker values; edge
contrast and object details are significantly obscured.

The transition from mesopic to scotopic (light to dark)

illuminance levels produces complex and rapidly changing color
effects, described in detail on this page.

change in visual color from mesopic to scotopic

vision
(left) color samples viewed under ~200 lux; (right) color samples
viewed under ~0.2 lux, just before color perception is lost

The diagram (above) shows the visual color of 24 watercolor

paints viewed under sky illuminances at sunset and 45 minutes
after sunset, just before the transition to scotopic vision is
complete. The full range of colors has degenerated to a limited
range of warm and cool hues, very poorly separated in lightness.

45. Illuminance is manifest inside color experience, as a

qualitative color attribute or "color consistency".

Color experience does not report a white surface under

moonlight as merely a visual gray that would be matched by a
material gray surface viewed under mesopic illumination. The
appearance of the "gray" itself is qualitatively different, so that
we see the illuminance level, or our luminance adaptation, in the
color experience. This is perhaps the most remote and subtle
aspect of color than an artist can observe and attempt to render
in an image.

Visual Color & Illuminance Contrast. We judge colors under

the assumption that all surfaces in view are under the same
illuminance, and that shadows all form in the same direction,
away from the dominant light source.

If the spatial relations that create illuminance differences are

obscured, then our visual color judgments suffer. Color lightness
contrast, apparent white/gray value, chroma and even hue can
be badly distorted.

Isaac Newton recognized the importance of illuminance

contrast to visual color over three centuries ago, when he
studied luminance dependence in white and gray:

Considering that these gray and dun Colours may also be

produced by mixing Whites and Blacks, and by consequence
differ from perfect Whites, not in Species of Colours, but only in
degree of Luminousness, it is manifest that there is nothing
more requisite to make them perfectly white than to increase
their Light sufficiently. ... And this I tried as follows. I rubbed [a
mixture of blue, green, yellow and red pigments] thickly upon
the Floor of my Chamber, where the Sun shone upon it through
the opened Casement; and by it, in the shadow, I laid a Piece of
white Paper of the same Bigness. Then going from them a
distance of 12 or 18 Feet, ... the Powder appeared intensely
white, so as to transcend even the Paper itself in Whiteness. —
Opticks (1704), Book I, Part II, Experiment 15.

The images (right) show the same material color (a red iron
oxide or "burnt sienna" paint), displayed either as a sunlit area
within a shadowed surround, or a shadowed area within a sunlit
surround. Illuminance contrast (variations in the radiant color)
can make the same material color appear orange, brown or
black. illuminance contrasts
and visual color
46. Luminance contrast produced by illuminance contrast
produces a local increase in both lightness contrast and the same dull orange paint, viewed
under higher illuminance, equal
chromaticity contrast, with minimal effects on hue.
illuminance, or lower illuminance
than the "white" surround
I have experienced illusory luminance contrast rarely: once
when I looked out my bedroom window an early morning to
survey the building site of my studio. I was surprised to see an
unfamiliar, large brilliant orange box sitting in a sloping field
nearby, profiled against a background of dark trees. Only after
repeated looking did I realize it was actually the contractor's
dark brown safe box, illuminated by a nearly horizontal shaft of
sunlight piercing through trees behind my house.

Well, not so rarely ... less reputable art galleries simulate

chromaticity contrast when they illuminate paintings hung on a
dimly lit wall by means of spotlights with very diffuse
boundaries. Because the illuminance boundary is not visible, the
illuminance contrast causes the paint colors to appear more
saturated and more contrasted than they will appear when both
the painting and the wall are viewed under the same light
source.

Visual Color & Spatial Factors. We are typically adept at

reconciling the infinite possible permutations of illuminance
contrast within light environments in terms of the spatial
configuration of surfaces.

Traditional color theory has almost entirely ignored spatial

effects in visual color — the studies of simulated transparency
by Joseph Albers being one of the notable exceptions — but
these effects are incredibly large. We can suggest this impact
through parallel color contrast examples.

