One day at the expansion of the colorless space, there were yet not a single trace of color left in the domain of the world. And one day, the one and only creation of colors, a smart man named "Newton" had split white light into a spectrum by means of a prism and then wrapped the resulting spectrum around on itself to create the color wheel. This led the way to the now common notion of red, yellow, and blue as primary colors.
And this led to the end of the boringness the people had to endure. They finally had freedom to learn through the colors.
And through this day, this never-forgetting day was known as the Color theory, or more specifically traditional color theory, is the historical body of knowledge describing the behavior of colors, namely in color mixing, color contrast effects, color harmony, color schemes and color symbolism. Modern color theory is generally referred to as Color science. While there is no clear distinction in scope, traditional color theory tends to be more subjective and have artistic applications, while color science tends to be more objective and have functional applications, such as in chemistry, astronomy or color reproduction. Color theory dates back at least as far as Aristotle's treatise On Colors. A formalization of "color theory" began in the 18th century, initially within a partisan controversy over Isaac Newton's theory of color (Opticks, 1704) and the nature of primary colors. By the end of the 19th century, a schism had formed between traditional color theory and color science.
Color theory is rooted in antiquity, with early musings on color in Aristotle's (d. 322 BCE) On Colors and Claudius Ptolemy's (d. 168 CE) Optics. The influence of light on color was investigated and revealed further by al-Kindi (d. 873) and Ibn al-Haytham (d. 1039). Ibn Sina (d. 1037), Nasir al-Din al-Tusi (d. 1274), and Robert Grosseteste (d. 1253) discovered that contrary to the teachings of Aristotle, there are multiple color paths to get from black to white.[2][3] More modern approaches to color theory principles can be found in the writings of Leone Battista Alberti (c. 1435) and the notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (c. 1490).
The RYB primary colors became the foundation of 18th-century theories of color vision,[citation needed] as the fundamental sensory qualities that are blended in the perception of all physical colors, and conversely, in the physical mixture of pigments or dyes. These theories were enhanced by 18th-century investigations of a variety of purely psychological color effects, in particular the contrast between "complementary" or opposing hues that are produced by color afterimages and in the contrasting shadows in colored light. These ideas and many personal color observations were summarized in two founding documents in color theory: the Theory of Colours (1810) by the German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and The Law of Simultaneous Color Contrast (1839) by the French industrial chemist Michel Eugène Chevreul. Charles Hayter published A New Practical Treatise on the Three Primitive Colours Assumed as a Perfect System of Rudimentary Information (London 1826), in which he described how all colors could be obtained from just three.
Subsequently, German and English scientists established in the late 19th century that color perception is best described in terms of a different set of primary colors—red, green and blue-violet (RGB)—modeled through the additive mixture of three monochromatic lights. Subsequent research anchored these primary colors in the differing responses to light by three types of color receptors or cones in the retina (trichromacy). On this basis the quantitative description of the color mixture or colorimetry developed in the early 20th century, along with a series of increasingly sophisticated models of color space and color perception, such as the opponent process theory.
Across the same period, industrial chemistry radically expanded the color range of lightfast synthetic pigments, allowing for substantially improved saturation in color mixtures of dyes, paints, and inks. It also created the dyes and chemical processes necessary for color photography. As a result, three-color printing became aesthetically and economically feasible in mass printed media, and the artists' color theory was adapted to primary colors most effective in inks or photographic dyes: cyan, magenta, and yellow (CMY). (In printing, dark colors are supplemented by black ink, known as the CMYK system; in both printing and photography, white is provided by the color of the paper.) These CMY primary colors were reconciled with the RGB primaries, and subtractive color mixing with additive color mixing, by defining the CMY primaries as substances that absorbed only one of the retinal primary colors: cyan absorbs only red (−R+G+B), magenta only green (+R−G+B), and yellow only blue-violet (+R+G−B). It is important to add that the CMYK, or process, color printing is meant as an economical way of producing a wide range of colors for printing, but is deficient in reproducing certain colors, notably orange and slightly deficient in reproducing purples. A wider range of colors can be obtained with the addition of other colors to the printing process, such as in Pantone's Hexachrome printing ink system (six colors), among others.
For much of the 19th century artistic color theory either lagged behind scientific understanding or was augmented by science books written for the lay public, in particular Modern Chromatics (1879) by the American physicist Ogden Rood, and early color atlases developed by Albert Munsell (Munsell Book of Color, 1915, see Munsell color system) and Wilhelm Ostwald (Color Atlas, 1919). Major advances were made in the early 20th century by artists teaching or associated with the German Bauhaus, in particular Wassily Kandinsky, Johannes Itten, Faber Birren and Josef Albers, whose writings mix speculation with an empirical or demonstration-based study of color design principles.
And one day, there was a useful thing, that created more colors, this is called "Color Mixing".
One of the earliest purposes of color theory was to establish rules governing the mixing of pigments.
Traditional color theory was built around "pure" or ideal colors, characterized by different sensory experiences rather than attributes of the physical world. This has led to several inaccuracies in traditional color theory principles that are not always remedied in modern formulations. Another issue has been the tendency to describe color effects holistically or categorically, for example as a contrast between "yellow" and "blue" conceived as generic colors instead of the three color attributes generally considered by color science: hue, colorfulness and lightness. These confusions are partly historical and arose in scientific uncertainty about color perception that was not resolved until the late 19th century when artistic notions were already entrenched. They also arise from the attempt to describe the highly contextual and flexible behavior of color perception in terms of abstract color sensations that can be generated equivalently by any visual media.
