Seeing Color 9/19/2018 A prism can be used to break white light down into all the pure colors of light that make-up white light.

You can also reverse the process and add colors of light together to create white light. However, you need to remember two things… Primary colors of light (blue, red and green) are different than the primary colors of paint (blue, red and yellow) When you combine all the primary colors of light you get white light, but when you combine all the primary colors of paint, you get a dark brownish color.

The retina in our eye has three different kinds of cones that mainly detect three different colors of light—blue, red and green—the primary colors of light. These work in combination to allow us to see all the colors of the rainbow.

If those cones are working correctly, this is what the person sees… Seeing Color 9/19/2018 If those cones are working correctly, this is what the person sees… However, if the cones respond to the wrong colors, this is how it may look. This occurs in 5-8% of men and 0.5% of women who have a red-green color deficiency—or what we call colorblindness.