like if you wanted to mix paint to get a color from a computer would you do the opposite of what the RGB value is? I’m confused
like if I wanted to take the RBG code R:99, G: 66, B, 33 wouldn’t it look more lightful than if I mixed paint into 1 part blue, 2 part green, 3 part red? how would you paint a color code?
This is a common misconception, but it has nothing to do with imperfections in the pigments. The real issue is that you don’t want each of your primaries to block a full third of the visible spectrum—you want each to block a narrow band of frequencies that overlaps as little as possible with the sensitivity curves of the other cone cells in your eyes, in order to produce fully-saturated colors. The tradeoff is that intermediate frequencies aren’t blocked by any of the primaries, which is why we need to add black.
You are right, but I felt like that kind of gets a little too far out of an easy-to-explain model, and decided to kind of push that off into the stuff I said I was going to gloss over because colors are weird
I suppose it’s sort of more like the pigments are intentionally imperfect to compensate for the also imperfect way that our eyes pick up colors that aren’t exactly red/green/blue
EDIT: Or perhaps from a certain point of view the pigments are more perfect than our eyes are. The point is the whole system is pretty wonky, a bunch of happy evolutionary accidents happened that allowed our ancestors to be better able to tell what fruit was ripe and spot predators, and at some point we also invented art, computers, monitors, and inkjet printers, and all we have to look at them with are some squishy orbs in our skull meant to spot berries and lions.