How are colors produced?

Color is the visual effect of light through eyes, brain and our life experience. People's perception of color is not only determined by the physical properties of light, for example, people's perception of color is often affected by the surrounding colors. Sometimes people also refer to the physical characteristics of different colors produced by substances as colors directly.

The wavelength and intensity of electromagnetic waves can be very different. In the wavelength range that people can feel (about 3 12.30nm ~ 745.40nm), it is called visible light, and sometimes it is simply called light.

If we list the intensities of various wavelengths of a light source together, we can get the spectrum of this light source. The spectrum of an object determines its optical characteristics, including its color. Different spectra can be received by people as the same color.

Extended data:

classify

1. Primary colors: The basic colors that cannot be decomposed are called primary colors. Primary colors can be synthesized into other colors, and other colors cannot be restored to their original colors. There are only three primary colors, the three primary colors of color light are red, green and blue, and the three primary colors of pigment are magenta (bright rose red), yellow and blue (lake blue). The three primary colors of color light can synthesize all colors and stack them together to get white light.

2. Intermediate color: an intermediate color made by mixing two primary colors. There are only three intermediate colors: magenta, yellow and cyan (lake blue), which are called "complementary colors" in some color photography books, referring to the complementary relationship on the color circle. The three primary colors of pigments, namely orange, green and purple, are also called secondary colors. It must be pointed out that the three colors of color and light are precisely the three primary colors of pigments.

3. Multicolor: Two intermediate colors or the primary colors of a pigment and their corresponding intermediate colors (red and green, yellow and purple, blue and orange) are mixed to get a composite color, also known as the third color. Composite color contains all the primary color components, but the proportion of each primary color is not equal, thus forming different tones such as red gray, yellow gray and green gray (not listed here).

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