The Additive Primary Hues

Human beings are trichromats.  The human color vision system is based on three types of cone cells each sensitive to a different range of wavelengths.  This means we have a three dimensional color space.  Physical colors are not actually three dimensional.  Each of the infinitely many possible wavelength is a different physical color.  Humans sense color according to how strongly each of the three cone types responds to incoming light.  Different mixtures of light wavelengths that produce the same activation of the three cones will look the same color to a human, although physically the light is different.  A spectrometer would reveal that the apparently identical colors  were in fact different.

The three primary additive colors are taken to be Red, Green and Blue because the three cone cells have their strongest response in these areas of the wavelength spectrum.

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• Red
  
• Green
  
• Blue
  

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