First consider the traditional color theory presentation of squares

within squares, the favorite device to demonstrate the
simultaneous color contrast demonstrated at length by
Michel-Eugène Chevreul (diagram, below).

simultaneous color contrast

two different central colors, contrasted in the middle row, against
two different background colors, contrasted in the two vertical
columns; a single central color appears in the top and bottom rows;
lightness (L*) values included

Here we see the traditional simultaneous contrast effects in both

the top and bottom rows: the dark central color appears darker
on a light surround, and the light central color appears lighter on
a dark surround. On this evidence, vision seems designed
primarily to make different colored areas appear as different as
possible, and the induced shift in the light and dark areas
appears about equal.

spatial color contrast

a sheet of white paper viewed in direct illumination and partial
shadow — (middle row) original photograph; (top row) illuminated
paper copied into shadowed area; (bottom row) shadowed paper
copied into illuminated area;

When the same average color contrasts are placed in a spatial

context, they present a different and much greater impact. The
agnostic lightness difference between the two background colors
in the previous figure is now a three dimensional illuminance
contrast on the same spatial surface, which requires us to
interpret the color area contrast — the contrast between the two
sheets of paper — in a spatially consistent way. Two effects
appear:

• increased contrast - the comparative impact of the color

differences is drastically increased: we perceive a much greater
difference between the illuminated and shadowed surfaces than
in the simultaneous contrast demonstration.

• nonlinear contrast - the contrast produced by copying the

shadowed area into light is much greater than that produced by
copying the lighted area into shadow: the same visual contrast
has a much greater "blackness" impact. The ratio of the
lightness contrast is the same, but in the bottom row the color is
both lighter and darker than the background.

These enormous visual differences signify that color is not

merely a medium through which we can see the qualities of light
absorbing materials, but a medium through which we see the
reality of light in three dimensional space.

47. Vision primarily and preferentially interprets surface

luminances (reflectance) in terms of the spatial
distribution of light in a three dimensional environment.

We do not have to strain our imaginations to see a building in a

photograph or a face in a painting

Illuminant & Visual Color. The spectral composition of a light

source (summarized as an illuminant) determines its
chromaticity, and this has a significant effect on color
appearance.

In most natural light environments, daylight (the combination of

sunlight and skylight) is quite variable across the time of day
and type of weather. However these changes in daylight spectra
follow a consistent chromaticity path from a slightly blue to
strongly yellow chromaticity. These chromaticity changes can be
indexed as the correlated color temperature of the light.
Noon daylight has a CCT of about 6500, while sunlight at sunset
has a CCT of around 2000. CCTs can also be used to describe
artificial light sources; most incandescent lights have a CCT
below 3000, which is rather yellow.

Our visual system is adapted to eliminate the effects of

moderate chromaticity in lights, especially across daylight
spectra, through a process of chromatic adaptation. This is
provided the lights contribute to the light environment, as is
most apparent at night. When we are indoors after sunset, the
illumination from incandescent lights, or a television screen in a
dark room, will appear "white"; but if we view these lights from
outdoors, as the light falls on a white sheet or window shade,
the same illumination will appear distinctly yellow or blue.

In more extreme cases, such as the illumination from a heat

lamp or "black" light (ultraviolet light), the chromaticity of the
light cannot be eliminated by chromatic adaptation. However we
may still be able to judge visual color accurately, as if we saw
normally illuminated colors through tinted glasses.

All surface colors are altered by the chromaticity of the

illumination. This alteration is effectively a subtractive mixture of
the chromaticity of the light with the chromaticity of surface
colors. Surface hues close to the hue of the light increase in
apparent chroma and appear more similar; hues opposite are
grayed or muted; hues perpendicular to the light hue are hue
shifted toward the light.

effect of an orange light source on surface colors

analogous surface hues and grays are made more chromatic and
more similar to the light hue; complementary surface hues are made
less chromatic

As with the substance uncertainty that occurs in the

subtractive mixture of two substances, we cannot predict the
visual color of surfaces from the visual color of the light source.
Low pressure sodium lamps appear yellow, but make both reds
and greens appear achromatic. Some fluorescent lamps appear
white, but have a concentrated spike of luminance in "green"
wavelengths that makes green colors appear unusually
saturated or "fresh" (a fact utilized in the lighting of many
supermarket produce displays).

Lights can be rated on their color rendering properties:

incandescent (tungsten or halogen) lights typically match the
perfect color rendering properties of noon daylight.

Luminance & Achromatic Values. My emphasis on the

powerful effect of the light environment and color luminance on
visual color leads naturally to the most important dimension of
color relationship discussed in traditional color theory: value, or
the colormaking attribute of lightness.

