When I got my refinishing kit, it came with three colors of universal colorants, red, yellow, and blue.   These are known to artists as the primary colors.  Other colors can be made for them, so I could mix up paints, glazes and toners with them.   In addition, I got bottles of white and black.  Mixing the primaries would give me other colors.   Adding white lightens the color and creates a tint.  Adding black darkens the color and creates a shade.  Adding both black and white (gray) creates a tone.  

 

The universal colorants are the things that you see at the paint store on a carousel that squirts colors into paint to make the color on the chip you want.   Various "bases" have varying degrees of white already mixed in.   They have lots of universal colorants, I suppose just to make their  work a bit easier.

 

^{(c) 2018, Keith Mealy}

Thanks!

 

It always amazed me that with paint the 3 primary colors are the ones you mentioned but with light they are Red, GREEN and Blue.

"Primary" changes because reflected light is subject to the surface absorbing certain wavelengths, whereas transparent colors filter out transmitted wavelengths.  In an excess of zeal several years ago, trying to match an existing door, I bought the color wheel and did some investigating with two stain companies.  Turns out there is no standard for colors in production.  TV/monitor colors can be calibrated in RBG mixes, but one mfr's "burnt umber" stain is another mfr's ochre.  Almost.  The color wheel is pretty good at approximating a surface color, but the recipe ingredients on the wheel (burn sienna, cordovan, burnt umber....12 in total) do not correspond to any mfr's palette, nor can the industry define "ochre" precisely (e.g., wavelengths)*.  You end up experimenting with available colors that seem to get close, and then testing different combinations/concentrations.  Of course about the time you think you have a match, it occurs to you that time/age will change the color to some extent, too. 

 

*Interesting to me is that you can define the color of light from a bulb by its solar temperature, so "white" can be calibrated

Back in January at TAW in Tennessee I talked to a man selling Chromacraft dye and he made a point I had not thought of in the past. I had always thought that it was the wood itself  that causes color to look different from say maple to cherry. He told me that every wood has a color that has to be compensated to get a true color . Even maple has a natural color.....yellow. The solution to getting a true color is to bleach the wood.

Then again, you can get into color matching using Pantone system.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantone

 

if printers can use it for ink, why don't we have something similar?

4 hours ago, Gerald said:

 The solution to getting a true color is to bleach the wood.

Years ago, I was hired to refinish a cherry dining table.  The guy told me that he used to live in AZ and the table got a lot of light.  I stripped it and it was a very pale color.  I was quite puzzled because usually cherry(heartwood) gets darker with UV exposure.  I started to sand it and the salmon color of raw cherry quickly appeared.   I remembered hearing that some manufacturers bleach the wood to reduce variances (in cherry there is a lot between sapwood and heartwood), and just add all the color back in.  I concluded that must have been the case.   I kept calling him to ask what sheen he wanted on the final coat.   Finally he called me back about 10 am one morning and decided on 'satin.'   And would he be able to get it delivered that afternoon because he was having a dinner party.   I buffed it out rather than adding a coat of satin and having a dinner party 5 hours later