CMU School of Drama


Wednesday, September 18, 2019

Relevé Spot - the world of additive color mixing

blog.etcconnect.com: We’ve mentioned additive color mixing time and time again, but what do we really mean and how is it different than subtractive mixing? To help demonstrate what happens with additive and subtractive mixing systems, we asked our advanced research group and our industrial design team here at ETC to help us out.

2 comments:

Dean Thordarson said...

The concept of color mixing in general has always been interesting to me. From first learning how to mix colored paints in preschool, combining two colors together to get a new completely different, yet vaguely reminiscent color, has always piqued my curiosity. As I grew up and learned more about light and colored light, I was fascinated how the primary colors were no longer red, yellow, and blue, but rather red, green and blue. I never really paid any mind to how using a gel to achieve a color quite literally subtracts the unwanted wavelengths and thus results in a much dimmer overall brightness. I have always just imagined that plain incandescent light plus gel equals color, but in reality, the gel is actually subtracting the unwanted wavelengths to achieve the desired color. Now that this is a conscious thought floating around my mind, it is much more clear why RGB+ LED fixtures are so desireable, as all these colors can be made without the loss of brightness from a conventional gel.

Alexa Janoschka said...

I LOVE COLOR MIXING and everything that has to do with the differences in subtractive and additive. I wish that we could add pictures to our comments because I got to play with Phillips Showline LEDs and I got to experiment with color mixing and it was very interesting. I have never played with an ETC LED fixture (I have hung them but never used them in a show) but ETC added Lime to their color mixing (most brands with have RGBW) but they discovered that adding lime gives a fixture a wider range of possible colors. I also watched a video about why ETC added lime to their color mixing and that was fascinating (it's on their youtube page). I would love to be able to experiment with some of ETCs moving fixtures because I know that the company is working out the kinks. I love learning everything our freshman year but at the same time articles about lighting just make me want to learn about everything and focus on what I'm interested in.