Variations in lightness provide almost all the structure in an

image: this lightness dominance is apparent if we remove
either the chromaticity contrast or the lightness contrast from an
image, and compare the revised versions to the original
(images, below).

the dominance of lightness contrast

a painting by Winslow Homer in its original form (top), then as
lightness contrast with no chromaticity contrast (left) or as
chromaticity contrast with no lightness contrast (right)

The diagram below shows our visual response within a

luminance range of 1:1000, a conservative estimate of the
human contrast ratio. (The contrast ratio is larger in dimmer
light environments, but is difficult to measure at the high end
due to glare avoidance and the adaptation effect of bright
lights.) However, the contrast ratio of surface luminances is
more often around 1:20 between perceptual white and black,
because most "white" surfaces are materially somewhat gray,
and no "black" surface absorbs all light.

luminance contrast, lightness and brightness

log luminance scale relative to dark threshhold = 1, with an arbitrary
1:1000 luminance contrast ratio

As shown in the diagram, lightness is a misnomer, since the

characteristic of all surface colors is that they contain a
component of blackness (grayness) — they appear to absorb
some portion of the light available in the light environment.
Lights appear to contain some component of brightness rather
than blackness (lights can appear dimmer, but not grayer), so
blackness and brightness form opposing dimensions of a single
luminance scale, with "white" near the neutral or middle point.

This is the reason why our visual contrast ratio vastly outstrips
the contrast ratio possible in all physical media: luminance is
perceptually mapped into two separate visual codes,
which ambiguously join around the luminance of a pure white to
"brilliant" white surface.

The difference between lightness and brightness is produced by

luminance contrast. As a simple demonstration, a diffusing
light can be presented within either a completely dark surround
or a surround at a constant luminance of 300 cd/m2 (diagram,
right top). In darkness, the light appears as "bright" (emitting
light) whether its luminance is 10 or 100,000 cd/m2; but when
viewed in the luminous surround, the light begins to darken, and
appear as a gray surface, as soon as its luminance is less than
the surround luminance (diagram, right bottom). Thus, the
"blackness" we see in surface colors is actually a brightness
suppressing response in our visual system that is stimulated by
luminance contrast.
lightness induction

The adaptation level can be thought of as the luminance that from Wyszecki & Stiles (1982)
would produce no change in luminance adaptation if that
luminance homogeneously filled the visual field. This is usually
said to be a middle gray, or an average reflectance that is about
20% of white — the surface commonly used by photographers
to estimate photographic exposures.

For the human visual system, adaptation is actually closer to

white. This appears in the phenomenon of lightness
anchoring, which shifts achromatic perception so that the
lightest valued achromatic surface in view appears as "white",
even when it is a middle gray or black (as nicely demonstrated
in the Gelb staircase effect). Thus, after the adaptation
response had stabilized, a middle gray color that completely
filled the visual field would appear as white.

In addition, this adaptation "white" produces a visual response

near the middle of the luminance response range when
luminance is very high (noon daylight). As a result, we
experience the maximum lightness contrast and the greatest
discimination in small lightness variations, especially in darker
values. The adaptation response shifts toward the bottom end of
the response range in dim light or darkness, reducing lightness
discrimination among light values and making all dark values
from middle gray to black indistinguishable.

Despite these dynamic adaptation and anchoring effects, a

"white" surface has a qualitatively different appearance in dim or
bright light environments — changing from a blazing, creamy
white appearance in sunlight to a silvery, silky blue gray in
moonlight (transitions suggested by the images, right).

Luminance perception is thus a very complex color experience,

in which our eye and mind adapt to the light environment,
anchor "white" in the lightest valued achromatic surfaces,
compensate for illuminance differences (cast shadows and spot
lights) within the light environment, and present the adaptation
level in color experience as changes in the amount of lightness
contrast between black and white and in the qualitative
appearance of white as grayed or brilliant.

Painters must wrestle with and consolidate all these effects as

they try to render the spectacular color experience of a natural
light environment as the color contrasts possible within a luminance dependent changes in
physical medium. "white" appearance

The Artists' Gray Scale. Artists are universally taught to

interpret and think of lightness variations in terms of a gray
scale or value scale, which breaks down the maximum lightness
discrimination of approximately 50 perceptible differences
into a dozen or fewer categories of lightness contrast. The nine
step scheme devised by Denman Ross a century ago is still
visually handy and easy to remember; it can also be
conveniently collapsed into a five step scale (table, below).
(Note that high light is the value step closest to white, while
highlight is the image of a light source reflected from a shiny
surface.)

denman value scale

value sample name value sample name
1 white 1 white
2 high light
3 light 2 light
4 low light
5 mid value 3 mid value
6 high dark
7 dark 4 dark
8 low dark
9 black 5 black

Because value is the dominant element of visual information, it

is the most important attribute to consider in visual design.
Artists commonly prepare a value sketch of a painting or
design, often utilizing only a "black", "gray" and "white" value
palette. (See also my Handprint lightness categories.)

