I think don't even understand the point of the author.
For one, I learnt in school that the primary colours where red, green and blue, and later that the substractive primary colours where cyan, magenta and yellow. So nothing different from the RGB/CMYK colour wheels everyone uses.
Second, well nobody will ever be able to create all colours from mixing red, yellow and blue, plain and simple. Unless your red is actually magenta and your blue is actually cyan.
At this point, you have just created a colour picker that uses cyan, magenta and yellow with no easy way to change lightness (without the K scale, you will have to manually change every colour level to match the global lightness you want).
But his implementation has a brightness slider and uses "real" red instead of magenta, and "real" blue instead of cyan, which makes it a BMYK color wheel, and which prevents it from reproducing all colours. Even just setting brightness to the minimum gives a dark brown instead of black, because he's mixing colors from different models.
> For one, I learnt in school that the primary colours where red, green and blue, and later that the substractive primary colours where cyan, magenta and yellow. So nothing different from the RGB/CMYK colour wheels everyone uses.
I thought I was going insane for a moment, because (though it's been years) I swore I was taught the same thing. Perhaps it's an artifact of having grown up in a "modern" world where additive and subtractive palettes are important, but thinking back on it, I remember the science classes and the "light experiment" of using different colored flashlights to produce white (from red, green, and blue--though not perfect because of the colors of cellophane used, and kids generally don't care).
While I realize art has a long history (and I appreciate the contributions it has made to society at large), scientific discovery has arguably made more important inroads on the why and how of colors. Interestingly, the Wikipedia article [1] on the subject links to the "four psychological primary colors" [2] of red, green, yellow, and blue. Yes, the RYB model is interesting (at least historically) and important to painters, but even prior to modern science what constituted "primary colors" seems to have been more inclusive than just a three color system.
I don't wish to seem ungrateful: I do appreciate the work the author put into the article (and appreciate the dissemination of the paper linked to on the RYB system), and I admit (not being an artist) that it's difficult for me to understand what seems like fairly superficial complaints relayed through him from his artist friend. It almost seems like it's being dismissive of what we know about our visual physiology for no other reason than "this is how they used to do it."
Interesting nevertheless, but like you, it's difficult for me to see the point: So there's a niche need for artists who don't like the existing color system? Okay, great. Give them what they want and move on.
Maybe a color picker that includes all colors isn't the goal?
When people first start learning digital painting (painting in Photoshop, Gimp, etc), a lot of them draw landscapes with chartreuse grass, because they used the greenest green on the color picker. Artists in other mediums don't usually have this problem, because rarely-useful colors like #00FF00 aren't included in the typical pigment set.
It really depends on your priorities for the use case. Sometimes you want to give as many options as possible, sometimes it's more important to make it really easy to get something that looks ok and hard to accidentally get something overly neon.
I imagine it has to do with how long ago you went to school. I remember learning that red, yellow, and blue were the primary colors, but that was back when TVs were black-and-white.
For me the RYB model just seems more intuitive. It just feels natural that green would be a bluish-yellow. It still seems odd that red and green can be combined at all, much less produce a pure yellow.
> For me the RYB model just seems more intuitive. It just feels natural that green would be a bluish-yellow. It still seems odd that red and green can be combined at all, much less produce a pure yellow.
But that's just what the CMY(K) model says. The CMY(K) model is the meaningful one in everyday life. In actual reality, with human eyes observing physical light filtered by pigments, blue is just cyan with a little magenta in it, and red is just magenta with a little yellow in it. The truth is, in the real world, you will never be able to make cyan or magenta if all you have is yellow, red and blue paint. But you will be able to make red or blue if you have yellow, magenta and cyan paint.
I think this might just be a case of people insisting to use less precise but more familiar names for colours, maybe. Maybe in English "cyan" and "magenta" sound like strange colours while blue and red sound more familiar and comforting. But insisting on using blue instead of cyan actually restricts your ability to draw colours.
The point of the author is basically "I wanted to make a color wheel that mirrors the behavior of the color gamut my friend is used to working with when she uses real-world paints".
So not being able to get the luridly luminous magenta and cyan you can get on a screen is a feature, not a bug.
For one, I learnt in school that the primary colours where red, green and blue, and later that the substractive primary colours where cyan, magenta and yellow. So nothing different from the RGB/CMYK colour wheels everyone uses.
Second, well nobody will ever be able to create all colours from mixing red, yellow and blue, plain and simple. Unless your red is actually magenta and your blue is actually cyan.
At this point, you have just created a colour picker that uses cyan, magenta and yellow with no easy way to change lightness (without the K scale, you will have to manually change every colour level to match the global lightness you want).
But his implementation has a brightness slider and uses "real" red instead of magenta, and "real" blue instead of cyan, which makes it a BMYK color wheel, and which prevents it from reproducing all colours. Even just setting brightness to the minimum gives a dark brown instead of black, because he's mixing colors from different models.