<p><strong>They don't.</strong></p>

<p>The problem with the diagrams representing the visible and RGB gamuts is that they're presented on RGB displays. They obviously cannot show you what they cannot show you : the area inside the parabola but outside of the triangle.</p>

<p><a href="https://i.sstatic.net/QIpkW.png" rel="noreferrer"><img src="https://i.sstatic.net/QIpkW.png" alt="RGB gamut"></a></p>

<p>The region outside of the triangle cannot be shown on your screen in a faithful way. For example, RGB cannot display a true, deep cyan. All you see is an approximation using green and blue. Some diagrams don't even try and only show a gray area :</p>

<p><a href="https://i.sstatic.net/DGyOe.png" rel="noreferrer"><img src="https://i.sstatic.net/DGyOe.png" alt="enter image description here"></a></p>

<p>To see what cyan can look like, you could stare at the white dot on this drawing for at least 30 seconds (2 minutes are recommended) and then slowly move your head towards a white wall:</p>

<p><a href="https://i.sstatic.net/upswE.jpg" rel="noreferrer"><img src="https://i.sstatic.net/upswE.jpg" alt="cyan illusion"></a></p>

<p>Similarly, RGB displays cannot show deep, saturated oranges or browns.</p>

CC BY-SA 3.0
2017-10-28T12:14:57.297Z
_The region outside of the triangle cannot be shown on your screen._ Well, I can see this region on screen with colors. So how can it be more precisely stated?
mdkdy
CC BY-SA 3.0
2017-10-28T12:28:30.443Z
@narthex: Thanks for the comment. I updated the answer. Is it any better now?
Eric Duminil
CC BY-SA 3.0
2017-10-28T12:39:43.350Z
Ok, thats fine. But what acually the values on each axis mean? This is never explained.
mdkdy
CC BY-SA 3.0
2017-10-28T12:57:57.177Z
@narthex see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIE_1931_color_space#CIE_xy_chromaticity_diagram_and_the_CIE_xyY_color_space
Eric Duminil
CC BY-SA 3.0
2017-10-28T18:33:18.013Z
The problem with CIE colorspace plots is that they are very hard to understand, hell we dont even know if some of the areas in the graph happen to make metamers.  Also the reason why you simply can not make a bigger triangle is not apparent (hint there is nothing outside the shape).
joojaa
CC BY-SA 3.0
2017-10-28T19:24:20.387Z
@joojaa: https://xkcd.com/1882/
Eric Duminil
CC BY-SA 3.0
2017-10-28T19:33:24.810Z
@narthex The screen can show a _diagram_ that _represents_ the CIE color space.  You don't even need a color screen for that:  You can just have text labels "red", "orange"', "yellow",...  What the screen can't show is all of the actual colors that exist in that space.
Solomon Slow
CC BY-SA 3.0
2017-10-29T00:32:15.310Z
Great, now I have a cyan dot in the middle of my vision :-(
Kevin
CC BY-SA 3.0
2017-10-30T05:01:06.800Z
It's worth noting that the CIE 1931 diagrams are somewhat misleading in the sense that the distance between two arbitrary points within it does not correspond to the perceived difference in colour. In other words, the area within and without the sRGB triangle is not representative of the perceived gamut: the difference is not that dramatic. (On the 1931 diagram, sRGB occupies less than half of the area). The 1976 version is much better in this regard.
Zeus
CC BY-SA 3.0
2017-10-28T11:47:04.403Z
2017-10-28T12:27:13.477Z
2017-10-28T12:27:13.477Z
Eric Duminil
<p>Humans are trichromatic, which means we have 3 different kinds of color receptors (better known as <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cone_cell" rel="noreferrer">cone cells</a>), each sensitive to a different set of wavelengths: </p>

<p><a href="https://i.sstatic.net/LucVA.png" rel="noreferrer"><img src="https://i.sstatic.net/LucVA.png" alt="frequency responses of different cone cells"></a><br>
Image source: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Cone-fundamentals-with-srgb-spectrum.svg" rel="noreferrer">wikipedia</a></p>

<p>So it only takes 3 different monochromatic stimuli to fool our eye into thinking it sees a color that is the same as another. Red, green, and blue are good fits to the peaks of the frequency response curves of each type of color receptor.</p>

