Talk:Complementary colors

message: I tried to make the orthography of the article consistent.  There were mostly "colour"s but some "color"s.  But the article is named "color" so I changed it that way.  If a great majority of people working on this article are British and have trouble remembering the American spelling, we might want to consider a move to Complementary colour, but otherwise I think this is the easiest solution.  --Chinasaur 18:15, 4 Oct 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Americanize 

message: Changelog: 
*I explained the function of additive complementary pairs.
*Gray is (literally) a shade of white; changed "shade of gray" to "shade of white".
*RGB section ended up being adupe of additive section; I removed it and will copy the formula from it to the additive section at a later date, with a better example than black and white.
*Looking at a chart is not a good way of remembering... Some might consider this cheating.
I'm still not pleased with the complementary subtractive section.  I don't think purple and yellow or red and green pigments will combine to produce the illuminant color. But it's 2:25am and I get up in 6 hours  for work so, another time. Ayeroxor 06:27, Jun 23, 2005 (UTC)
:Yes, sorry, I think the "color of the illuminant" was something of a red herring for this discussion.  Sorry because I think I put that in at some point.  I think the current article is now at least roughly accurate, but not very readable.  Hopefully more color science people and artists will help correct technical errors while lay people can make it things more readable in WP's iterative process from here.  --Chinasaur 22:20, 28 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I'm taking those color pairs back out.  Could you justify including them?  They don't make much sense to me and I doubt they have much formal validity in color science.  They are more relevant to CMKY printing than anything else I can think of.  --Chinasaur 09:21, 18 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: They make a lot of sense to most people :o) There is very strong empirical evidence that the three primaries and the three secondaries form the main concepts by which colour perception in general is ordered; certainly RGB sensors are the main components of the sensory apparatus. It is thus useful to order them in complementary pairs and mention them explicitly, the more so because it is very common to do so and we as an encyclopedia must reflect this social practice. It is not our place to endorse or condemn. However we might add that the value of this ordering in colour science is very limited. Of its "formal validity" I know little; but a material validity is present ;o)--MWAK 12:31, 25 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Cleaning, explaining, clarifying... 

message: If you think about it, there should be a shade of grey that when inverted, will produce the same colour (ie; it is exactly halfway between black and white). Does anyone know what its hex is equal to, and if so, could you add it to the article as a piece of trivia?Tuck99 04:21, 25 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: The closest you can come, in a typical 8-bit space, is 127 or 128, which are inverse of each other.  It's too trivial to be worth a mention. Dicklyon 05:06, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

text: I'd say it depends on what you mean by "inverted", and on factors like amount of ambient light, etc.  “Complementary” usually just refers to hues, in my experience, not even really to particular colors. --jacobolus (t) 22:19, 10 August 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Grey 

message: The article currently claims:
In the RGB color model (and derived models such as HSV), primary colors and secondary colors are paired in this way: Red and green, yellow and purple, blue and orange.
With all the people obviously knowing the differences between the various color wheels and theories, how can something as commonly known as the RGB color model and it's complementary colors still be wrongly described? In the RGB color model, red is the opposite of cyan, green is opposite of purple and blue is opposite of yellow. The first image in this article even confirms this. Unless anyone can justify why the piece of text I just quoted is correct, I'll edit the above text. JoaCHIP (talk) 18:39, 1 March 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Simply wrong 

message: I noticed that a few professional sports teams, such as the Mets, Knicks and Islanders (blue & orange), along with the Lakers (purple & gold), use complimentary colors as their primary colors. Is that relevant information? Mr. Brain (talk) 04:09, 4 May 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Complimentary colors used by various professional sports teams.  

message: Some editors are removing large swaths of this article and replacing material with unsourced information and conjecture.  Perhaps before making further dramatic changes, the issue should be discussed here. Taroaldo (talk) 19:23, 18 July 2010 (UTC)
thread_title: Recent Edits

message: I just removed a clarification needed tag from afterimages, as i think it was pretty clear how the afterimage is formed. I added a bit more clarification just to make it more clear.Larryisgood (talk) 16:41, 26 January 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Afterimages 

message: Colored shadow redirects to this article, but the term is not explained, here. Shouldn`t that be changed?! --Hans Dunkelberg (talk) 08:45, 3 July 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  The term "colored shadow" 

message: It is a grave heresy, unless we essentially redefine "red" with a deviation towards magenta and "green" with a deviation towards cyan. Which sources speak about this and what exactly they say? Incnis Mrsi (talk) 10:48, 19 January 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: Well, we should look at it this way: under the Wikipedia NPOV rule we must try to give an exposition of both systems: the traditional one and the scientific one. We give them due weight by indeed saying that the one is scientific and the other traditional and mention the latter last. Of course reality is a bit more complicated as is shown by works as those of Mr Whelan who take a sort of "in between" position: they take a traditional colour wheel and then squeeze in cyan and (not very saturated) magenta somewhere. That makes such "systems" severely incoherent but that doesn't matter much as they are not even popular science books: they are just popular. They aim at giving the reader a happy colour experience and perhaps help him a bit in decorating his house (should the poor man try to actually mix paint according to the precepts he is in for a very unhappy surprise, obviously). Such books cannot be used as serious references.--MWAK (talk) 09:28, 21 January 2013 (UTC)

