Colour

Pigment Colours - Classification (Used in fine arts and drawings and mainly used for physical works)

Additive colour mixing {Used in computer screening and graphics and mostly used for digital purposes}

Subtractive colour mixing {Used in computer screening and graphics and mostly used for digital purposes}

Colour (British English and Commonwealth English) or color (American English) is a property of light.

The following are the most common colour names:

• Red
• Orange
• Yellow
• Green
• Cyan
• Blue
• Magenta
• Purple
• Lavender
• Lilac
• White
• Black
• Grey
• Silver
• Pink
• Maroon
• Brown
• Beige
• Tan
• Peach
• Lime
• Olive
• Turquoise
• Teal
• Navy blue
• Indigo
• Violet

Primary colours can be mixed to make other colours. Red, yellow, and blue are the three traditional primary colours. The primary colours for television screens and computer monitors are red, green and blue. Printers and paints use magenta, yellow, and cyan as their primary colours; they may also use black. Sometimes this set of colours is simply called red, yellow, and blue.

People who can not see colours or have a distorted sense of colour are called colour-blind. Most colour-blind people are male.

Colours are sometimes added to food. Food colouring is used to colour food, but some foods have natural colourings, like beta carotene.

When something has no colour, it is called transparent. An example is air.

The science of colour is sometimes called chromatics, colourimetry, or simply colour science.

A translucent material is not the same as a colourless material because it can still have a colour, such as stained glass.

Colour Media

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  Colouring pencils

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  The visible spectrum perceived from 390 to 710 nm wavelength

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  The upper disk and the lower disk have exactly the same objective color, and are in identical gray surroundings; based on context differences, humans perceive the squares as having different reflectances, and may interpret the colors as different color categories; see checker shadow illusion

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  Normalized typical human cone cell responses (S, M, and L types) to monochromatic spectral stimuli

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  The visual dorsal stream (green) and ventral stream (purple) are shown; the ventral stream is responsible for color perception

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  Additive color mixing: combining red and green yields yellow; combining all three primary colors together yields white

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  Subtractive color mixing: combining yellow and magenta yields red; combining all three primary colors together yields black

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  Twelve main pigment colors

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  Spectrum of a color-optimal reflective material. There is no known material with these properties, they are, for what we know, only theoretical

• The visible gamut plotted within the CIELUV color space using D65 whitepoint. u and v are the horizontal axes; L is the vertical axis.

Related pages

• Colour vision
• List of colors