Timeline for Why does paint mix to produce black, but light mix to produce white?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
11 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Sep 14, 2018 at 15:12 | vote | accept | Zirc | ||
| Sep 13, 2018 at 23:11 | comment | added | Gabriel Golfetti | @peterh as I've mentioned in a comment, we're approximating gray to black. Gray is just very dim white, and black is even dimmer white. | |
| Sep 13, 2018 at 22:45 | comment | added | peterh | Once as a child I mixed all my paints. I've got a gray color, not a black one. | |
| Sep 13, 2018 at 21:32 | history | edited | Gabriel Golfetti | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
added 22 characters in body
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| Sep 13, 2018 at 21:31 | comment | added | Gabriel Golfetti | @npostavs oops, right. Not really a typo, just poor sentence structure. | |
| Sep 13, 2018 at 21:15 | comment | added | npostavs | "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? | |
| Sep 13, 2018 at 13:23 | comment | added | orion | 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. | |
| Sep 13, 2018 at 10:33 | comment | added | Gabriel Golfetti | @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). | |
| Sep 13, 2018 at 10:25 | comment | added | LLlAMnYP | 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? | |
| Sep 13, 2018 at 2:50 | vote | accept | Zirc | ||
| Sep 14, 2018 at 15:05 | |||||
| Sep 13, 2018 at 0:39 | history | answered | Gabriel Golfetti | CC BY-SA 4.0 |