Within the first year of you going to school you were most likely taught that the three primary colors are red, yellow and blue. However, one thing you might not have known was that there is another set of primary colors, cyan, yellow and magenta. You’ll often find that the CMY primary colors are used in printers and even some of the most famous artists in history used these three base colors as opposed to the RYB primaries. Yet in school, we’re taught that the RYB primaries are the most important colors, why is that? Today, I’ll be explaining the key differences between the RYB color wheel and the CMY color wheel.

Let’s start off with the color wheel we are most familiar with, the RYB color wheel is very simple. Red, yellow and blue mix with each other to create orange, purple and green secondary colors. Secondary colors can mix to become brown, or even be mixed again with more of the primary colors to change the hue and contrast of the colors
However, the RYB color wheel does have some flaws when it comes to saturation. Lets say you are painting a picture of a vibrant sunset and you need to use a really saturated purple to make the colors stand out, but you ran out of the purple you’d usually use for this. What do you do? You could use the RYB color wheel to mix red and blue to make purple, but there’s a problem, the purple you mixed does not match the purple you used on the previous coat, it’s to muddy. This is where the CMY color wheel comes in.
There’s a reason printers use the CMY primaries, when mixed together, they are more saturated then the RYB system which makes for beautiful, contrasting colors for images. So, instead of mixing a purple using the RYB primaries, you should use the CMY primaries to make your purple, a ration of 1 part magenta and 2 parts cyan will do the trick. With that you have a beautiful match of purple for the painting.

This is just one example of how you can use the CMY primaries rather then the RYB primaries. For many, the RYB color wheel will always have the superior primaries, but many overlook the advantages that the CMY primaries provide.
So, which one is the better set of primaries? Well, neither of them are superior to one another. Both sets of primaries have there own advantages and disadvantages, it just depends on the kind of art you want to make with them. CMY primaries are good to use in bright and saturated images, but can’t create more gloomy or warm contrasted images that the RYB primaries can.
It’s all about what you can create with the colors that matter.