Talk:Complementary colors

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Help!!!

There are some fundamental problems with this article. Primary colors do not allow us to form the full range of human perceivable colors. Take a look at gamut and also Google it and you should be able to find that the gamut of a trichromatic TV or computer screen is far from the entire range of possible colors. The discussion of primary colors as a means of forming a color gamut doesn't belong in an article on complimentary color in the first place. Primary colors are only relevant to complementary colors from a historical standpoint where, for example, certain primaries/secondaries were picked for painting, etc. But from a color science standpoint, any color has a complementary such that when the two are added they will form gray (or the color of the illuminant in a subtractive system). It's irrelevant which colors are primaries.

If you want to understand primaries, the true authority is the CIE. Again, you will have to go outside of Wikipedia to get a thorough understanding of this topic. The short answer is that the only way to get the full gamut of human perceivable colors with three primaries is to make your primaries imaginary colors (or allow subtraction of colors in an otherwise additive system).

If this makes your brain hurt, you're not alone. I don't really feel completely authoritative on all this either. I will try to complete a complementary wavelength article to go with the dominant wavelength article when I have time (not for a while I'm afraid). This should cover complementary color except for the historical stuff, which we can keep here.

I'm really sorry to just complain and not help fix things, but I just don't have the time right now and thought I'd better at least point out the problems as I saw them. --Chinasaur 08:43, 4 Oct 2004 (UTC)

I agree with you on the inappropriateness of referring to the primary and secondary colours in this article, so I did your dirty work for you and deleted the references. I am looking forward to your article on complementary wavelengths. :-) --Heron 11:50, 4 Oct 2004 (UTC)

It should be recognised that here is a theoretical and a practical approach. The practical approach is based on the three types of colour receptors - cones - in the human eye: red, green and blue. This is the origin of primary colours. Thus it makes perfect sense to use them.

TV screens are three-chromatic for the above reason. As to the imperfect colour reproduction, it is not a limitation of the three-chromatic approach but was a technical problem. Engineers couldn't make a better phosphorus, later LEDs. The quality was limited by the technology. Yes, the still current sRGB is poor with it's 16 million colours. However, current digital movie cameras have 16 bit/channel colour resolution IE:2.814749767×10¹⁴ - 281 trillion - colours. This is important during the editing but not for the end product. A DLP cinema projector is offering 35.2 trillion colours. More than enough to exceed the limitation of the human eye - about ten times.

Now the author of the article needs to decide how to combine/separate/discuss theory vs practicality. Naturally, neither are right or wrong. Just different. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 115.70.29.185 (talk) 03:25, 4 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Creative arts

What are complementary colours 102.221.220.128 (talk) 16:44, 22 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]