I always learned “ROYGBIV” as the colors of the rainbow. Red, orange, yellow, blue, indigo, violet.
What’s up with the last two? Isn’t indigo basically just dark blue? Why is it violet and not purple? Can’t it just be “ROYGBP”?
I always learned “ROYGBIV” as the colors of the rainbow. Red, orange, yellow, blue, indigo, violet.
What’s up with the last two? Isn’t indigo basically just dark blue? Why is it violet and not purple? Can’t it just be “ROYGBP”?
The rainbow is white light that has been split into its component parts. So the only colors that appear on the rainbow are made from a single wavelength. The missing shades of purples are made from a mixture of both high and low frequency light.
RGB color is a fair approximation of human color vision. Your screen’s Red, Green, and Blue, components are designed to match the 3 cone cells of the human eye.
If you compare a real rainbow to the RGB rainbow in the color picker in your favorite graphics software, you’ll likely notice extra colors. Unlike a real rainbow, the RGB rainbow has shades after blue, and it comes back around to red. Real rainbows do not do this.
That’s because purple, and magenta and fuchsia and other similar shades are made from both high and low frequency light. Therefore they cannot appear on the rainbow.