Chapter 3. Color Essentials: What Makes a Color

People have many different ways of thinking about, talking about, and working with color, but there’s a notion that comes up again and again—that we can create any color by combining three primary colors. Art directors may feel comfortable specifying color changes with the terms hue, lightness, and saturation. Those who came to color through the computer may be more at home with levels of RGB. Scientists think about color in all sorts of strange ways, including CIE Lab, HSB, and LCH. And dyed-in-the-wool prepress folks think in CMYK dot percentages.

Although Photoshop tries to accommodate all these ways of thinking about color, many Photoshop users find themselves locked into seeing color in only ...

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