Skip to main content
Physics

You are not logged in. Your edit will be placed in a queue until it is peer reviewed.

We welcome edits that make the post easier to understand and more valuable for readers. Because community members review edits, please try to make the post substantially better than how you found it, for example, by fixing grammar or adding additional resources and hyperlinks.

7
  • 7
    $\begingroup$ What is not immediately obvious, is that one paint reflects one color, another reflects another, so shouldn't a mix of paints reflect all colors, resulting in white? $\endgroup$
    – LLlAMnYP
    Commented Sep 13, 2018 at 10:25
  • 10
    $\begingroup$ @LLlAMnYP Good point, and it's almost what happens. If you could plot a spectrum of the reflected light, it would be almost perfectly balanced. But the thing is, so much energy is absorbed by the paint that it barely reflects enough power at all. A very dim white light is just gray (i.e. black). $\endgroup$
    – Gabriel Golfetti
    Commented Sep 13, 2018 at 10:33
  • 11
    $\begingroup$ You can get both. If you are mixing paints, then what one doesn't aborb, another one does (so they just take away incrementally from the same light until nothing is left). But if you put pixels of different colors side by side, you get halftone printing, and you see average colour, which is the same hue, but brighter because none of the dots absorbs it all. However one has to be careful about mixing and black colour: the subtractive mixing model breaks down at high concentrations - it's no longer linear, and you usually get brownish tone. $\endgroup$
    – orion
    Commented Sep 13, 2018 at 13:23
  • $\begingroup$ "Mixing light does result in white, but this happens due to how paint works." - how does the way paint works affect mixing of light? Is there a typo there? $\endgroup$
    – npostavs
    Commented Sep 13, 2018 at 21:15
  • $\begingroup$ @npostavs oops, right. Not really a typo, just poor sentence structure. $\endgroup$
    – Gabriel Golfetti
    Commented Sep 13, 2018 at 21:31