Color Me!

That cyan would show up as the complement to pure red does appesr a bit shocking

to Christmas card affectionados. Wrong color! It shouldn't; cyan light has spectrum 

properties like any other and is visible to us. But we have chosen to define color for 

Graphics with RGB for Web and CMYK(cyan, magenta, yellow, black) for printing. 

Red, blue and green are obvious enough. When one adds colors to a light source, it

becomes more powerful to eventually appear white. When one mixes inks of various

colors, the product darkens to eventually become (near) black.

Human vision picks up only a small fraction of the electromagnetic spectrum. But

we see light itself mainy through what it allows us to see as reflection. Under a white

light, an object that appears blue has absorbed the longer wavelengths and is 'cool';

one that appears yellow or even red doesn't show the more powerful shortwave blues

and is 'hot'... and might even be fire!

So both color models have their uses. RGB moves in one direcion, toward the shorter 

wave pole. CMYK can cojoin the two ends, as different wavelengths can hit an object 

at the same time. We can work from a color wheel, or see the two systems as moving

from one to the other through their complements.

Mix red and blue light rgb(0, 255, 255) and the result is yellow. Mix magenta

and cyan ink and the result will be blue!!

...visible light occupies only one-thousandth of a percent of the spectrum.

source: HowStuffWorks

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Big plans for tomorrow:

Downloaded the tree from Sketchpad; it's vector art that can

be downloaded with a transparent background if one saves the

icon while it is in chosen mode!!