The standard in color models, for example in the Munsell

color order system, is an 11 step value scale ranging from 0
(black) to 10 (white). The CIELAB L* dimension is a multiple
of 10 of the Munsell scale: a 6 on the Munsell value scale
corresponds to a 60 on the L* dimension.

Artists often use a physical gray scale to visually match the

lightness of objects they are painting or drawing. A typical
example is presented below. Open the scale image in a new
window by clicking on the link below it, print the image on a
good quality color printer (with print options set to "black ink
only"), and you have a serviceable value scale for use in the
field or studio. Preprinted value scales are available from online
art retailers, and the standard photographer's grayscale
(manufactured by Kodak) is sold at most camera stores —
though the photographer's scale crunches up the range of light
values and spreads out the darks.

9 step value scale

Click here to view the full size image on gray background

Lightness interval scales such as these are calibrated to

differences in perceived lightness between black and white so
that each value step appears to be equally different from the
steps above and below it. This disguises the fact that lightness is
equal to a power of the reflectance, proportional to the
luminance scaled with an exponent of 0.43. These power scales
produce finer gradations of value in dark values, and more
closely match the logarithmic scaling of light energy relevant to
film exposure.

Artists use these value scales by holding the scale so that it

visually overlaps an area in the field of view, then finding the
lightness match between the object and the scale; this is the
value that should be matched in the painting. This assumes that
only surfaces under the same illumination — not surfaces under
strongly contrasted illumination, or actual lights — are included
in the image.

The important exception to rendering illuminance contrast in a

painting is the visual color contrast between illuminated and
shadowed surfaces. Here the gray scale can be used to calculate
the paint value contrast. In bright daylight the contrast between
light and shadow creates up to a 60% reduction in lightness, so
a sunlit surface matched by a value of 8 will appear as a value
slightly above 3 (8 * 0.4 = 3.2) in shadow.

Shadow contrast may only amount to a 40% or less lightness

reduction under overcast skies or indirect (window illuminated
indoor) light: then 8 * 0.6 = 4.8 or 8 * 0.7 = 5.6.

These value contrasts must be reproduced in paint mixtures that

maintain the same color saturation between light and dark
surfaces (that is, shadows reduce the relative lightness by 60%
and reduce the color chroma by 60%). If the lightness is
reduced more than the chroma, the shadowed surface will
appear to be illuminated by a secondary light source. If the
chroma is reduced more than the lightness, the surface will
appear grayed or blackened rather than shadowed.

Hue Relationships. Despite the overriding importance of

luminance and luminance contrast in color experience,
traditional color theory has maintained a long and incredibly
disproportionate infatuation with chromaticity — especially, with
the relationships among saturated hues and complementary
colors.

Moses Harris (in around 1760) was the first author after Newton
to emphasize complementary color relationships, and the first to
identify complementary color contrast as an important factor
in visual design:

"If a contrast is wanting to any colour or teint, look for the

colour or teint in the system [wheel], and directly opposite you
will find the contrast wanted. Suppose it is required what colour
is most opposite, or contrary in hue to red, look directly opposite
to that colour in the system and it will be found to be green, the
most contrary to blue is orange, and opposite to yellow is
purple."

Hues in Traditional Color Theory. We can trace this

infatuation back to the circular arrangement of spectral hues
(the most saturated color stimuli physically possible) innovated
by the English physicist Isaac Newton in 1704. This is the
foundation image both for artists' color wheels and for the hue
circle in all scientific color spaces.

isaac newton's "diatonic" hue circle

from Opticks (1704), Book I, Proposition VI, Problem ii. Newton's
division of the hue circle as a diagram (black lines), and as fractional
diatonic sections (green lines); the spectral hues in wavenumber
spacing are aligned to match the modern perceptual scaling in which
extraspectral mixtures (dots) span one fourth of the total
circumference

Newton's hue circle exemplifies three ruling issues in traditional

color theory, which it will be enlightening to put in context. The
issures were:

• simple geometry. Newton apportioned the hue circle into

seven hues — red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet
— and spaced them by analogy to the whole number
fractions used to describe a diatonic musical scale in a vibrating
string (the C major scale starts at violet, and orange and indigo
represent half tone steps). This abstract geometry was based on
the observed or visual color sequence and spacing of spectral
hues.

