Download Colours - Spectrum Consultancy Services

Web Design and Marketing
Colours
We learnt at school that the primary colours are red, yellow and blue, and this is true for
painting.
When working with computers the primary colours are red, green and blue. Why is this?
Red paint is red because it absorbs all other colours of the spectrum apart from red, the
red light is reflected which is why the paint appears red. The same is true of a red object
or for that matter an object painted red!
A Cathode Ray Tube (CRT) screen such as a standard monitor or a television screen
works in a different way. Such devices contain three guns a red, a green and a blue
one. It creates colour by mixing the light emitted from each of the guns.
In order for a computer to ‘understand’ a colour it needs to know what is referred to as
the red, green, blue (RGB) values. If for instance you ask the graphic designer of your
company logo for the RGB values of the colours used in the logo they should be able to
provide them.
The values range from 0 to 255 for each colour component and are quoted in the
sequence red, green blue.
So for instance:
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(255,0,0) is red
(0,255,0) is green
(255,255,0) is yellow.
It is important to understand how this works as ultimately the computer can only
understand colour in these terms.
However there are more ‘user friendly’ ways of creating the colours you need.
In FrontPage you can:
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Right click in the middle of your page in ‘Normal’ view
Left click ‘Page Properties’
Left click ‘Background’
Left click ‘Background Color’
Left click ‘More Colors’
Left click ‘Custom Colors’
Here you can add customer colours to your document either by entering values directly
or by using the colour selector. Once your colour has been created you should note
down the RGB value so that you can duplicate it again exactly rather than relying on an
eye match.
© Mark Cooper 2004
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