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The Color Musings
Additive Mixture
Subtractive Mixture
Complementary Colors
Primary Colors
Hue, Value, Chroma
Predicting Color Mixtures
Young's 3-color Theory
A 3-color System
Land's 2-color System
Mind-Blower
James Clerk Maxwell
Thomas Young
Hermann von Helmholtz
Edwin H. Land
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Color Homepage
Blue and Yellow Don't Make Green
The Physics and Physiology
of Color and Color Vision
How do humans see color?
What happens at the retina, and in the visual cortex that allows us to see as many as a million discrete colors? Three of the greatest physicists of the nineteenth century postulated answers to such questions.
These giants of classical color theory were James Clerk Maxwell, Thomas Young, and Hermann von Helmholtz.
In the 1950s, Edwin Land, inventor of the Polaroid camera, discovered some fascinating properties of color vision that raise questions Maxwell, Young, and Helmholtz never imagined
Visit this great web-site:
A History of Photography
by Dr. Robert Leggat MA M.Ed FRPS FRSA
© J. C. Adamson, 1997
Your first grade teacher didn't lie to you about primary colors. But she only knew a bit of the truth.
Young's lucky guess led us to the science of color reproduction. Did it also lead us to a century and a half of misunderstanding?
Did Maxwell know he couldn't photograph red and green? Why should we care?
Can Land's discoveries explain Maxwell's demonstration?
Color reproduction starts by analyzing red, green and blue light. Your eyes work differently.
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Three great philosophers paved our way. Let's not be sheep on the road they built.
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