CC BY-SA 4.0
2019-08-02T02:20:11.820Z
But.. some humans are Tetrachromats :)  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrachromacy
wip
CC BY-SA 3.0
2017-10-27T14:55:16.743Z
2017-10-27T21:56:56.383Z
2017-10-27T21:56:56.383Z
ratchet freak
<p>One more thing: "violet" and "purple" <em>are not the same color.</em>  Violet is a pure color around 400 nm; but purple is a combination of red and blue.  To our not-quite-perfect human eyes they look the same.</p>

<p>If you pass a beam of pure violet through a triangular prism, the light will be bent but not broken up into components.  If you then shine a beam of purple through the same prism, it will be separated into a blue and a red beam, with different amounts of "bend" to them.</p>

CC BY-SA 3.0
2017-10-28T19:38:32.483Z
Depends what you mean by "color."  In many contexts, it makes a lot of sense to say that if nobody can see the difference between two different patches on a surface, then both patches must be the same "color."  On the other hand, when a painter says "color," she or he is talking about the physical substance into which he/she dips a brush.  In that case, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metamerism_(color)#Metameric_failure
Solomon Slow
CC BY-SA 3.0
2017-10-28T21:02:00.480Z
@jameslarge: It really doesn't. Just because they look the same under one light source doesn't mean they'll look the same under a different one, even if both light sources look identical on a white surface.
R.. GitHub STOP HELPING ICE
CC BY-SA 3.0
2017-10-29T05:59:17.800Z
I don't think this answers the question in any way.  It also applies to any colours - not just violet and purple.  Monochromatic light of any hue from red through to violet won't get split by a prism, and any mixed light will get split.
Dawood ibn Kareem
CC BY-SA 3.0
2017-10-28T14:30:44.827Z
2017-10-28T14:30:44.827Z
Jennifer
<p>They don't. Aside from what others have said about the physical reasons not, from a practical computer graphics standpoint, representing either surface pigments or light sources with RGB color is insufficient to model colored lighting of a scene. For example there is no way to represent a material which is translucent or reflective only in a narrow band; you can only represent translucency or reflectivity of wide bands corresponding roughly to what the red, green, and blue cones in the human eye pick up. This actually matters for a lot of real-world colors in the pink/purple/violet family, which look radically different under different types of light, even different "white" light that looks identical when viewed on a white surface.</p>

CC BY-SA 3.0
2017-10-29T09:03:15.753Z
One common example for that is the quasi-monochromatic sodium vapor lamps, which are commonly used for city lamps and look always different in reality than on photos.
Julien Guertault
CC BY-SA 3.0
2017-10-30T02:14:26.250Z
but those are fringe issues, I would consider very advanced. The issue doesn't materialize in most cases, RGB is just a fourier encoding with 3 harmonics of some signal that happens to be enough for most cases.
v.oddou
CC BY-SA 3.0
2017-10-30T02:40:58.363Z
@JulienGuertault: While that's a nice example, I don't think it's quite an example of what my answer is pointing out - as long as your photosensor's/film's responses to the light in its 3 components matches the human eye's well enough, it should faithfully represent what a human would see. Where RGB (or any other model that lumps whole ranges of the frequency spectrum together) is insufficient is for actually modelling surfaces and light sources in a way that you can predict the perceived color of a light on a surface.
R.. GitHub STOP HELPING ICE
CC BY-SA 3.0
2017-10-30T02:52:23.420Z
@v.oddou: "I don't care, it looks good enough" is a reasonable position to take, but there really is a difference. You won't be able to model the way the color of a wall looks different under daylight vs incandescent light vs led light that's supposed to be the same color temp as one or the other.
R.. GitHub STOP HELPING ICE
CC BY-SA 3.0
2017-10-30T03:42:51.897Z
hmm, I might have misunderstood. Do you have a concrete example of the limitation you are referring to?
Julien Guertault
CC BY-SA 3.0
2017-10-30T16:22:51.063Z
I've seen plenty of visual phenomena that *seem to be* examples of what I'm saying, but haven't done experiments or anything to confirm. The canonical example would be something like a narrow-band yellow light source on a material that reflects most light but absorbs a band around the particular yellow of the light source. In an RGB model, the material's color would be close to white (1.0,1.0,1.0), the light's color would be something near (1.0,1.0,0.0), and a rendering would show a yellow-lit surface whereas in reality the surface would be barely-lit.
R.. GitHub STOP HELPING ICE
CC BY-SA 3.0
2017-10-28T21:08:59.327Z
2017-10-28T21:08:59.327Z
R.. GitHub STOP HELPING ICE
<p>Let's reminds ourselves what light is.</p>

