Interactive Color Wheel

Before embarking on a lengthy narrative about the color wheel, it is important to understand that there are two distinctly opposite types of color wheel. There is the additive color wheel and there is the subtractive color wheel. There are interactive color wheels based upon each of these two types of color wheel. The additive color wheel deals essentially with colored rays of light and how they mix, whereas the subtractive color wheel shows how we see the mixture of different colored pigments, for example inks and paints. To illustrate this, when the three additive primary colors of red, green and blue are mixed together as rays of light as on a television or computer screen, the combined light beam is white, whereas when the three subtractive primary colors of yellow, cyan and magenta are mixed as pigments on a sheet of paper, they combine to form black.

The advent of the computer age has brought with it the interactive color wheel. This is a most useful aid and it has become an essential tool to the graphic designer and the hi-tech printer. With the click of a mouse button it is possible to choose the exact color needed for a particular project or illustration. The interactive color wheel has become a fully integrated part of all of the best graphic design programs such as Photoshop or Freehand. The early days of computing used to involve complicated code to be written in order to set the color of a particular piece of information technology. Traditionally a color wheel showed three, six or twelve colors, but the electronic color wheel you see on your computer screen will normally show the complete range of colors and is adjustable for color intensity and hue. Today the choice of a color is a mere click of a button away.

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