Because light doesn’t work like the fingerpaints you used as a child. Think of a blue paint: it reflects blue to your eyes, but sucks up other colors. Pigments are like a filter. As you add more filters, pretty soon all colors are absorbed and none are reflected, so it appears black. Light mixes color.
Yellow and blue with lights work different than yellow and blue with ink… but anyway they can still make green if you make the blue more greenish (“cyan” like THIS)
More experiments:
I made an image with 3 parts - first is red/cyan, next is green/magenta and third is blue/yellow…
When I view it at 100% zoom it looks kind of red, green and blue…
I made a version that is 200% of the size, with no interpolation…
It seems like red/cyan, red/cyan then black/white…
Even at 200% zoom with my head faraway it looks like that…
then moving my head closer I see the blue/yellow…
it takes longer to notice that one part is green/magenta rather than red/cyan…
On my other monitor it basically looks gray then red/cyan, red/cyan and black/white when zoomed in…
Pure yellow pigment and pure blue pigment do make green pigment. But computer monitors aren’t pigments.
Could the flickering be because your monitor can’t display that many colours? (8 bit panel or something)
It only flickers in the native resolution - for lower resolutions there is no flickering. I’m guessing that it involves the type of interference that they prevented in the new iPad retina display.
No flickering but I do see lines. I have a 50 in. plasma 1080p over HDMI input.
Pure blue pigment absorbs ALL red and green light. Pure yellow pigment absorbs ALL blue light… so you end up with all light being absorbed, resulting in black.
See the right side:
Where the blue part and the yellow part there is black.
I did auto color adjust on that LCD monitor and now it looks gray like the other monitor…
BTW I made a video of what that gray image looks like while it does auto color adjustments… notice that the background image doesn’t seem to change at all…
The image changes for me depending on how far I zoom in.
0 - thin vertical stripes of alternating dark/ light gray.
1 - the light gray stripes are wider, and have a column of little dark dots
2 - a checkerboard pattern, yellow squares with blue dots, and blue squares with yellow dots
3 - vertical stripes of several shades of grey, not much contrast between the shades.
4 - the same, but now has some faint horizontal lines. This could be what the OP is seeing.
5 - back to the checkerboard, but the squares are much larger. This time it’s a 6[sup]1[/sup]/[sup]2[/sup] by 4[sup]1[/sup]/[sup]2[/sup] grid
6 - alternate dark grey/ light grey dots. Flickers a bit. Four very faint vertical lines, and a few even fainter horizontal ones.
7 - can see the yellow and blue pixels, except that some pixels are larger, and some are smaller.
8, 9, 10 - same as 7, but easier to see.
11 - blue and yellow squares, no longer seem to be different sizes.
Interesting effect, I wonder what causes it.
WAG: but, our eyes aren’t very good at seeing blue-yellow, which might be related to the required closer distance.
Here’s an image of two normal, non-color blind persons’ retinas (the colors are are fake and added post-imaging, but show which cone each is). The first image is the same person as the second. We have fewer blue cones and as a result (and due to other chicken-or-egg factors) the resolution is poorer. Caveat: the RGB that our cones like best are not the same RGB that computers show or even what we would name RGB, e.g. the blue is more purple. But the monitor ones are close enough.
not only do i get flickering at max zoom, when i crossed my eyes a picture of a hippopotamus appeared. i’ll go lie down for awhile.
Here I printed over the same sheet of paper - the top one is with photo quality printing and no color correction. The bottom is normal quality.
The blue is dark but it is as pure blue as I could make it… if it was lighter it would have some green or red in it.
It looks like when combined there is some green but it is very dark green… unlike the bright green you can get mixing cyan and yellow.
It could be argued that white paint could be added to it to brighten it up but that would create desaturated grayish green…
Yeah the resolution for blue vision would be lower… BTW I can move forward and backward and there is a rough threshold where it changes from black/white to blue/yellow…
http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/vision/rodcone.html
Maybe due to the increased red cones, it initially seems like the green/magenta is also red/cyan… (green/magenta is close in color to cyan/red).
I linked to the image but not to one of the papers (Roorda & Williams, I think). the R:G or L:M ratio varies from IIRC 3:1 R:G to more green than red. There seem to be no behavioral differences between any ratio, though. It’s likely that any differing ratios are “known” by the visual system and compensated accordingly. That link, click “response curves” and it mentions that, as well as further in that blue sensitive cones are completely absent in the center of the visual field. Yet we don’t need to look to the side to sense blue.
I don’t think it actually flickers, I think it’s just an optical illusion along the same lines as this.
Exactly. Your monitor uses Additive Color, while paint/ink/pigment uses Subtractive Color.
I see a small grey dot (not uniform) pattern. I have to zoom quite a bit to see the blue/yellow pixels.
If you see flickering, then something isn’t right. You’re using the wrong software to zoom or you have poor hardware.