<p>Radio waves, micro waves, X rays and gamma rays are all <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_radiation" rel="noreferrer">electromagnetic radiation</a> and they only differ by their frequency. It just so happens that the human eye is able to detect electromagnetic radiation between ~400nm and ~800nm, which we perceive as light. The 400nm end is perceived as violet and the 800nm end is perceived as red, with the colors of the rainbow in between.</p>

<p>A ray of light can be a mix of any of those frequencies, and when light interacts with matter, some frequencies are absorbed while other might not: this is what we perceive as the colors of objects around us. Unlike the ear though, which is able to distinguish between a lot of sound frequencies (we can identify individual notes, voices and instruments when listening to a song), the eye is not able to distinguish every single frequency. It can generally only detect <em>four ranges</em> of frequencies (there are exceptions like daltonism or mutations).</p>

<p>This happens in the retina, where there are several kinds of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photoreceptor_cell" rel="noreferrer">photo-receptors</a>. A first kind, called "<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_cell" rel="noreferrer">rods</a>", detects most frequencies of the visible light, without being able to tell them apart. They are responsible for our perception of brightness.</p>

<p>A second kind of photo-receptors, called "<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cone_cell" rel="noreferrer">cones</a>", exists in three specializations. They detect a narrower range of frequencies, and some of them are more sensitive to the frequencies around red, some to the frequencies around green, and the last ones to the frequencies around blue.</p>

<p>Because they detect a <em>range of frequencies</em>, they cannot tell the difference between two frequencies within that range, and they cannot tell the difference between a monochromatic light and a mix of frequencies within that range either. The visual system only has the inputs from those three detectors and reconstruct a perception of color with them.</p>

<p>For this reason, the eye cannot tell the difference between a white light made of all the frequencies of the visible light, and the simple mix of only red green and blue lights. Thus, with only three colors, we can reconstruct <em>most</em> colors we can see.</p>

<p>By the way, rods are a lot more sensitive than cones, and that's why we don't perceive colors in the night.</p>

CC BY-SA 3.0
2017-10-28T02:20:25.410Z
"Thus, with only three colors, we can reconstruct all the colors we can see." This sentence is incorrect. Starting from three primaries, you can only reconstruct certain colors. The range of colors that can be reconstructed is called the "gamut". You can search for "sRGB gamut" and find pictures that show a triangle inside a larger parabola. The triangle represents the colors that we can make from the sRGB primaries, and the parabola is all the colors we can see. From this it's clear that *any* triangle inside the parabola will be smaller than it.
Dietrich Epp
CC BY-SA 3.0
2017-10-28T07:38:27.817Z
woops, you're right. I've replaced "all" with "most" and will try to think of an explanation for the remaining visible colors.
Julien Guertault
CC BY-SA 3.0
2017-10-28T07:45:14.310Z
Also the concept of white light is governed by our really fancy  white balance system it dont mich matter what the color is it will be precieved as white. Incandescent lightbulbs are orange but if we are inside the house we precieve them as white. As for the extra colors, if you integrate the energies of your color distribution multiplied by curves ratchet freaks show you youll notice that sometimes  you get unique signals because the overlap is different.
joojaa
CC BY-SA 3.0
2017-10-27T15:07:10.777Z
2017-10-28T07:37:20.117Z
2017-10-28T07:37:20.117Z
Julien Guertault
<p>Why do red, green, and blue combinations can make up all the visible colors?</p>

