RGB basics - combining colours

Red, Green, Blue: these colours correspond to the three "guns" in a colour cathode ray tube used in monitors and to the colour receptors in the human eye. The other colours can be created with these three basic colours as shown in the image above. This way combines the colours as light, and hence the resulting colours are not the same as what you would expect to get when combining colour pigments. To give an example:

If you combine all three RGB colours as light, you will get white light as a result (as you can see in the centre of the image). But if you would combine all three basic pigments (say, paint) red, blue, yellow together, you would get black as a result.

Next, you can test producing different colours by combining the basic Red, Green and Blue colours and viewing the result. To do this, you need to download the following simple applet onto your PC and try it out.

Colour Selector.exe

Keep the Color Selector applet open at your desktop during the whole time of this module to have a quick access to RGB values and their output!

Use the Colour selector to perform the exercise on the Next Page!

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