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From: winalski@psw.enet.dec.com (Paul S. Winalski)
Newsgroups: sci.bio
Subject: Re: Primary colors in human color vision
Message-ID: <1991Apr13.204343.22648@hollie.rdg.dec.com>
Date: 13 Apr 91 20:43:43 GMT
References: <00945FE5.1F9B5480@aclcb.purdue.edu> <15410001@hp-and.HP.COM>
Sender: news@hollie.rdg.dec.com (Mr News)
Reply-To: winalski@psw.enet.dec.com (Paul S. Winalski)
Organization: Digital Equipment Corporation
Lines: 24

In article <15410001@hp-and.HP.COM>,
panek@hp-and.HP.COM (Jon Panek) writes:
|>During all this talk about additive and subtractive color primaries,
|>people have been overlooking a subtle but important point.  While it
|>is true (I believe) that the additive primaries are red, green and
|>blue, a more accurate nomenclature for the subtractive primaries are
|>magenta, cyan and yellow.
|>
|>Folklore has it that the aforementioned Dr. Land would call up the
|>CEO of Crayola on an annual basis, slightly before Christmas.  He
|>demanded that Crayola include in its crayon sets three crayons which
|>were accurate primaries.  He claimed that children in elementary
|>schools were being misled when told that "mixing red and yellow
|>gives you orange", or "mixing blue and yellow give you green".  Each
|>year the CEO replied that no, the subtractive primaries hadn't been
|>included.

Perhaps Dr. Land had stricter definitions for "green" and "orange"
than the layman's use of those color terms.  Anyway, mixing red and
yellow crayola colors, poster paints, or inks *does* yield a mixture
whose color is a shade of orange, and mixing blue and yellow *does* give
you a shade of green.  This is trivially verifiable by experimentation.

--PSW