Ah, but the argument that it formed from said that a lighter or darker shade was formed by adding black or white to the mix, so green plus blue(note, no percentages nor are there indications that it is an even mix) is still cyan, point, as originally intended, still stands. And to Timothy, one of the areas I work around is a print shop, they make sure they have full spectrum flourescent lighting over their print area to make certain that their colors actually match up to what they want. Standard flourescent lighting can cause some mixups. -----Original Message----- From: icehouse-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:icehouse-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Carl Worth Sent: Friday, September 07, 2007 9:43 AM To: Icehouse Discussion List Subject: [Icehouse] A geeky ramble on "cyan" and "green plus blue" On Fri, 07 Sep 2007 01:43:14 -0700, Scott Sulzer wrote: > Then again, people are calling cyan a lighter version of blue when it is, in > fact, a combination of blue and green, A quick note here. I'm definitely in the "light blue" crowd. I've just never understood how the current pyramid color could be officially title "cyan" when to me it looks nothing like what I understand the color cyan to be. So, now I just checked with wikipedia and my confusion became quite clear: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyan The cyan I learned, (from a computer graphics background), wikipedia calls "electric cyan", "web color aqua", "electrical blue". This is a secondary color in an additive color system with red, green, and blue primaries, (it is 100% green + 100% blue). That's the cyan I've always known and loved. Meanwhile, there's another color there called "process cyan", "pigment cyan", or "printer's cyan" which is a primary color in the subtractive CMY system used for printing. And indeed _this_ color, (meaning, the particular RGB formulation that wikipedia demonstrates), does look very much like a "cyan" pyramid from Xeno set I have here. So now at least I understand where the pyramid color name comes from, (I'd really always been baffled that it was named "cyan" rather than "light blue"). To me, I would never have named a pyramid as "cyan" unless it looked to me like the additive secondary color shown on the wikipedia page. And I do feel a little smug and justified in my pre-conceived notion now. "Cyan" as used as a name for the subtractive primary color makes it a perfectly legitimate name for the current pyramid color. But it's not all that accurate to call it "green plus blue". It's a primary color, not obtainable by any mixing in the subtractive system that gives it its name. And, if you do form this color from an additive RGB color system it wouldn't be with an even mix of green plus blue. It would be something more like 70% green plus 92% blue, (again using the particular formulation quoted on the wikipedia page). > lighter shade of red. Both of which work to make the entire light/dark > arguments moot, canceling the entire line of thought as well as this > argument, true? I don't think so. Given the actual colors of the currently available plastic, I think "light blue" and "dark blue" could be argued convincingly from a single "grand unified theory of pyramid color schemes". It's the official names of "blue" and "cyan" that are harder to reconcile, but those names themselves might be hard to justify from a single color system. So maybe that was meaningless to everyone else. But I for one, am no longer going to feel guilty about calling these pyramids "light blue" instead of "cyan". And again, this might just be my computer graphics background that has wired my brain to think in terms of additive RGB. -Carl