Color
From DmWiki
1 a : a phenomenon of light (as red, brown, pink, or gray) or visual perception that enables one to differentiate otherwise identical objects b : the aspect of objects and light sources that may be described in terms of hue, lightness, and saturation for objects and hue, brightness, and saturation for light sources c : a hue as contrasted with black, white, or gray.
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Different views on color
Ghoethe
Since Newton's discovery of the light spectrum not a lot of people have questioned it's correctness. In his book "Zur Farbenlehre" or "Colortheory", Goethe takes a highly critical position on the, even at his time, widely accepted theory of the colors. Some of his criticism can maybe be attributed to his poetic view upon the world. The matter of the fact though is that he truthfully believed Newton's concept of colors to be flawed.
Ghoete's research on the topic was much more focused on the actual perception of color and hence the more or less color circle from his book, takes into account the complementarity of colors, which Newton's work totally neglected. While Newton concentrated on color as an phenomenon of light Goethe strived for a much deeper understanding of color. To him the major aspect of color was not it's wavelength but the effect it has when perceived by a human being.
Newton
Newton is of course famous for his refraction experiments, using prisms, which showed that white light is made up of all the colors of the spectrum. Newton's theory is strictly physically based and lacked the artistical nuances of Ghoete's aproach.
Color Modells
The powerful dialectic between these two views on the phenomenon of color lends itself well to explain the two major ideas behind color modells used in rendering and image manipulation today. Newton's way of thinking can be found in any color model that is additive, like RGB. Since white light is made up of the color's in the spectrum in such color models white is at the upper end of the spectrum. In that respect it is easy to understand the term additive color model.
Goethe's color theory on the other hand is behind another type of color model which is called substractive. CMYK is the most commonly known subtractive model. Usually subtractive models are used in printing and design, since instead of adding colors up to form white light, here color is applied to to a medium (like paper). Adding more and more color results in less and less light being reflected and hence when all colors are added up we arrive at black.
RGB
RGB is the standard color format for display devices. The reason why the entire spectrum of visisble colors can be reproduced from only red, green and blue light is that the human eye is only sensitive to light of those wavelengths. Often an additional alpha component is added to the model to account for opacity of a surface.
CMYK
HSV
HSL
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