Color Wheel

My eyes, my eyes! Why do I see so many colors?!?!

To understand color, we must first understand light. Light is made up of electromagnetic energy waves which are grouped into what is called a spectrum. As these waves vary, so does our perception of color of the object that the light waves bounced off of. The wavelengths are not colored but rather, produce the sensation of color to our eyes.

Our eyes can only detect a small portion of the electromagnetic energy spectrum.  When Reeko was just a kid, he had a special pair of goggles that let him see additional wavelengths but they were taken away from him after an incident in the girls' locker room (long story, we'll discuss it later).

We call the wavelengths that we can detect with our eyes, the visible light spectrum. At one end of the spectrum, the lowest wavelengths, we can see the color blue.  At the other end of the visible spectrum are the longer wavelengths of light we see as red. All the other colors we can see in nature are found somewhere along the spectrum between blue and red. Beyond the limits at each end of the visible spectrum are the short wavelengths of ultraviolet light and X-rays (remember Reeko's special goggles mentioned above) and the long wavelengths of infrared radiation and radio waves, which are not visible to the human eye.

If we laid the entire visible spectrum out flat and divided it into thirds, the predominant colors would be red, green, and blue. These three colors are considered the primary colors of the visible light spectrum. Primary colors can be arranged in a circle, commonly referred to as a color wheel. Red, green and blue (RGB) form a triangle shapes on the color wheel. The color wheel below is an example.

How computers display colors

Television and computer monitors create and show all colors using the three primary colors of light (red, green, and blue). Each pixel on a monitor screen starts out as black. If only the red phosphor is lit up, the color of the pixel appears as red.  If both the red and blue phosphors are lit up, the color appears as purple (red and blue make purple).  When the red, green and blue phosphors of a pixel are all illuminated at the same, that pixel becomes white. This phenomenon is called additive color.  Computer programmers use various combinations of these three colors to make all sorts of colors in the games that you run.

Computer programmers, the geeks that make the programs that run on our computers, represent colors in their programming languages as “RGB” values (or Red, Green, Blue). Computers split the range of each primary color into 255 different pieces so that lite red can be represented as #1 and dark (pure) red can be represented as #255. The same goes for the green and blue colors. They then mix these three colors, and their degree of intensity, together to form all the colors in between. For instance, a very bright purple color would be represented as Red-255, Green-0, Blue-255.  The color white which is all three primary colors mixed together is represented by Green-255, Red-255, and Blue-255. Black, the absence of color, would be represented as 0,0,0. Computers use hexadecimal numbers to represent these as a shorthand method. a shorthand method.

In the color wheel below, hover over the different colors and watch the Red, Green, and Blue number values change. The equivalent hexadecimal value is displayed on top (i.e. Hex FF,FF,FF is the same as 255,255,255).