Color mixing correspond to ideal subtractive color mixing because some light from the subtracted color is still being reflected by one component of the original paint. This results in a darker and desaturated color compared to the color that would be achieved with ideal filters. The three primary colors in subtractive mixing that produce the largest gamut are yellow, magenta and cyan, leading to the CMYK color model widely used in color printing. Historically, painters have used yellow, red and blue in place of these, resulting in reduced gamut. In subtractive mixing of color, the absence of color is white and the
Secondary color secondary CMY colors (with secondary colors in boldface) are: Ideally, combining three perfect primary colors in equal amounts would produce black, but this is impossible to achieve in practice. Therefore a "key" pigment, usually black, is added to printing to produce dark shades more efficiently. This combination is referred to as CMYK, where K stands for Key. Before the discovery of CMY, at least as far back as Goethe, the best primary colors were thought to be red, yellow, and blue. Mixing these pigments in equal amounts produces orange, green, and purple: That is, the primary and secondary RYB colors