Ask anyone about the three primary colors and they’ll say: red, blue, and yellow. They’ll also say that all other colors are created by mixing these three colors in certain proportions.

But now, open up your desktop printer and you’ll see something quite different. Besides black there are three colors of ink which, when combined, produce all others: cyan, magenta, and yellow. So this is a different set of three colors which are ‘primary,’ yet still generate a color wheel containing all the other colors. So what does the ‘primary‘ designation really mean? More