A color triangle is an arrangement of colors within a triangle, based on the additive or subtractive combination of three primary colors at its corners.
An additive color space defined by three primary colors has a chromaticity gamut that is a color triangle, when the amounts of the primaries are constrained to be nonnegative.[1][2]
Before the theory of additive color was proposed by Thomas Young and further developed by James Clerk Maxwell and Hermann von Helmholtz, triangles were also used to organize colors, for example around a system of red, yellow, and blue primary colors.[3]
After the development of the CIE system, color triangles were used as chromaticity diagrams, including briefly with the trilinear coordinates representing the chromaticity values.[4] Since the sum of the three chromaticity values has a fixed value, it suffices to depict only two of the three values, using Cartesian co-ordinates. In the modern x,y diagram, the large triangle bounded by the imaginary primaries X, Y, and Z has corners (1,0), (0,1), and (0,0), respectively; color triangles with real primaries are often shown within this space.
- ^ Arun N. Netravali; G. Haskell (1995). Digital Pictures: Representation, Compression, and Standards (second ed.). Springer. ISBN 0-306-42195-X.
- ^ Werner Backhaus, Reinhold Kliegl and John Simon Werner (1998). Color Vision: Perspectives from Different Disciplines. Walter de Gruyter. ISBN 3-11-015431-5.
- ^ Sarah Lowengard (2008). The Creation of Color in Eighteenth-Century Europe. Columbia University Press. ISBN 978-0-231-12454-6.
- ^ Judd, Deane B. (January 1935). "A Maxwell Triangle Yielding Uniform Chromaticity Scales". JOSA. 25 (1): 24–35. doi:10.1364/JOSA.25.000024.