40 articles
Additive color
Additive color: creating colors by combining lights, using red, green, and blue primaries as in displays. Formalized by Grassmann's laws and Maxwell's 1855 colorimetry; distinct from subtractive pigment mixing.
Black
Black is the visual perception produced when a surface reflects little or no visible light, an achromatic color with no hue and one extreme of the gray-to-white axis.
Blue-green
Blue-green is a color about midway between blue and green in the spectrum, first recorded in English in 1850 to 1855, with darker shades called teal and lighter ones cyan.
Brown
Brown is a color perceived when an orange- or yellow-toned surface looks dark relative to a brighter surround, unlike any spectral color, with no wavelength of light appearing brown.
Carmine (color)
Carmine, also known as carmine red, is a deep red pigment and colorant obtained from cochineal, dried scale insects, used in foods, cosmetics, textiles, and artists' paints.
CIE 1931 color space
CIE 1931 color space: the XYZ tristimulus system defining color via the 2-degree standard observer from Wright and Guild's matching experiments; basis of all colorimetry, supplemented by the 1964 10-degree observer.
Color
Color is the visual percept arising when light of different spectral compositions stimulates the eye, produced through processing by the visual system's three cone types.
Color difference
Color difference quantifies how far apart two colors appear, via CIELAB Euclidean distance (ΔE*ab) or the CIE's current CIEDE2000 formula, a weighted extension with lightness, chroma, hue, and blue-region corrections used in industry tolerancing.
Color mixing
Color mixing: combining lights (additive, RGB, screens) or pigments (subtractive, CMY(K), printing) to make new colors. Rooted in trichromatic vision; formalized by Newton, Young, Maxwell, and Helmholtz, and standardized by CIE color-matching functions.
Colorfulness
Colorfulness is the attribute of visual perception by which a color appears more or less chromatic, one of the basic attributes of color alongside brightness and hue.
Cyan
Cyan, from the Greek kyanos, is a greenish-blue color evoked by wavelengths of roughly 490 to 520 nm, a subtractive primary in printing whose digital value is #00FFFF.
Gold (color)
Gold is the characteristic yellow color of the metallic element gold, produced by relativistic effects on its electrons, which make it absorb blue light instead of reflecting a silvery white.
HSL and HSV
HSL (hue, saturation, lightness) and HSV/HSB (hue, saturation, value) are 1978 cylindrical rearrangements of RGB for intuitive color picking; hsl() is in CSS, hsv() is not, and both ignore perceived lightness.
Lavender (color)
Lavender is a pale bluish purple color named for the flowers of the lavender plant, recorded as a color term from 1840 and defined in web standards as hex #e6e6fa.
Lists of colors
The lists of colors, also covered as a list of color names, anchor color names to defined values in systems like CSS named colors and the ISCC-NBS dictionary.
Magenta
Magenta, also known as fuchsia or FF00FF, is a non-spectral color with no single matching wavelength, produced by mixing red and blue light; the name comes from the 1859 aniline dye fuchsine.
Maroon
Maroon is a dark brownish red, standardized on the web as the CSS named color maroon, hexadecimal #800000, or rgb(128, 0, 0), meaning half-intensity red.
Mauve
Mauve is a pale purple color ranging between lilac and violet, named from the French word for mallow, and also the dye mauveine discovered in 1856.
Munsell color system
Munsell color system, created by Albert H. Munsell, is a color order system specifying color by hue, value, and chroma (e.g. 7.5YR 5/4); standardized in ASTM D1535 and widely used in soil science.
Orange
Orange is the color between yellow and red on the visible spectrum, produced by light with wavelengths of roughly 590 to 620 nanometers. The name comes from the fruit.
Orange (colour)
Orange is the color between red and yellow in the visible spectrum, with wavelengths of roughly 590 to 625 nanometers, and takes its name from the fruit.
Persistence of vision
Persistence of vision is the traditional theory that an image lingers after its source disappears, long used to explain film and animation but largely refuted by vision research.
Pink
Pink, also known as the pink color, is a non-spectral color: a pale, desaturated red produced by mixtures of light such as red with white, not by any single wavelength.
Purple
Purple is a nonspectral color seen when the eye receives both red and blue-violet light, so no single wavelength looks purple; Tyrian purple dyed ancient royalty.
Rose (color)
Rose is a color name for a pink or pinkish red, named after the flower and used as a noun and an adjective since the early modern period.
ROYGBIV
ROYGBIV (Roy G. Biv) is the mnemonic for the visible spectrum's color order, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet, from Newton's seven-color division in Opticks (1704), longest to shortest wavelength.
RYB color model
The RYB color model is a subtractive color model for mixing painting pigments, built on red, yellow, and blue and taught traditionally in art education.
Secondary color
Secondary color: a color made by mixing two primaries in a color system. RGB secondaries are yellow, cyan, magenta; CMY secondaries are blue, red, green; RYB gives orange, green, purple.
Shades of black
Shades of black, also called off-black, are the distinct materials and formulations that all read as black but differ in composition, opacity, and light absorption.
Shades of brown
Shades of brown are colors perceived as a dark orange or yellow that exists only in contrast with brighter surroundings; no isolated light can look brown.