color wheel primary secondary tertiary psd

So I set about manually trying to come up with a color that appeared to my eye to be halfway between red and yellow. The color appears to be correct, but not its brightness. But it is too dark, too close to red in tonality than to yellow. Rounding the green value up to 128 (since we can't use fractions), I get the orange tone shown in the old color wheel above. Averaging these numbers together, I get a middle orange tone of (255, 127.5, 0). Our red value is equal to (255, 0, 0), while our yellow value is (255, 255, 0). So the tertiary color between red and yellow will be orange. The tertiary colors are halfway between adjacent primary and secondary colors. As it so happens, the average color number ought to be 127.5, but since fractions are not possible when using Photoshop in 8-bit mode, we get either 127 or 128 but this is close enough.Ĭlick here for an overview of the RGB color system. By default, Photoshop will average all these colors together to gray. When we mix these colors together, we get a neutral gray color. The opponent color to red is cyan, which we get by setting R=0 and G and B both equal to 255, and this is the brightest and most saturated cyan we can represent in our system.

Setting R=255, with G and B both equal to 0, we will get the brightest and most saturated pure red that can be represented by the sRGB color system. We are looking for the brightest colors we can as our primaries. There is hardly any differentiation between the green colors. Orange appears to be closer in brightness to red, being much darker than yellow, and likewise sky blue looks darker than it ought to be. The primary colors of red, green, and blue are opposed to the secondary colors of cyan, magenta, and yellow, and if you mix these opposed colors in Photoshop you will indeed get a neutral gray. The primary and secondary color relationships shown here are correct.

Color wheel primary secondary tertiary psd