The web is a very colorful place, but color doesn't start with the web.
It starts in your eye.

We don't see stuff. We see the light that came from that stuff and flew into our eye. Our lens and cornea focus that light onto a "screen" at the back of our eye, called the retina. Our retina is coated with millions of cells, each coated in a chemical that changes when light hits it. Here's where the color comes in. Some of those cells respond most when hit with certain red light, some with green light, and some with blue-ish purple light. Check out the picture to the right. The higher the hump, the more sensitive some cells are to that light.

What does this have to do with color on the web? Well, our eyes left us a really neat loophole, letting us trick ourselves into seeing different colors. We don't really see colors, really. Our brain simply compares the chemicals on those three types of cells in our eye. If the blue is going nuts, but the red and green aren't doing much, then our brain "sees" blue light. If we see something red, the blue cells probably aren't changing, but the red cells are sending big signals to our brain.

So what if we look at something yellow? Look at the picture to the right, and you can see that yellow is on the green and red humps, meaning our red and green cells are signalling our brain. How does our brain interpret red and green together? It must be yellow!

ColorMixer

But here's the cool part: we can fake our brain out. What if I show you red light and green light at the same time? No yellow at all. What do you see? Yellow of course! Your brain can't tell the difference. So the web, along with computers, tv's, movies, and anything that wants to show you colors by making light, really only needs three colors: red, green, and blue! Don't believe it? Try it yourself!

Slide these sliders around to mix red, green and blue light, and see what your eyes see.

Still don't believe it? Okay, this may sound silly, but SNEEZE ON YOUR SCREEN! It'll make tiny magnifying glasses right up against the screen. You can use a good magnifying glass too. Try different colors, and see what colors are REALLY there if you look closely. You may be surprised! It may look something like this.

On the web, programmers use a number shorthand to write how bright Red, Green, and Blue should be. If they want red to be off, they'll say 00. But programmers are funny. They wanted to fit more numbers into fewer spaces, so instead of counting 0123456789, they count 0123456789ABCDEF. So A is 10 and F is 16. It's called Hexadecimal (meaning 16) counting.

Try it yourself. Drag the red slider, and watch the "web color code" change. Then try the blue slider. Get a feel for how colors mix. You can write any color using only six letters!

Are you a color mixing master? Then check out this fun (and rather addictive) game. It's like tetris, but instead of combining shapes, you combine colors to eliminate falling shapes. Click here to Try Color Box

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