Talk:Complementary color

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Contents 1 HELP!!! 2 Americanize 3 Complementarity and Negativity. 4 Cleaning, explaining, clarifying... 5 Grey

[edit] HELP!!!

There are some fundamental problems with this article. Primary colors do not allow us to form the full range of human perceivable colors. Take a look at gamut and also Google it and you should be able to find that the gamut of a trichromatic TV or computer screen is far from the entire range of possible colors. The discussion of primary colors as a means of forming a color gamut doesn't belong in an article on complimentary color in the first place. Primary colors are only relevant to complementary colors from a historical standpoint where, for example, certain primaries/secondaries were picked for painting, etc. But from a color science standpoint, any color has a complementary such that when the two are added they will form gray (or the color of the illuminant in a subtractive system). It's irrelevant which colors are primaries.

If you want to understand primaries, the true authority is the CIE. Again, you will have to go outside of Wikipedia to get a thorough understanding of this topic. The short answer is that the only way to get the full gamut of human perceivable colors with three primaries is to make your primaries imaginary colors (or allow subtraction of colors in an otherwise additive system).

If this makes your brain hurt, you're not alone. I don't really feel completely authoritative on all this either. I will try to complete a complementary wavelength article to go with the dominant wavelength article when I have time (not for a while I'm afraid). This should cover complementary color except for the historical stuff, which we can keep here.

I'm really sorry to just complain and not help fix things, but I just don't have the time right now and thought I'd better at least point out the problems as I saw them. --Chinasaur 08:43, 4 Oct 2004 (UTC)

I agree with you on the inappropriateness of referring to the primary and secondary colours in this article, so I did your dirty work for you and deleted the references. I am looking forward to your article on complementary wavelengths. :-) --Heron 11:50, 4 Oct 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Americanize

I tried to make the orthography of the article consistent. There were mostly "colour"s but some "color"s. But the article is named "color" so I changed it that way. If a great majority of people working on this article are British and have trouble remembering the American spelling, we might want to consider a move to Complementary colour, but otherwise I think this is the easiest solution. --Chinasaur 18:15, 4 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Colour is the spelling recognized around the world, color is the spelling in just one nation. I support formally changing the spelling of this word everywhere it appears. 66.46.152.30 18:36, 11 August 2006 (UTC)

I reverted your changes. Wikipedia practice is to keep whatever spelling was used first in the article; in this case, "color". See the Color talk page for the most recent of numerous lengthy debates on this topic. -- Laura S | talk to me 19:17, 11 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Complementarity and Negativity.

This is ridiculous! This article says that yellow is the complement of purple, but at yellow it says that yellow is the complement of blue. 66.245.26.248 18:32, 27 May 2004 (UTC)

Good point. I have tried to fix the article. -- Heron 16:03, 7 Aug 2004 (UTC)

I will look over this article with an eye to both psychology, where red is the complement of green and to photography, where red is the negative of cyan. Artistically, both cyan and green make adequate complements, but to the photoreceptors in the eye, green is better. Photographically, red is the negative of cyan, not green. It's worth noting that the receptors for blue in the eye are very well suited to receiving violet. IOW, more difference is between the peaks for blue and green than the peaks for red and green. My main reference is a textbook that I no longer possess: Physiological psychology (I might even need to look at the University of Alberta calendar to remember the author). BTW, violet is a better word than purple for the complement of yellow, because purple can be confused with dark majenta or a 2:1 mix of majenta and cyan. Know what? Your monitor doesn't do violet.—The preceding unsigned comment was added by Brewhaha@edmc.net (talk • contribs).

It would be better to start a new section than to respond to an old item from 2004. As for your concept of "negative colors", please provide a verifiable source. You seem to be taking this article into a direction that is unfamiliar to me, and I'm quite familiar with color science and its application in photography. I'm going to revert your edit for now, since I think this "negative colors" approach is rather non-standard. I recommend you start over with a new section below, and certainly back up any major changes with sources. Dicklyon 15:32, 30 March 2007 (UTC)

Now, can anyone answer the question "Why are the 2 sets of colors different"?? Please read this very slowly and carefully:

In the summer of 2003, I stumbled across a site at http://www.gamecheetz.com/Rant.html that appears to explain very logically. It has a color section. When I stumbled across it, I thought it was logical in every way except one: it has not been widely adopted as standard. In February 2004, I edited various color edits to see how difficult the information could ever get widely adopted. Now, go to Talk:Color. The 7-section supgroup titled "What are the primary colors??" that is being discussed about the edits that I made sounded strange, but now I will reveal the truth: all I was trying to do is make the information mentioned in the above external link widely adopted, and it turned out that it can't. Three months later, I contacted the owner of the web site, convincing the owner that their information cannot be widely adopted, and the reason turned out to be that it was only the webmaster's opinion as of when the information was presented, and the opinion was changed. "The black-white scale and blue-yellow scales each have gray in the center, but the red-green scale has yellow. Thus, yellow is both a primary and a secondary color! No other color is both primary and secondary." (In contrast to the webmaster's previous belief as of when I stumbled across the page, which was all 3 scales contained gray.) Even later, I asked the webmaster how the red-green scale looks to someone who is red-green color blind and the answer was that the webmaster (contrary to what I thought when I stumbled across their site) is not an expert on colors. Now, are any of you registered Wikipedians able to answer the question with your best knowledge: "Why are the 2 sets of primary colors in paint and light different??" 66.32.241.40 02:18, 8 Aug 2004 (UTC)

