Up close, what is a screen picture made of?
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After you watchUp close, what is a screen picture made of?
The short answer
Many screens form pictures with tiny red, green, and blue subpixels. Different brightness combinations produce many perceived colors. In this model, an orange pixel becomes reddish when green is removed while red and blue remain.
Try this next
- What happens if you turn OFF the red light instead of the green? Reveal one pixel, then switch the red light off — predict first: does the warm orange go green-ish, blue-ish, or stay the same?
- How does the screen make pure white? Slide red, green, and blue all the way up in the mixer and watch the middle — predict whether three colored lights can really make plain white.
- Can you build a color with just two lights? Turn one light fully off in the mixer and push the other two — see how many colors you can still reach with only two of the three lights.
The whole story
How it works
The mixer shows additive RGB combinations. The hidden test uses a separate orange pixel with red 238, green 124, and blue 48 on a 0–255 scale. A zoom separates its three channels, then green switches off. The remaining red and blue make a reddish color. Subsequent channel toggles update both the picture and the numerical result.
What people get wrong
An orange-looking pixel need not be an orange emitter. In an RGB display it is a mixture of primary lights. Removing green changes the mixture while the other channels stay on.
The catch
A display’s primary lights define its color range, or gamut. Three channels make many colors, but not every color people can see. Real displays also differ in subpixel arrangement and black level.
Questions kids ask
Is an orange pixel a tiny orange lamp?
On an RGB display, the pixel combines red, green, and blue subpixels. Bright red and medium green can appear orange, sometimes with some blue. The example orange-sky pixel has levels 238, 124, and 48.
Why do three colored lights make white instead of brown?
Lights add together — red, green, and blue all shining at full brightness pile their colors up and reach white. Paint does the opposite: each color absorbs light, so mixing lots of paints absorbs almost everything and goes muddy brown or black.
How does a screen make black?
By turning the lights down. If red, green, and blue are all switched off, that pixel makes no light, which your eye reads as black. That's why a screen looks darkest in a dark room — black is really just 'no light.'
Why don't I see the three lights when I watch normally?
The lights are tiny and packed extremely close together. From a normal distance your eye can't resolve them as separate specks, so it merges each trio into one smooth color. Press your nose to the glass or use a magnifier and the red, green, and blue dots appear.
Talk about it
- Ask them: if there's no orange light on the screen at all, where does the orange you see actually come from?
- Ask: paint mixed all together goes muddy brown, but three screen lights all on full go white — why are paint and light opposites?
- Ask: when the screen shows black, do you think it's adding a 'black light,' or doing something else entirely?
For grown-ups
The model illustrates additive RGB mixing with three channels, each specified on a 0–255 scale. Real display primaries and subpixel arrangements vary. A display’s gamut covers only part of the colors humans can see. The canvas scene is a deterministic pixel drawing, not a photograph or a microscope image.
Keep going
What else makes you wonder?
- If a screen only has red, green, and blue lights, how does it show black — is black just all three lights switched off?
- Printers use a totally different set of colors than screens — why can't a printer just copy a screen's red, green, and blue?
- If three lights can fool your eye into seeing millions of colors, are there colors your eye can see that no screen can ever make?
