Are there 8 primary colors?
For any given medium, there are primary colors from which most other colors in that medium can be derived. The nature of those colors is based on the physics and constraints of the medium. In emitted light, and therefore on computer monitors, the three are red, green and blue. In paint, pastel, and most pigment-based media, there’s red, yellow, and blue. In printing, either digital or offset lithography, true red and true blue are too dark to effectively mix brighter colors through half-toning. So in those media, they use magenta (a bright pinkish red), cyan(a bright sky-blue), and yellow (which is actually a brighter yellow than primary yellow in paint). Printing usually also incorporates black to darken the truely black areas. Not all colors can actually be derived from primary colors, hence why paint stores sell more than three colors of paint. In high-end jobs, printers will sometimes use upwards of ten colors of ink (cyan, magenta, yellow, black, photo-cyan, photo-magenta, red, gr