CC BY-SA 3.0
2017-10-27T17:17:54.027Z
what about CMYK?
user3526
CC BY-SA 3.0
2017-10-27T23:12:42.657Z
CMYK is a process by which we can print colors onto a substrate (and a much smaller selection of colors than we can see) but the way we see is RGB.
Gábor
CC BY-SA 3.0
2017-10-28T00:08:27.377Z
They don't make up *all* the colors. They just make up a sufficient range of them that most scenes can be represented with acceptable fidelty.
Peter Green
CC BY-SA 3.0
2017-10-28T02:43:44.590Z
Because humans have red, green and blue receivers in their eyes.
Criticize SE actions means ban
CC BY-SA 3.0
2017-10-28T18:57:16.603Z
This would be better for biology stack exchange (if there is one) because it is more a question about the human visual system than one of computer graphics.
mathreadler
CC BY-SA 3.0
2017-10-28T19:06:34.587Z
@mathreadler https://biology.stackexchange.com
briantist
CC BY-SA 3.0
2017-10-28T19:09:28.190Z
@briantist wow cool, who knew.
mathreadler
CC BY-SA 3.0
2017-10-28T19:18:57.623Z
Good answers here and good answers on Biology.SE will give different perspectives, so I'm glad the question has been asked on both sites.
trichoplax is on Codidact now
CC BY-SA 3.0
2017-10-28T19:29:09.067Z
[Similar/related questions on Biology.SE for comparison](https://biology.stackexchange.com/search?tab=votes&q=red%20green%20blue%20is%3aq)
trichoplax is on Codidact now
CC BY-SA 3.0
2017-10-28T19:53:42.347Z
@mathreadler Actually this is better for [cognitive sciences.se](https://cogsci.stackexchange.com/). More accurately the place that mixes all that's needed. But its fine here as well.
joojaa
CC BY-SA 3.0
2017-10-29T03:53:59.353Z
Apparently there is at least one tetrachromat woman (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrachromacy) that is able to distinguish more colours than those of us who are trichromat.
Bill Bell
CC BY-SA 3.0
2017-10-29T05:54:20.360Z
@immibis that is a gross over-simplification and really quite inaccurate.
Dawood ibn Kareem
CC BY-SA 3.0
2017-10-29T07:51:34.757Z
@BillBell and probably its digital counterpart: [Quattron](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quattron), adding yellow color subpixels on Sharp Aquos LCD TV.
Andrew T.
CC BY-SA 3.0
2017-10-29T16:16:11.667Z
@AndrewT.: I expect that a lot of this is lost on people like me that can't see the difference between 'Saddle Brown' and 'Sienna'. :)
Bill Bell
<color><color-science><color-separation>
Why do red, green, and blue make up all the colors?
Hedayat Mahdipour
# Why do red, green, and blue make up all the colors?

(Asked by: username_0 on 2017-10-27)

Why do red, username_3, and blue combinations can make up all the visible colors?

**Tags:** color, color-science, color-separation

> **Comments:**
> **username_1**: what about CMYK?  
> **username_2**: CMYK is a process by which we can print colors onto a substrate (and a much smaller selection of colors than we can see) but the way we see is RGB.  
> **username_3**: They don't make up *all* the colors. They just make up a sufficient range of them that most scenes can be represented with acceptable fidelty.  
> **username_4**: Because humans have red, username_3 and blue receivers in their eyes.  
> **username_5**: This would be better for biology stack exchange (if there is one) because it is more a question about the human visual system than one of computer graphics.  
> **username_6**: @username_5 https://biology.stackexchange.com  
> **username_5**: @username_6 wow cool, who knew.  
> **username_7**: Good answers here and good answers on Biology.SE will give different perspectives, so I'm glad the question has been asked on both sites.  
> **username_7**: [Similar/related questions on Biology.SE for comparison](https://biology.stackexchange.com/search?tab=votes&q=red%20green%20blue%20is%3aq)  
> **username_8**: @username_5 Actually this is better for [cognitive sciences.se](https://cogsci.stackexchange.com/). More accurately the place that mixes all that's needed. But its fine here as well.  
> **username_9**: Apparently there is at least one tetrachromat woman (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrachromacy) that is able to distinguish more colours than those of us who are trichromat.  
> **username_10**: @immibis that is a gross over-simplification and really quite inaccurate.  
> **username_11**: @username_9 and probably its digital counterpart: [Quattron](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quattron), adding yellow color subpixels on Sharp Aquos LCD TV.  
> **username_9**: @AndrewT.: I expect that a lot of this is lost on people like me that can't see the difference between 'Saddle Brown' and 'Sienna'. :)  

---

## 5 answers

### Answer by username_21 on 2017-10-27. Score: 23 | Accepted answer

Let's reminds ourselves what light is.

Radio waves, micro waves, X rays and gamma rays are all [electromagnetic radiation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_radiation) and they only differ by their frequency. It just so happens that the human eye is able to detect electromagnetic radiation between ~400nm and ~800nm, which we perceive as light. The 400nm end is perceived as violet and the 800nm end is perceived as red, with the colors of the rainbow in between.

