The primary subtractive colors, magenta, cyan, and yellow, are of paramount importance to the color printing and photography industry. These colors can be combined to form the millions of print colors. Equal parts of the three primary subtractives yields the color black.

The default opening condition of this tutorial has three colored circles (magenta, cyan, and yellow) bouncing randomly around. Use the "manual" button to suspend their motion. Next, use the mouse cursor to drag the circles over one another to produce the primary additive colors and black.

Questions or comments? Send us an email.

© 1995-2022 by Michael W. Davidson, Kirill I. Tchourioukanov, and The Florida State University. All Rights Reserved. No images, graphics, software, scripts, or applets may be reproduced or used in any manner without permission from the copyright holders. Use of this website means you agree to the Legal Terms and Conditions set forth by the owners.

This website is maintained by our
Graphics & Web Programming Team
in collaboration with Optical Microscopy at the
National High Magnetic Field Laboratory.

Last modification: Thursday, May 19, 2016 at 09:03 AM

Access Count Since December 24, 1999: 69194

Visit the websites of our partners in education: