188 PART 4 HOW DIGITAL PRINT-MAKING WORKS
How Colors Are Created
In digital photography, two totally different ways of creating color blend into one another so seamlessly that it seems as if some master
painter—and joker—must be at work. At one end of the spectrum, so to speak, the colors on your computer monitor, on your camera’s LCD
screen, on your TV, and in the movies are all created using light. At the other extreme, the colors in this book, on billboards, on cereal
boxes, and in photograph prints are created with paints and dyes and pigments in an entirely opposite process. Yet most of the time, any-
way, color moves from one medium to another with grace and beauty.
All the colors we perceive come to us through
light, more specifically through various wave-
lengths we see as the different colors in the spec-
trum. The spectrum we see when a prism breaks
up white light is a seamless infinity of hues. We
can reproduce not all, but most, of those colors
using only three of them. (The ones we cannot
reproduce are never missed.)1
Color created by the joining of differently colored lights is called addi-
tive color. The colors add to each other’s capacity to produce light. If
you shine a red light on a white surface and then shine a green light on
the same area, the two colors join forces to create a third color: yellow.
If you then shine a blue light on the intersection of red and green light,
the three together produce a white light. Those three colors have
added up to white, the total of all light in the visible spectrum.
Red, green, and blue are the colors used in a monitor, a TV, or
any device that shineslight to create color and images, giving
us the RGB(red,green,blue) standard.2
When two colors are mixed together in the form of an ink, a
paint, a powder, or a pigment, they subtract from each other’s
capability to reflectlight. They form subtractive color
because each color absorbs (subtracts) a part of the spectrum
found in white light. The more colors in the mix, the more col-
ors deducted from the light reflecting from whatever the mixed
colors are used on until the mixture becomes black and reflects
no color at all.3