Colors in Photoshop Part 01 Artistic color wheel

Before starting color wheel it is important to understand what are colors?
Colors are nothing but the result of the spectrum of light as it is reflected or absorbed, as received by the human eye and processed by the human brain.

5.1 Artistic color wheel

This color wheel is a great tool for creating colorful design or an art work. All color schemes used in a design are based on this color wheel. A artistic color wheel is based on red, yellow and blue which are traditional primary colors in painting medium. Sir Isaac Newton developed the first circular diagram of colors in 1666.

An artistic color wheel can be basically bifurcated as primary colors,Secondary Colors and Tertiary colors.

Primary color + Secondary Color + Tertiary color = Artistic color wheel.

5.1.1 Primary Colors

Sir Isaac Newton color wheel starts off with 3 primary colors, red, yellow and blue. These three colors cannot be created by mixing any colors however by mixings these 3 primary colors we can get millions of colors Refer to Figure 5.1.

Figure 5.1 Primary color

5.1.2 Secondary Colors

When we mix two adjacent primary colors in the artistic wheel in equal proportions we would get our secondary colors.

• Red color + Blue color = Violet Color
• Blue color + Yellow color = Green Color
• Yellow color + Red color = Orange color

Secondary Colors are- Orange, Violet and Green Refer to Figure 5.2 secondary color.

 Figure 5.2 Secondary color

5.1.3 Tertiary Colors

To create tertiary colors we ned to mix one primary color with the adjacent secondary color in equal proportions (Figure 5.3 Tertiary colors).

Yellow color + Orange color = Yellow Orange color

• Orange color + Red color = Orange Red color
• Red color + Violet color = Red Voilet color
• Violet color + Blue color = Violet Blue color
• Blue color + Green color = Blue Green color
• Green color + Yellow color = Green Yellow color

Figure 5.3 Tertiary colors

We get the final artistic color wheel with primary, secondary and tertiary colors Refer to Figure 5.4

Figure 5.4 Final artistic color wheel

In Artistic color wheel, when the 3 artistic primary colors (RYB) are mixed in equal proportions the end result is black. Black is not a true color as per the color wheel thus the mixing of RYB in equal proportion is called subtractive color mixing.