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Why color-wheel websites (Adobe...) claim these colors are complementary

Photography Asked on June 18, 2021

I just learn about the different color harmony styles models, and I was playing with Adobe color wheel website using the complementary style, but I’m realizing that the proposed colors are not really on the other side of the Hue circle:

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Here, you see that the blueish line has hue 174° and the brown color has hue 19°, and 174°-19°=155°, while I would expect their distance to be 180° since they are complementary. And if I ask to Krita, they are indeed not on opposite parts of the Hue circle:

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So what’s wrong with Adobe color wheel? I also tried with https://paletton.com, and the Paletton gives similar results compared to Adobe color. Are all color wheels crazy, or am I missing something? I also tried to check how footage was behaving, and they seem to agree with my definition, for instance this photo uses colors #27AB9E (Hue=174°) and #ff4473 (hue=344°), which are much more aligned, and we have 344-174 = 170° which is way closer to 180°.

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One Answer

Not all color wheels are alike. The traditional/old school RGB color wheel (like Krita's) begins with the three primaries at 120˚ intervals; which places red opposite cyan, such as this wheel.

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However, more modern color wheels use the opponent process colors which places red/green and blue/yellow opponents at 180˚ intervals... such as the adobe color wheel.

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And then there are other color wheels that use RBY which places those three colors at 120˚ intervals; it also places red opposite green, but blue is no longer opposite yellow. This wheel aligns with the color mixing principles taught in grade school (e.g. blue+yellow=green, blue+red=purple, and red+yellow=orange). However it breaks the CMY (subtractive colors) triadic relationship the other two color wheels maintain.

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Which one is correct? I can't really say because it's all color theory. But my inclination is the opponent process theory.

Correct answer by Steven Kersting on June 18, 2021

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