text: Do you want to say that a painter’s red and green can be mixed (in appropriate proportion) to produce something perceived nearly as a neutral grey? Incnis Mrsi (talk) 04:57, 8 June 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: I probably wouldn't go that far; they'd probably make a muddy brownish color, like this guy shows.  But they're still considered complementary in that system, and if you used a red slightly on the magenta side and a green toward the cyan side a little, as you note, they might make a neutral mix.  If you mix appropriate amounts of the three primaries red, yellow, and blue, you should be able to make a neutral; the relative amounts of blue and yellow in that mix will be a green of sorts, no?  Of course, it does depend on what the absorption spectra of those primaries look like.  Here's a page where red and green paints mix to make a fairly neutral blackish color.  Dicklyon (talk) 05:15, 8 June 2013 (UTC)
replies: text:  I agree that a non-spectral (i.e. without a dominant wavelength) “red” and a non-standard wave-shortened “green” (something like emerald) can be perceptually complementary. So named (ironically) Natural Color System really makes namely this choice. But it has no sense (except for making linguistic constructions) to draw a triangle (or hexagon, or rhombus) diagrams and to label vertices and midpoints with some words like “red”, “yellow”, “green”, and “blue”, without specifying their meaning. Is RYB color model presented in a more intelligent way by B.M.Whelan s and most Wikipedians? One can draw an arbitrary color triangle (such as yellow–blue–black), make custom “secondary color” definitions (such as white=yellow+blue, brown=yellow+black), and then say that blue and brown are complementary in the YBK color model. Incnis Mrsi (talk) 06:04, 8 June 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  red and green 

message: I spent 4 days without Internet, and today surprisingly see all references to them disappeared from the article. It is not good. Incnis Mrsi (talk) 13:10, 3 June 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: Why were they removed?  I think you need to work more slowly and carefully.  Dicklyon (talk) 05:17, 8 June 2013 (UTC)

text: Incnis, you, too.  I now see that in this edit  you added an unsourced assertion that the widespread concepts of complementarity in the RYB system are just wrong.  You don't get to decide that.  I always revert unsourced assertions of errors and confusions when I see them, and I'm sorry I missed this.  It is not WP:NPOV.  We need to respect and fairly represent even those color systems that predate the more colorimetrically accurate concepts.  Dicklyon (talk) 05:26, 8 June 2013 (UTC)
replies: text:  When I edited the article, the only reference was Theory of Colours (van Gogh’s perverse Café was absent at the time), and Goethe did not write a Whelanian crap, he actually examined and researched the perception. Theory of Colours does not describe the complementary of green as “red”. Maybe van Gogh did, but Goethe did not. Incnis Mrsi (talk) 06:15, 8 June 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  [[Johann Wolfgang von Goethe]] and [[Theory of Colours|his theory]] 

message: Theoretically it is true, as rules for mixing differ, but actually (not terminologically) this difference is tiny. The citation intended to suggest (although it does not explicated) that van Gogh was right with his red–green “complementarity” but in his (pigment) system. No, he was not, and this pair was likely a misconception appeared somewhere in 19th-century.
There is almost no difference between RGB’s and pigments’ complementaries in actual colors (not names). The case with orange: actually, the same color, but referred to as “blue” (except in heraldry) historically and as “azure” since 20th century. These words were nearly synonymous and diverged with establishment of modern color terminology in mid-20th century. Just look at the “blue” of van Gogh’s paints.
The complementary of yellow, nowadays called the (color wheel) blue, was historically known as indigo: read the latter article to find a citation. It has no big difference with violet, which Goethe named as yellow’s complementary. BTW, Goethe’s “violet” is hardly different from (modern) “indigo”. Goethe did not make a noticeable error with these two pairs.
Finally, subtractive complementary to red is known to be cyan, never green. So, “RYB complementaries” are a misconception having little to do with any (either physiological or pigment mixing) color process. But the article retouches this consideration down. Incnis Mrsi (talk) 20:24, 8 June 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: The traditional role of red and green as complements in the RYB system that painters use is probably more related to a color opponent process than to the idea that complements mix to give a neutral.  Either that or the colors that they call Red and Green are a bit off from what we call red and green in the RGB system.  But trying to explain the traditional RYB system in terms of modern colorimetry and the RGB system is a bit of a losing game in my opinion.  Let it stand on its  own and you'll be less bothered by it.  Dicklyon (talk) 01:34, 9 June 2013 (UTC)
replies: text:  A bit off, really? Get van Gogh and check whether he used a-bit-offed NCS so-named “red“ (actually crimson) and ”green” (actually emerald), or standard (both RGB and CMYK) ones. Incnis Mrsi (talk) 03:37, 9 June 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: I wouldn't know how to get a hold of him.  Dicklyon (talk) 04:51, 9 June 2013 (UTC)

text: BTW commons:Category:Le Café de nuit shows a great divergence in colors: one photo even shows an unambiguous cyan instead of ”green”. It’s not good. Incnis Mrsi (talk) 06:52, 9 June 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  additive colors and subtractive colors… operate by different rules, and [have] different primary and complementary colors 

message: Can we please come up with a better image for the top of this article?   The picture of the pilot flying blind is confusing and adds no information at all about complementary colors. Most people who come to this article simply want to know what colors are complementary.  I believe we need a color wheel or chart that shows people the complementary colors.   Thank you!  SiefkinDR (talk) 13:45, 9 June 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Needs a better lead image, please  

message: What are complementary colours 102.221.220.128 (talk) 16:44, 22 June 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  Creative arts