Learning to Color

I come from a fine artist's background and learned about color by applying it to paint. I had my crayon set and yellow plus blue made green. This is because painting is a subtractive color set based on pigments. The chemicals used in creating the paint would react with each other when mixed and create green. You start with a white canvas and add colors until you get black. CMYK works in the same way. Cyan, Magenta, and Yellow are pigments that are mixed to create darker colors (black is also used, but only to reduce the need of having to mix CMY all of the time).

CMYK (subtractive color) pigment based

cyan (00ffff)

magenta (ff00ff)

yellow (ffff00)

black (000000)

By default, photoshop, your computer monitor, and HTML files use RGB. RGB is an additive color set that is based on mixing light instead of pigments. Your monitor starts with black and adds different spectrums of light until you get white. In RGB the three primary colors are Red, Green, and Blue.

RGB (additive color) light based

red (ff0000)

green (00ff00)

blue (0000ff)

white (ffffff)

Because RGB is based on light it has a much wider gamut of colors than pigment based color sets. In fact, all of the colors in CMYK are also in RGB (the reverse is not true). This means that Hex is unique in the sense that it is really has both RGB and CMYK.

I know, if you go to any other website and read any other description of Hex color they will tell you that Hex color is just RGB, they don't even mention CMYK. From a mathematical standpoint, they are absolutely right. Your browser converts Hex code into RGB and then into binary and BAM! You've got color. However, I submit that as a designer this isn't the best way to "think" about color when you are working with Hex color.

Let me explain; people generally think of things linearly, from one end to another. White to black. Which, will work in Hex code if you slowly add equal amounts of color into Red, Green, and Blue. In the sample below I do just that. going from 000000 to ffffff works because you are just dealing with value. But, hue doesn't work in a straight line, it works in a big circle. That is why we have the color "wheel" and not the color "line".

more:

http://www.colourlovers.com/blog/2007/06/30/ultimate-html-color-hex-code-list/