• measurable mixtures. Newton chose a circular geometry in

order to explain measurable light mixtures, specifically the
fact that specific quantities of red, yellow, green and blue colors
of light produced an achromatic or "white" mixture, represented
by the center of the circle. These relationships therefore
describe additive mixtures of light.

• primary colors. Newton complicated the idea of "primary"

colors, first calling all seven colors of light equally "primitive"
and irreducible, then dismissing them all as sensations in the
mind. Naturalists and painters who adopted Newton's circular
geometry and measurable mixture relationships wanted to
explain material color mixtures in pigments, and therefore
inserted the painter's three primary colors into the hue circle.
This made it appear that a hue circle can describe subtractive
color mixtures, and made it appear that material color and
radiant color were the same thing.

These three issues (and several others), in the context of both

scientific and artistic uses of color, made Newton's scheme
appear arbitrary or inconsistent to many 18th and 19th
century readers. In addition, mixtures of light had no practical
application, and were much more difficult to measure or
manipulate than mixtures of pigments (paints or inks) and dyes.

So Newton's hue circle was revised toward more traditional and

practical concepts, useful to printers and painters. But quite a lot
of uncertainty remained in the way colors would be represented,
as suggested by a sampling of historical hue models (diagram,
below).

color theory color icons

c.1700: additive hue circle after Newton, 1704; c.1750:
subtractive color wheel after Harris, 1766; c.1800: perceptual color
hexagram after Goethe, 1807; c.1850: additive hue circle by
Laugel, after Helmholtz, 1856/1869; c.1900: subtractive color
triangle after Sloan, 1923; c.1950: subtractive color wheel by
Famous Artist's School, 1958; Harris, Goethe and Laugel diagrams
revised to place yellow at top

A long explanation could be provided for the conceptual and

substantive differences among these color models, the
audiences they were intended to address, the applications they
were intended to serve, and the specific advantages or
disadvantages each presents as a model of conceptual, visual or
material color.

But the overarching lesson is the dominant, governing role of

the three subtractive primary colors. The fact that these have
changed over time only shows that traditional color theory has
struggled to reconcile traditional artistic lore with evolving
colorant manufacture technologies and continuing scientific
advances in color research. This effort has pushed artistic color
theory to emphasize conceptual colors, specifically "primary"
colors, as a framework in which visual and material colors can
coexist, and where any discrepancies between conceptual and
material colors can be blamed on paint "impurity".

Hues in Modern Color Theory. Vision science, grappling with

the technical difficulties of color measurement and color
appearance modeling, and the diverse empirical problems
created by color media and color imaging systems, has displaced
"primary" colors with a factual description of visual hue
relationships.

Why visual? Because visual color addresses most directly the

relationship between the color stimulus and the color
experience, and because "how a color looks" is the fundamental
issue in any color image or color design. We don't care whether
a red is saturated or yellowish, as material color: we only care
whether it appears appropriately saturated or yellowish, given
the image or visual context in which it is interpreted. And if we
want to create that saturated red with a computer monitor, and
printing inks, and paints, we do not want "saturated red" to be
defined in terms of any specific material medium.

The visual trichromatic or "retinal" primary colors are not the

primary colors of color appearance; they only have a role in
bridging or connecting radiant colors to visual color appearance.
The visual primary colors have been replaced by the opponent
functions that are associated with the hue contrasts violet
red/blue green (a+/a–) and yellow/blue violet (b+/b–). These
define the hue spacing shown in the diagram (below).

the modern primaries: the ab opponent dimensions

average hue locations on the CIECAM aCbC hue plane at lightness 6;
letters R, Y, G, B and P indicate location of Hering unique hues (red,
yellow, green, blue) and Munsell purple

These two dimensions do not privilege any "primary" hues, or

impose a hierarchy of primary, secondary and tertiary hues.
They simply regulate the spacing of visual hues around the hue
circle. They reproduce the hue spacing determined through
laborious research in the Munsell Color System and as defined
by the CIECAM color appearance model.

Literally any hue naming or hue categorization system can be

imposed on this hue circle; the labels in the diagram above are
based on my Handprint hue categories, adapted from the hue
naming system used by Moses Harris and exemplified by the hue
circle diagram (above).

