RGB Color versus Wavelength

While light of particular color consists of photons of a single wavelength ¹, our eyes can be tricked into seeing that same color by mixing red, green and blue light (RGB) in different proportions. Everyone learned this in elementary school art class when mixing paints or crayons, and this is the basis of how the monitor you are viewing this page shows different colors ².

The image below shows the color corresponding to each wavelength in the visible spectrum from 380 to 780 nm. The formula to generate them is surprisingly non-intuitive. The code to generate this image can be found on github.

1. or, equivalently, its inverse, the frequency ↩

2. mixing paints is an example of subtractive mixing, while computer displays use additive mixing to generate colors ↩