Color Wheel

color wheel with primary additive and subtractive colors
The primary colors of light (and of photographic and many computer processes) are red, green, and blue. A combination of all three is white, and the absence of all three is black. White minus red is cyan; cyan is the complement of red, because red plus cyan equals white. Magenta is the complement of green, and yellow is the complement of blue. Below is the same color wheel, but showing intermediate colors as well.
continuous-variation color wheel

This page Copyright © 1997, 2000 by Curtis Clark. Last revision Friday, August 04, 2000.