Physical Hue Exemplars. As verbal categories are imprecise, it

is helpful to have exemplars for color matching.

Below are visual color exemplars for the 18 hue categories as

GIF files in standard 8 bit hex codes using the Photoshop color
space in Mac OS X 10.5, standard cinema display palette and
gamma. (Computer monitors differ in how well they reproduce
absolute color samples, and reproduce greens, blue greens and
violet reds poorly.) The "extraspectral" hues are titled in italics,
and the nearest matching single pigment is suggested.

red violet violet blue violet

PV49 PV23 PV15 [blue shade]

violet blue blue green blue

PB29 PB35 PG36

blue green green yellow green

PG7 PG36 PY3+PG7

green yellow yellow orange yellow

PY184 PY35 PY65

yellow orange orange red orange

PY110 PO20 PO73

orange red red violet red

PR188 PR209 PR122

Next, here is how the visual hue circle distributes physical

exemplars for the hue categories. The diagram (below) shows
the hue circle location of:

(1) spectral wavelengths and extraspectral mixtures of "red" and

"violet" light (in color science, hues can be identified precisely by
the matching hue of spectral light, called the dominant
wavelength).

(2) the spacing of hue categories in the Munsell Color System,

and

(3) the location of the four unique hues (red, yellow, green
blue), as averaged across a number of color scaling
experiments.

spectral wavelength and Munsell visual hue angles

average Munsell hue angle for all hues across values /6 to /8 and
chromas /6 to /8, on the CIECAM aCbC plane

The spacing of spectral hues shows the increased wavelength

discrimination that appears around "yellow" and "cyan"
wavelengths, the decreased discrimination at the spectum ends
and in the "green" wavelengths, and the strong tinting effect of
"violet" light in the mixture of red and violet hues. It also
vindicates Newton's original scaling of hues, which was
developed using only the crudest of light manipulation tools.

The next diagram shows the spacing of common watercolor

pigments on the visual hue circle, with spectral hues repeated
for reference. (Note: all yellow hues appear in the spectrum, so
the commercial watercolor paint name "spectrum yellow" is
meaningless.)
 spectral wavelength and pigment visual hue angles
on the CIECAM aCbC plane

This diagram illustrates very clearly the relative scarcity of green

and violet pigments; very often, commercial watercolors in those
hues colors must be mixed from green and yellow, or red and
blue, pigments.

Complementary Hue Relationships. By adjusting the distance

between hues around the circumference, the hue circle also
determines which hues will be directly opposite, connected by a
straight line that passes through the "white" center of the wheel.
This again was explicitly noted by Newton:

If only two of the primary Colours which in the circle are

opposite to one another be mixed in an equal proportion, the
[mixture] shall fall upon the center." Opticks, Book I, Proposition
VI, Problem ii.

Newton observed that mixtures made with his seven "primary"

colors did not create a pure white, but "some faint anonymous
Colour," which was because none of his hue wedges are directly
opposite each other: all are skewed slightly to one side of
"white". However in 1853 the German scholar Hermann
Grassmann proved, and the vision scientist Hermann von
Helmholtz quickly demonstrated, that the appropriate pair of
individual light wavelengths must and can mix an achromatic
white. These wavelengths define visual complementary hues.

When artists replaced Newton's light "primaries" with primary

colors of paint, they also redefined complementary hues to be
those hues of paints that, when mixed in the appropriate
proportions, create an achromatic gray or black. These paints
define mixing complementary hues.

The difference between radiant and material colors intrudes

again in complementary color mixtures: the pairing of
complementary hues defined by light mixtures (which produces
white light) is significantly different from the complementary
pairs defined by paint mixtures (which produce black paint), as
summarized in the diagram (below) of the mixing
complementary relationships as they appear on a visual
chromaticity plane.

mixing vs. visual complements

pigment locations on the CIECAM aCbC plane

The diagram shows that the visual colors of paints from

blue violet (ultramarine violet, PV15) to green (phthalo green
YS, PG36) create a span of visual complements that extends
from yellow to red violet. But the mixing complements for these
paints cover a much smaller hue span, roughly from yellow
orange (yellow ochre, PY42) to violet red (quinacridone rose,
PV19).

These differences occur because violet blue paints, such as

ultramarine blue (PB29), contain more blue+green than red
reflectance, so the visual complement yellow must be shifted
toward red, to contain more red than blue+green reflectance
and create a balance in subtractive mixture. On the other hand
green paints, such as phthalo green YS (PG36) contain more
blue+green than red reflectance, so the visual complement
red violet must be shifted toward red, to contain more red than
blue+green reflectance to compensate.

