Week 7 Page 5: RGB Color Wheel

Colors on the Wheel

On the RGB color wheel all the colors have been categorized based on their relationships to the primary colors: red, green and blue.

Secondary colors are mixes of any two adjacent primary colors.

• Red and green make yellow
• Red and blue make magenta
• Green and blue make cyan. 

Tertiary colors are interspersed between the primary and secondary colors.

Here's an image that clearly demonstrates the different levels of color from a tutorial by Owen James at Tutorial 9 Links to an external site.:
 

So why are we so interested in naming these different colors? The main reason is that there are guidelines for combining specific categories of colors. Some colors will harmonize better than others and their relationships on the color wheel might indicate how compatible they are.