What are the basic and primary colors?
Primary colors are sets of colors that can be combined to make a useful range (gamut) of colors. For human applications, three are often used; for additive combination of colors, as in overlapping projected lights or in CRT displays, the primary colors normally used are red, green, and blue. For subtractive combination of colors, as in mixing of pigments or dyes, such as in printing, the primaries normally used are magenta, cyan, and yellow.[1] Any choice of primary colors is essentially arbitrary; for example, an early color photographic process, autochrome, typically used orange, green, and violet primaries.[2] Psychovisual studies and the opponent process color model lead to the notion of four “pure” or “unique” colors:[23] red, yellow, green, and blue, with red and green defining one color-opponent axis, and yellow and blue a second color-opponent axis. basic colors cannot be created by mixing other colors.In the 1969 study Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution, Brent
Almost all visible colors can be obtained by the additive color mixing of three colors. If the three colors of light can be mixed to produce white, they are called primary colors and the standard additive primary colors are red, green and blue. Two colors that produce white when added together are called complementary. The color complementary to a primary color is called a secondary color. The complementary or secondary colors for red, green and blue are cyan, magenta and yellow respectively. These three colors are often referred to as the subtractive primary colors. When the three are combined in subtractive color mixing, they produce black.