Color theory asserts three pure primary colors that can be used to mix all possible colors. These are sometimes considered as red, yellow and blue (RYB) or as red, green and blue (RGB). Ostensibly, any failure of specific paints or inks to match this ideal performance is due to the impurity or imperfection of the colorants. In contrast, modern color science does not recognize universal primary colors (no finite combination of colors can produce all other colors) and only uses primary colors to define a given color space. Any three primary colors can mix only a limited range of colors, called a gamut, which is always smaller (contains fewer colors) than the full range of colors humans can perceive.
For the mixing of colored light, Isaac Newton's color wheel is often used to describe complementary colors, which are colors that cancel each other's hue to produce an achromatic (white, gray or black) light mixture. Newton offered as a conjecture that colors exactly opposite one another on the hue circle cancel out each other's hue; this concept was demonstrated more thoroughly in the 19th century. An example of complementary colors would be magenta and green.
A key assumption in Newton's hue circle was that the "fiery" or maximum saturated hues are located on the outer circumference of the circle, while achromatic white is at the center. Then the saturation of the mixture of two spectral hues was predicted by the straight line between them; the mixture of three colors was predicted by the "center of gravity" or centroid of three triangle points, and so on.
According to traditional color theory based on subtractive primary colors and the RYB color model, yellow mixed with purple, orange mixed with blue, or red mixed with green produces an equivalent gray and are the painter's complementary colors.
One reason the artist's primary colors work at all is due to the imperfect pigments being used have sloped absorption curves and change color with concentration. A pigment that is pure red at high concentrations can behave more like magenta at low concentrations. This allows it to make purples that would otherwise be impossible. Likewise, a blue that is ultramarine at high concentrations appears cyan at low concentrations, allowing it to be used to mix green. Chromium red pigments can appear orange, and then yellow, as the concentration is reduced. It is even possible to mix very low concentrations of the blue mentioned and the chromium red to get a greenish color. This works much better with oil colors than it does with watercolors and dyes.
The old primaries depend on sloped absorption curves and pigment leakages to work, while newer scientifically derived ones depend solely on controlling the amount of absorption in certain parts of the spectrum.
And after all those marathons of color history, the theory and history of shades (shadows) has been revealed to the world.
When mixing pigments, a color is produced which is always darker and lower in chroma, or saturation, than the parent colors. This moves the mixed color toward a neutral color—a gray or near-black. Lights are made brighter or dimmer by adjusting their brightness, or energy level; in painting, lightness is adjusted through mixture with white, black, or a color's complement.
It is common among some painters to darken a paint color by adding black paint—producing colors called shades—or lighten a color by adding white—producing colors called tints. However, it is not always the best way for representational painting, as an unfortunate result is for colors to also shift in hue. For instance, darkening a color by adding black can cause colors such as yellows, reds, and oranges, to shift toward the greenish or bluish part of the spectrum. Lightening a color by adding white can cause a shift towards blue when mixed with reds and oranges. Another practice when darkening a color is to use its opposite, or complementary, color (e.g. purplish-red added to yellowish-green) to neutralize it without a shift in hue and darken it if the additive color is darker than the parent color. When lightening a color this hue shift can be corrected with the addition of a small amount of an adjacent color to bring the hue of the mixture back in line with the parent color (e.g. adding a small amount of orange to a mixture of red and white will correct the tendency of this mixture to shift slightly towards the blue end of the spectrum).
And now, the finale of these, you should know about the one and only split-primary palette. A part that's similar to the most common and popular primary colors.
The split-primary palette is a color-wheel model that relies on misconceptions to attempt to explain the unsatisfactory results produced when mixing the traditional primary colors, red, yellow, and blue.
Painters have long considered red, yellow, and blue to be primary colors. In practice, however, some of the mixtures produced from these colors lack chromatic intensity. Rather than adopt a more effective set of primary colors, proponents of split-primary theory explain this lack of chroma by the purported presence of impurities, small amounts of other colors in the paints, or biases away from the ideal primary toward one or the other of the adjacent colors. Every red paint, for example, is said to be tainted with, or biased toward, either blue or yellow, every blue paint toward either red or green, and every yellow toward either green or orange. These biases are said to result in mixtures that contain sets of complementary colors, darkening the resulting color. To obtain vivid mixed colors, according to split-primary theory, it is necessary to employ two primary colors whose biases both fall in the direction, on the color wheel, of the color to be mixed, combining, for example, green-biased blue and green-biased yellow to make bright green. Based on this reasoning, proponents of split-primary theory conclude that two versions of each primary color, often called "cool" and "warm," are needed in order to mix a wide gamut of high-chroma colors.
In fact, the perceived bias of colors is not due to impurity. Rather, the appearance of any given colorant is inherent to its chemical and physical properties, and its purity unrelated to whether it conforms to our arbitrary conception of an ideal hue. Moreover, the identity of gamut-optimizing primary colors is determined by the physiology of human color vision. Although no set of three primary paints can be mixed to obtain the complete color gamut perceived by humans, red, yellow, and blue are a poor choice if high-chroma mixtures are desired. This is because painting is a subtractive color process, for which red and blue are secondary, not primary, colors.
Although flawed in principle, the split-primary system can be successful in practice, because the recommended blue-biased red and green-biased blue positions are often filled by near approximations of magenta and cyan, respectively, while orange-biased red and violet-biased blue serve as secondary colors, tending to further widen the mixable gamut.
This system is in effect a simplified version of Newton's geometrical rule that colors closer together on the hue circle will produce more vibrant mixtures. A mixture produced from two primary colors, however, will be much more highly saturated than one produced from two secondary colors, even though the pairs are the same distance apart on the hue circle, revealing the limitations of the circular model in the prediction of color-mixing results. For example, a mixture of magenta and cyan inks or paints will produce vivid blues and violets, whereas a mixture of red and blue inks or paints will produce darkened violets and purples, even though the angular distance separating magenta and cyan is the same as that separating red and blue.