A ray of light can be a mix of any of those frequencies, and when light interacts with matter, some frequencies are absorbed while other might not: this is what we perceive as the colors of objects around us. Unlike the ear though, which is able to distinguish between a lot of sound frequencies (we can identify individual notes, voices and instruments when listening to a song), the eye is not able to distinguish every single frequency. It can generally only detect *four ranges* of frequencies (there are exceptions like daltonism or mutations).

This happens in the retina, where there are several kinds of [photo-receptors](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photoreceptor_cell). A first kind, called "[rods](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_cell)", detects most frequencies of the visible light, without being able to tell them apart. They are responsible for our perception of brightness.

A second kind of photo-receptors, called "[cones](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cone_cell)", exists in three specializations. They detect a narrower range of frequencies, and some of them are more sensitive to the frequencies around red, some to the frequencies around username_3, and the last ones to the frequencies around blue.

Because they detect a *range of frequencies*, they cannot tell the difference between two frequencies within that range, and they cannot tell the difference between a monochromatic light and a mix of frequencies within that range either. The visual system only has the inputs from those three detectors and reconstruct a perception of color with them.

For this reason, the eye cannot tell the difference between a white light made of all the frequencies of the visible light, and the simple mix of only red username_3 and blue lights. Thus, with only three colors, we can reconstruct *most* colors we can see.

By the way, rods are a lot more sensitive than cones, and that's why we don't perceive colors in the night.

> **Comments:**
> **username_23**: "Thus, with only three colors, we can reconstruct all the colors we can see." This sentence is incorrect. Starting from three primaries, you can only reconstruct certain colors. The range of colors that can be reconstructed is called the "gamut". You can search for "sRGB gamut" and find pictures that show a triangle inside a larger parabola. The triangle represents the colors that we can make from the sRGB primaries, and the parabola is all the colors we can see. From this it's clear that *any* triangle inside the parabola will be smaller than it.  
> **username_21**: woops, you're right. I've replaced "all" with "most" and will try to think of an explanation for the remaining visible colors.  
> **username_8**: Also the concept of white light is governed by our really fancy  white balance system it dont mich matter what the color is it will be precieved as white. Incandescent lightbulbs are orange but if we are inside the house we precieve them as white. As for the extra colors, if you integrate the energies of your color distribution multiplied by curves username_17 freaks show you youll notice that sometimes  you get unique signals because the overlap is different.  

---

### Answer by username_12 on 2017-10-28. Score: 20

**They don't.**

The problem with the diagrams representing the visible and RGB gamuts is that they're presented on RGB displays. They obviously cannot show you what they cannot show you : the area inside the parabola but outside of the triangle.

[![RGB gamut](https://i.sstatic.net/QIpkW.png)](https://i.sstatic.net/QIpkW.png)

The region outside of the triangle cannot be shown on your screen in a faithful way. For example, RGB cannot display a true, deep cyan. All you see is an approximation using username_3 and blue. Some diagrams don't even try and only show a gray area :

[![enter image description here](https://i.sstatic.net/DGyOe.png)](https://i.sstatic.net/DGyOe.png)

To see what cyan can look like, you could stare at the white dot on this drawing for at least 30 seconds (2 minutes are recommended) and then slowly move your head towards a white wall:

[![cyan illusion](https://i.sstatic.net/upswE.jpg)](https://i.sstatic.net/upswE.jpg)

Similarly, RGB displays cannot show deep, saturated oranges or browns.

> **Comments:**
> **username_13**: _The region outside of the triangle cannot be shown on your screen._ Well, I can see this region on screen with colors. So how can it be more precisely stated?  
> **username_12**: @narthex: Thanks for the comment. I updated the answer. Is it any better now?  
> **username_13**: Ok, thats fine. But what acually the values on each axis mean? This is never explained.  
> **username_12**: @narthex see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIE_1931_color_space#CIE_xy_chromaticity_diagram_and_the_CIE_xyY_color_space  
> **username_8**: The problem with CIE colorspace plots is that they are very hard to understand, hell we dont even know if some of the areas in the graph happen to make metamers.  Also the reason why you simply can not make a bigger triangle is not apparent (hint there is nothing outside the shape).  
> **username_12**: @username_8: https://xkcd.com/1882/  
> **username_14**: @narthex The screen can show a _diagram_ that _represents_ the CIE color space.  You don't even need a color screen for that:  You can just have text labels "red", "orange"', "yellow",...  What the screen can't show is all of the actual colors that exist in that space.  
> **username_15**: Great, now I have a cyan dot in the middle of my vision :-(  
> **username_16**: It's worth noting that the CIE 1931 diagrams are somewhat misleading in the sense that the distance between two arbitrary points within it does not correspond to the perceived difference in colour. In other words, the area within and without the sRGB triangle is not representative of the perceived gamut: the difference is not that dramatic. (On the 1931 diagram, sRGB occupies less than half of the area). The 1976 version is much better in this regard.  

