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Two different light spectra which have the same effect on the three color receptors in the human eye will be perceived as the same color. This is exemplified by the white light that is emitted by fluorescent lamps, which typically has a spectrum consisting of a few narrow bands, while daylight has a continuous spectrum. The human eye cannot tell the difference between such light spectra just by looking into the light source, although reflected colors from objects can look different.
Similarly, most human color perceptions can be generated by a mixture of three colors called primaries. This is used to reproduce color scenes in photography, printing, television, and other media.
No mixture of colors, though, can produce a fully pure color perceived as completely identical to a spectral color, although one can get very close for the longer wavelengths, where the chromaticity diagram below has a nearly straight edge. For example, mixing green light (530 nm) and blue light (460 nm) produces cyan light that is slightly desaturated, because response of the red color receptor would be greater to the green and blue light in the mixture than it would be to a pure cyan light at 485 nm that has the same intensity as the mixture of blue and green.
Because of this, and because the primaries in color reproduction systems generally are not pure themselves, the colors reproduced are never perfectly saturated colors, and so spectral colors cannot be matched exactly. However, natural scenes rarely contain fully saturated colors, thus such scenes can usually be approximated well by these systems. The range of colors that can be reproduced with a given color reproduction system is called the gamut. The CIE chromaticity diagram can be used to describe the gamut.
Another problem with color reproduction systems is connected with the acquisition devices, like cameras or scanners. The characteristics of the color sensors in the devices are often very far from the characteristics of the receptors in the human eye. In effect, acquisition of colors that have some special, often very "jagged", spectra caused for example by unusual lighting of the photographed scene can be relatively poor.
Species that have color receptors different from humans, e. g. birds that may have four receptors, can differentiate some colors that look the same to a human. In such cases, a color reproduction system `tuned' to a human with normal color vision may give very inaccurate results for the other observers.
When producing a color print or painting a surface, the applied paint changes the surface; if the surface is then illuminated with white light (which consists of equal intensities of all visible wavelengths), the reflected light will have a spectrum corresponding to the desired color.
Media that transmit light (such as television) use additive color mixing with primary colors of red, green, and blue, each of which stimulates one of the three types of the eye's color receptors with as little stimulation as possible of the other two. This is called " RGB" color space—see also RGB color model. Mixtures of light of these primary colors cover a large part of the human color space and thus produce a large part of human color experiences. This is why color television sets or color computer monitors need only produce mixtures of red, green and blue light.
Other primary colors could in principle be used, but with red, green and blue the largest portion of the human color space can be captured. Unfortunately there is no exact consensus as to what loci in the chromaticity diagram the red, green, and blue colors should have, so the same RGB values can give rise to slightly different colors on different screens.
It is possible to achieve a large range of colors seen by humans by combining cyan, magenta, and yellow transparent dyes/inks on a white substrate. These are the subtractive primary colors. Often a fourth black is added to improve reproduction of some dark colors. This is called "CMY" or " CMYK" color space.
The cyan ink will reflect all but the red light, the yellow ink will reflect all but the blue light and the magenta ink will reflect all but the green light. This is because cyan light is an equal mixture of green and blue, yellow is an equal mixture of red and green, and magenta light is an equal mixture of red and blue.
The RGB and CMYK color spaces are most useful for technical reproduction of color scenes. A color space used in computer graphics that more closely models the human experience is the HSV color space which arranges colors in a cylinder, somewhat similar to the CIE-xyz space discussed above. The cross-section of the cylinder is a color wheel, but instead of pure spectral colors, the edge consists of additive mixtures of red, green, and blue. In the HSV color space, every color is specified by its hue (position on the circle), saturation (distance from the circle's center) and value (luminosity). The basic idea of the HSV color space was already used by 19th century physiologist Ewald Hering, although the modern definition dates from the 1970s. The HSV color space is also sometimes referred to as the HSB (hue-saturation-brightness) color space.
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