Tuesday, October 5, 2010 A tinge is a slight trace of color, or any other quality or ingredient added in a small amount, such as a flavor or an emotion—’a tinge of grey’, ‘a tinge of nutmeg’, ‘a tinge of regret’.
When a color is mixed with varying amounts of white, a lighter version of the original color, known as a tint, is produced.
Saturday, March 13, 2010 
Image courtesy of The AV-Empire.
When emitted light is used to form an image, as on TVs, computer monitors, and mobile phone screens, red, green, and blue are combined in various amounts to display a gamut of colors. This system is called the RGB color model, after the first letters of its primary colors. RGB is an additive color model, meaning one starts with black, the absence of light, then red, green, and blue lights are superimposed to create the illusion of other colors. When 2 primary colors are mixed in equal amounts, they create a secondary color. Red light and green light combine to make yellow, green and blue make cyan, and blue and red create magenta. Blending all 3 colors at full intensity gives white.
A subtractive color model is used in painting and color printing. When white light, containing all of the colors in the visible spectrum, hits a pigmented surface, some colors are absorbed (subtracted) and others are reflected; the reflected colors are the ones that you see. CMYK, the most common subtractive color scheme, uses cyan, magenta, yellow, and black as its primary colors. Combining cyan, magenta, and yellow in equal proportions should make shades of grey or black, but in practice, this creates muddy browns while blurring details and wasting ink. Hence, black is used in printing as a separate pigment. In the printing process, the color plates are aligned (keyed) to the black plate, so it is assigned the letter ‘K’ for ‘key’.