Mixing complements roughly match the visual complements for

hues such as yellow green/violet and red orange/green blue, but
we clearly must choose one or the other system, especially for
color design work.

Many painters, adhering to 18th century color prejudice, prefer a

hue circle or color wheel defined by paint mixtures. But these
"mixing color wheels" are plagued with practical shortcomings,
summarized on this page. As a point of reference, the diagram
(below) shows a typical mixing color wheel, based on my
exhaustive table of watercolor mixing complements, to
illustrate some of the problems.

a mixing complement hue circle

saturated paints on the circumference, less saturated paints on the
inner circle

The main problems with subtractive mixture hue circles are:

• The core problem is the wide color difference between

mixing complements: this means that paints with the same
mixing complement relations but very different visual hues must
be placed in the same hue location, or that paints with the same
visual hue but different mixing complement relations must be
spaced apart.

• As indicated in the diagram (above), subtractive hue circles

must allot a quarter of the hue circle to hues from red to yellow
orange in order to represent the complement relations with the
much larger span of hues from blue violet to blue green

• Subtractive hue circles force an erratic spacing of hues (very

large gaps between yellow green and green, or between blue to
green blue, and a very compressed spacing from yellow orange
to green yellow or from violet blue to blue)

• The spacing of hues that results does not represent the

perceptual difference between them (very similar hues are
spread far apart, very different hues are pressed close together)

• To reconcile these discrepancies, many arbitrary decisions

have to be made about the spacing between hues: different
painters, using the same mixing complement information,
will usually produce different hue spacings around the hue circle.

Chroma Relationships. Chroma has been the most neglected

colormaking attribute in traditional color theory. In part this is
because the study of color relationships has focused on
saturated hues and "pure" primary colors.

However, another reason chroma has been neglected is that it is

a hybrid color attribute that combines aspects of
lightness/brightness and hue; separately manipulating lightness
and hue limits chroma variations in important ways. To
understand these issues it is necessary to view chroma as
influenced by three separate factors — relative luminance,
changes in lightness across all hues, and changes in lightness
within a single hue.

Relative Luminance & Chroma Boundaries. Chroma or

saturation inhabits three different realms of color experience,
articulated by the luminance contrast between lights and
surfaces, and between ideal and real physical surfaces (diagram,
below).

three fundamental chroma boundaries

on the CIECAM aCbC plane

Individual spectral wavelengths, presented at adequate

luminance in a dark surround, produce the most saturated visual
color sensations possible in a radiant color. They illuminate the
physiological limits of chroma sensation: the structure of our
visual system makes it impossible to perceive a greater or more
intense hue purity. We see hues of this intensity, for example, in
prismatic colors, lasers, the setting sun, transmissive colors in
gems or stained glasses, or saturated surface colors viewed
under high illuminance contrast.

These color stimuli all appear with the sensation of brightness,

and part of their hue purity arises because they do not have the
blackness inherent in surface colors viewed within a single light
environment. The theoretical boundary between lightness and
brightness is defined by optimal colors, which have the highest
hue purity possible for a nonfluorescent surface color of a given
hue and lightness. We commonly see isolated visual colors
comparable to optimal colors in saturated surfaces under
moderate illuminance contrast.

At still lower levels of chroma are reflective material colors,

including all artists' pigments, that present some blackness or
grayness under normal viewing conditions. I have defined the
color attribute hue purity as the chroma of a material color
divided by the chroma of the optimal color of matching hue and
lightness, or (in the diagram, above):

HP = CMC / COC

I have tabulated here the hue purity values of 170 watercolor

pigments; in general, hue purity correlates very well with
CIECAM chroma.

The point here is that visual chroma depends on how a color is

illuminated and how that illumination is interpreted. In general,
the range of chroma is greater for lights than for material
surfaces, and our visual judgments of chroma depend
importantly on how we interpret surface illumination. To the
extent that we can "see" that the brightness of a color is due to
the illuminance it receives, we discount that brightness as an
attribute of the material color.

Chroma & Lightness Across Hues. The lightness or value at

which a hue reaches its maximum chroma is different around
the hue circle. Hues near yellow reach their peak chroma only
when they are at a very high lightness, and hues near blue
violet reach their peak chroma only when they are very dark.

