My friends and I have be quarreling about which of these is correct:
BLACK is the absence of color
WHITE is the absence of color
BLACK is the product of all colors
WHITE produces all colors.
I think what the difference is whether you are talking about light or just artist colors…any idea how to resolve this. I know this is probably easy for you but I need a surefire answer to shut them all up.
Well, you failed to put this in Great Debates, the way you said you would. But, I allow as how you put it in the correct Forum, so, for now, it stays.
samclem Moderator, General Questions
White is the product of all colors. Black is the abscence of all color.
This applies only to light. Artistic pigmentation is a different beast.
I suppose by “light”, you mean additive color, and by “artist colors”, you mean subtractive color.
Additive mixing (light): black is the absence of colour, white is all colours.
Subtractive mixing (paint, ink etc.): black is all colours, white is an absence of colour.
That’s pretty simplistic, but it’ll do.
It depends, as everyone has said, if you’re talking about light (different colors for different wavelengths) or pigments (different wavelengths of light absorbed and reflected - the reflected wavelengths are the ones your eye detects).
BLACK is the absence of light of any wavelength.
WHITE is the presense of light of all visible wavelengths.
BLACK is produced by the product of all pigments, or of enough pigments to absorb nearly all light that hits it.
WHITE is produced by the (near) absence of pigment, causing nearly all light that hits it to reflect.
When mixing paint or other pigments, black is the presence of all colors. This is subtractive color.
When mixing light (like on your monitor or TV), white is the presence of all colors. This is additive color
To make things more difficult, each of those has a different set of primary colors. Basically, what you learned in kindergarten is, uh, highly simplified.
If you really want to get picky, you could also define white as equal amounts of pure Red, Blue, and Green. Unlike the ear, the eye doesn’t do a spectral analysis on the information presented to it. In other words, it’s visually impossible to distinguish equal amounts of RGB from a continuous spectrum, whereas listening to 3 pure tones spread across the audible spectrum doesn’t sound anything like ‘white’ noise - the eye only has 3 different types of color sensors, whereas the ear has discrete sensors for all audible frequencies.
You don’t need RGB or even three primaries. There are millions of ways to combine two or more pure wavelengths to get what looks like white light to the human eye. We use RGB for video monitors because its covers a decent subset of the full color gamut, but for the purposes of creating white light other primaries can work just as well. This is how fluorescent lights work.