---

### Answer by username_17 on 2017-10-27. Score: 17

Humans are trichromatic, which means we have 3 different kinds of color receptors (better known as [cone cells](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cone_cell)), each sensitive to a different set of wavelengths:

[![frequency responses of different cone cells](https://i.sstatic.net/LucVA.png)](https://i.sstatic.net/LucVA.png)  
Image source: [wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Cone-fundamentals-with-srgb-spectrum.svg)

So it only takes 3 different monochromatic stimuli to fool our eye into thinking it sees a color that is the same as another. Red, username_3, and blue are good fits to the peaks of the frequency response curves of each type of color receptor.

> **Comments:**
> **username_18**: But.. some humans are Tetrachromats :)  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrachromacy  

---

### Answer by username_19 on 2017-10-28. Score: 4

One more thing: "violet" and "purple" *are not the same color.* Violet is a pure color around 400 nm; but purple is a combination of red and blue. To our not-quite-perfect human eyes they look the same.

If you pass a beam of pure violet through a triangular prism, the light will be bent but not broken up into components. If you then shine a beam of purple through the same prism, it will be separated into a blue and a red beam, with different amounts of "bend" to them.

> **Comments:**
> **username_14**: Depends what you mean by "color."  In many contexts, it makes a lot of sense to say that if nobody can see the difference between two different patches on a surface, then both patches must be the same "color."  On the other hand, when a painter says "color," she or he is talking about the physical substance into which he/she dips a brush.  In that case, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metamerism_(color)#Metameric_failure  
> **username_20**: @jameslarge: It really doesn't. Just because they look the same under one light source doesn't mean they'll look the same under a different one, even if both light sources look identical on a white surface.  
> **username_10**: I don't think this answers the question in any way.  It also applies to any colours - not just violet and purple.  Monochromatic light of any hue from red through to violet won't get split by a prism, and any mixed light will get split.  

---

### Answer by username_20 on 2017-10-28. Score: 4

They don't. Aside from what others have said about the physical reasons not, from a practical computer graphics standpoint, representing either surface pigments or light sources with RGB color is insufficient to model colored lighting of a scene. For example there is no way to represent a material which is translucent or reflective only in a narrow band; you can only represent translucency or reflectivity of wide bands corresponding roughly to what the red, username_3, and blue cones in the human eye pick up. This actually matters for a lot of real-world colors in the pink/purple/violet family, which look radically different under different types of light, even different "white" light that looks identical when viewed on a white surface.

> **Comments:**
> **username_21**: One common example for that is the quasi-monochromatic sodium vapor lamps, which are commonly used for city lamps and look always different in reality than on photos.  
> **username_22**: but those are fringe issues, I would consider very advanced. The issue doesn't materialize in most cases, RGB is just a fourier encoding with 3 harmonics of some signal that happens to be enough for most cases.  
> **username_20**: @username_21: While that's a nice example, I don't think it's quite an example of what my answer is pointing out - as long as your photosensor's/film's responses to the light in its 3 components matches the human eye's well enough, it should faithfully represent what a human would see. Where RGB (or any other model that lumps whole ranges of the frequency spectrum together) is insufficient is for actually modelling surfaces and light sources in a way that you can predict the perceived color of a light on a surface.  
> **username_20**: @username_22: "I don't care, it looks good enough" is a reasonable position to take, but there really is a difference. You won't be able to model the way the color of a wall looks different under daylight vs incandescent light vs led light that's supposed to be the same color temp as one or the other.  
> **username_21**: hmm, I might have misunderstood. Do you have a concrete example of the limitation you are referring to?  
> **username_20**: I've seen plenty of visual phenomena that *seem to be* examples of what I'm saying, but haven't done experiments or anything to confirm. The canonical example would be something like a narrow-band yellow light source on a material that reflects most light but absorbs a band around the particular yellow of the light source. In an RGB model, the material's color would be close to white (1.0,1.0,1.0), the light's color would be something near (1.0,1.0,0.0), and a rendering would show a yellow-lit surface whereas in reality the surface would be barely-lit.  

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