As for that rant, the guy is seems to have mulled over the issue, but came to the wrong conclusions because he just doesn't know how the brain perceives different colors. The most comprehensive site on color I have found is http://www.handprint.com/HP/WCL/wcolor.html, and if you are interested I suggest you check it out. The reason all this information isn't discussed is because I think it's out of the realm of wikipeida (as you can see there there is a TON of info... too much to include in one encyclopedia article).

FYI the reason there are 2 sets of primary colors is because paint absorbs light, and colored lights emit it (that's why the primary colors of light are called "additive primary colors" and the primary colors of pigment are called "subtractive primary colors". Ctachme 05:04, 8 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Yes, Ctachme, that's true, but painters use a third set of primary colours: red, blue and yellow. I think these were chosen because they were once the only colours that could be manufactured in a stable form suitable for paint pigments, and modern painters still refer to these as the "primary colours". Traditionally, yellow was made from orpiment (an arsenic compound), blue from lapis lazuli (a gemstone), and red from Chinese cinnabar or vermilion (a mercury ore). The complements of these pigments are red/green, blue/orange and yellow/purple. -- Heron 16:18, 8 Aug 2004 (UTC)

But shouldn't the stance be that the so called "painter's primary colors" are only worthy of historical note because as you just said, it was based only on available pigments, not on the actual colors that the eye considers primary? I see no reason to pretend this historical note is still fact. The three subtractive primary colors are yellow, cyan and magenta with compliments of blue, red and green, and the additive primary colors are just the opposite (blue/yellow, red/cyan and green/magenta). Ctachme 02:38, 9 Aug 2004 (UTC)

OK, I concede that there is no value in promoting the RYB 'primaries'. My point is that there are still many books out there that cling to the old theory, and that people should be able to find that theory somewhere on Wikipedia, even if it is only in an historical note. Would you accept, for example, a note under blue saying "Blue is an additive primary colour. It was once considered a subtractive primary colour, the complement of orange, but this theory has now been superseded by the more accurate cyan/magenta/yellow system of subtractive primary colours"? -- Heron 08:36, 9 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Sure, that would seem fine to me, as long as all of the colors were updated to reflect this. Ctachme 11:53, 9 Aug 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Cleaning, explaining, clarifying...

Changelog:

• I explained the function of additive complementary pairs.
• Gray is (literally) a shade of white; changed "shade of gray" to "shade of white".
• RGB section ended up being adupe of additive section; I removed it and will copy the formula from it to the additive section at a later date, with a better example than black and white.
• Looking at a chart is not a good way of remembering... Some might consider this cheating.

I'm still not pleased with the complementary subtractive section. I don't think purple and yellow or red and green pigments will combine to produce the illuminant color. But it's 2:25am and I get up in 6 hours for work so, another time. Ayeroxor 06:27, Jun 23, 2005 (UTC)

Yes, sorry, I think the "color of the illuminant" was something of a red herring for this discussion. Sorry because I think I put that in at some point. I think the current article is now at least roughly accurate, but not very readable. Hopefully more color science people and artists will help correct technical errors while lay people can make it things more readable in WP's iterative process from here. --Chinasaur 22:20, 28 December 2005 (UTC)

I'm taking those color pairs back out. Could you justify including them? They don't make much sense to me and I doubt they have much formal validity in color science. They are more relevant to CMKY printing than anything else I can think of. --Chinasaur 09:21, 18 January 2006 (UTC)

They make a lot of sense to most people :o) There is very strong empirical evidence that the three primaries and the three secondaries form the main concepts by which colour perception in general is ordered; certainly RGB sensors are the main components of the sensory apparatus. It is thus useful to order them in complementary pairs and mention them explicitly, the more so because it is very common to do so and we as an encyclopedia must reflect this social practice. It is not our place to endorse or condemn. However we might add that the value of this ordering in colour science is very limited. Of its "formal validity" I know little; but a material validity is present ;o)--MWAK 12:31, 25 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Grey

If you think about it, there should be a shade of grey that when inverted, will produce the same colour (ie; it is exactly halfway between black and white). Does anyone know what its hex is equal to, and if so, could you add it to the article as a piece of trivia?Tuck99 04:21, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

The closest you can come, in a typical 8-bit space, is 127 or 128, which are inverse of each other. It's too trivial to be worth a mention. Dicklyon 05:06, 25 February 2007 (UTC)