It was to be another few decades, however, before the difference between colours was correctly understood, enabling a more precise distinction between colour mixtures. Coloured light is mixed additively, to use the modern term. The additive mixture of red and green will, for example, result in yellow. Violet-blue together with green will give cyan. Two colours which additively neutralise each other and combine to form white are called complementary colours.
Coloured pigments have an effect that is very different to coloured light.
The subtractive mixture of a yellow and a violet-blue pigment will not result in white, but black. Here, we can point to a few distinctions which have traditionally always been blurred. To ignore them will always lead to confusion. In other words, the corresponding subtractive colours will be cyan magenta and yellow. This is not a typographical error.