A visualization of additive color mixing. Adjust the slider. The lower you make the slider, the more yellow the red and green looks.
There are two types of mixing – additive and subtractive. Subtractive is more familiar to us. It is when an object absorbs most colors but not all. The primary colors are red, yellow, and blue. For example, red objects absorb all but red light. The red light reflects off. If the light enters our eyes, it looks red. If light bounces off a red object, then a yellow object, only orange light, which contains some of both, is not absorbed and may end up entering our eyes. This is why mixing red and yellow makes orange. Additive mixing occurs when light sources mix. The primary colors are red, green, and blue. For example, a green light gives off green light. If that light enters our eyes, we see it as green. If a red light and a green light are close enough to each other that our brain interprets it as one color, we see yellow. Movie screens, for example, use this type of mixing. This is an example of additive mixing.
