Everything about Color Triangle totally explained
A
color triangle is an arrangement of
colors within a
triangle, based on the
additive combination of three
primary colors at its corners.
An additive
color space defined by three primary colors has a
chromaticity gamut that's a color triangle, when the amounts of the primaries are constrained to be nonnegative.
Before the theory of additive color was proposed by
Thomas Young and further developed by
James Clerk Maxwell and
Hermann von Helmholtz, triangles were also used to organize colors, for example around a system of
red, yellow, and blue primary colors.
After the development of the
CIE system, color triangles were used as chromaticity diagrams, including briefly with the
trilinear coordinates representing the chromaticity values. Since the sum of the three chromaticity values has a fixed value, it suffices to depict only two of the three values, using Cartesian co-ordinates. In the modern
x,y diagram, the large triangle bounded by the imaginary primaries X, Y, and Z has corners (1,0), (1,0), and (0,0), respectively; color triangles with real primaries are often shown within this space.
Maxwell's disc
Maxwell was intrigued by
James David Forbes's use of color
tops. By rapidly spinning the top, Forbes created the illusion of a single color that was a mixture of the primaries:
vermilion (V),
emerald (EG), and
ultramarine (U).
Initially, he compared the color he observed on the spinning top with a paper of different color, in order to find a match. Later, he mounted a pair of papers,
snow white (SW) and
ivory black (Bk), in an inner circle, thereby creating shades of gray. By adjusting the ratio of primaries, he matched the observed gray of the inner wheel, for example:
To determine the chromaticity of an arbitrary color, he replaced one of the primaries with a sample of the test color and adjusted the ratios until he found a match. For
pale chrome (PC) he found
. Next, he rearranged the equation to express the test color (PC, in this example) in terms of the primaries.
This would be the precursor to the
color matching functions of the
CIE 1931 color space, whose chromaticity diagram is shown above.
Image:Color top 1895.png|Drawing of Maxwell's color top
Image:YoungJamesClerkMaxwell.jpg|Maxwell with his wheel
Image:Maxwell color Triangle Luckiesh 1921.png|Maxwell's color triangle
Image:Fick color triangle.png|A color triangle attributed to Fick in 1892, based on imaginary primaries corresponding to the three primary sensations of the human eye. In such a triangle, all real colors fall within the curved outline defined by the "pure sensations".
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