This relationship roughly matches the relative luminance of the

individual hues as they appear in the spectrum, for example as
their contribution to a photopic sensitivity function. The
major exceptions are in violet to violet red hues, which are
spectral mixtures and are brighter than spectral blue violet.

These variations are very nicely distributed along the a+/a–

dimension, as displayed in the artist's value wheel for most
common watercolor pigments, and as measured in the CIECAM
color space using a 70 nm optimal circuit, as explained in the
synthesis of surface colors (diagram, below).

lightness of peak chroma in 18 hue categories

the lightness at which different hues reach their peak chroma in
optimal colors, distributed by red/green (a+/a–) content and
mapped into a watercolor pigment gamut (L* = 95)

The major implication of these relationships is in the mapping of

hues into a value design. Dark valued areas of an image simply
cannot be rendered as a pure saturated green or orange; the
green or orange can be saturated, but at darker values they will
appear dull or (in orange) as brown. The clearest mapping of
hue to value appears in medieval and certain modernist painting
styles (late Van Gogh, Matisse, Derain, Ellsworth Kelly, etc.),
where pure pigment colors are used much more than mixed
colors or colors darkened with black.

This relationship between peak chroma and lightness is the

reason traditional color theory claims that "warm" hues
advance and "cool" hues recede. In fact this visual effect has
almost nothing to do with hue. It occurs because red, orange
and yellow pigments have a higher saturation than all other
pigments (with the exception of some convenience yellow
greens), and because at their peak saturation they are much
lighter valued than nearly all green, blue and violet pigments.

warm color effects caused by lightness and/or

chroma
cool colors can easily appear "advancing" or "arousing" if they are
lighter and/or more intense than the warm colors around them; a
white disk appears "closer" than a black disk

The diagram (above) shows that we can easily make "cool"

greens and blues appear to advance, or to be more "arousing", if
we manipulate them to have a higher chroma or lightness than
the "warm" hues they are paired with. The fact that a white disk
appears to "advance" in relation to a black disk shows that the
effect is independent of chromaticity.

Chroma & Lightness Within Hues. The modern geometrical

color framework implies that we can change one colormaking
attribute without changing the other two. This is true only in one
sense: we can always reduce the chroma of any color toward
gray without changing its hue or its lightness.

In practice, the changes possible in one colormaking attribute

are limited by the value of the other two attributes. Thus, it is
not possible to make a pastel blue paint more chromatic without
also making it darker, or to make a saturated yellow darker
without reducing its chroma. The diagram (below) contrasts
these limitations between two visual complementary hues of
yellow and violet blue, as displayed in color samples from the
Munsell Color System.

chroma and lightness boundaries in yellow & blue

paints
as defined in the Munsell Color System

Similar diagrams for other hue slices would show the same
bulging contour: hues taper to achromatic at extreme white and
black lightness, and bulge to their maximum chroma at some
middle lightness. The previous diagram showed where that
bulge is located on a lightness scale, but the exact shape of the
bulge, and the lightness of the peak chroma, vary widely across
hues (diagram, right).

Obviously, increasing the lightness variation in an image usually

forces some hues to have low chroma, and using all hues at high
chroma limits the range of lightness values that each hue can
represent: light valued figures must be yellow, orange or yellow
green; dark valued figures must be blue or violet. The French
painter André Derain turned this second limitation into a
painting style.

The lightness/chroma interaction comes to the fore when the

painter or photographer tackles the problem of gamut
mapping. It also has implications for color design. A widely
recommended technique for producing color harmony is to
render all hues at a very similar lightness and chroma; this is
maximum chroma of
nuance matching. But it is not possible to match a light munsell color samples
valued, saturated yellow with a light valued, saturated blue. So
any combination of hues can be selected to have the same shown within optimal color limits for
the same hues (white area); after
nuance (the same chroma and lightness) only within a spindle Kuehni (2003) and Perales, Mora et
shaped core of the color space (diagram, below). al. (2004)

the nuance space

the range of lightness and chroma values common to all optimal
color stimuli, expressed in units of Munsell (left) and CIELAB (right)
chroma, on a vertical CIE L* scale (grayscale)

This diagram was developed using optimal colors; the nuance

matching possible with pigments will necessarily be smaller
(compare diagrams, above right), though its general form will be
the same: the widest variety of nuance matches are possible in
the middle lightness values, and in light or dark valued colors
only at a very reduced (dull) chroma.

Last revised 08.I.2015 • © 2015 Bruce MacEvoy