I would think anything that produces its own light would generally be additive and anything that reflects light would be subtractive.

2:51 according to my video game experience, a new stage is going to unlock lol

Great video! One comment about subtractive color: don't use red, green, blue. Use cyan, magenta, yellow. Cyan is the absence of red. Magenta is the absence of green. Yellow is the absence of blue. You can't use RGB paint/due/pigment to produce any color you want; but you can with CMY.

Yay! Another ActionLab video! I SO look forward to these, love this guy!!!

Zebra colour. Edit: Well, at least I was half right.

That's how RGB display works...

Digital artists actually paint with additive colors while using RGB sliders to swap from colors, for example red+green=yellow, it's different to the oil/acrylic color mixing techniques, it's also a cool way to think about colors!

The way the glow stick works is pretty interesting. The chemical reaction that makes the actual light, for all colors of glow sticks, only produces ultraviolet light, which we can't see. Another substance is added to the mixture that absorbs the UV light and emits light of a different color. But there's demand for all sorts of colors, and it's not always cheap, easy, or possible to obtain substances that will glow that color from UV. So for those "hard to reach" colors, I substance with approximately the correct color is chosen, and then as demonstrated in this video, sometimes a pigment is added to subtractively produce the desired color. This is part of the reason why some glow sticks, before they're activated, will already appear to be a certain color while other glow sticks' colors may be difficult to determine until they are activated. The ones that needed the pigment give you a "hint". Fluorescent bulbs work the same way. The metal vapor in the tube produces UV light when current runs through it, and the glass is coated (on the inside) with a substance that absorbs the UV light and emits visible light. So it's actually "simpler" to make a black light than a visible fluorescent light, because there's one less step. There are also "white" and "warm white" LEDs that produce light in a similar way. For the most part, an LED's light output peaks strongly at a specific color (though researchers are working on that). As this channel has mentioned more than once, "white" isn't really a color you can point to on the spectrum. So to get white light, you can use multiple LEDs close to each other, each with a different color, or you can use an ultraviolet LED and "paint" over it with a fluorescent substance that produces a mixture of light to produce white.

Thank you so much @ActionLab I knew this thing for a while but never knew the real reason. Thank you so much.

I hate when people confuse additive and subtractive color mixing. This video sums up their differences pretty well. Good job!

Yep that was a lovely video already watched it all.

Yay new video!

This explained so much, thabk you!

I'm only 11 but i watch your videos and i guessed the question right. This is how many people like The Action Lab.(BTW love ur videos dude) ⇓

I think white light because I assumed glow-sticks to produce light by passing electricity through a particular chemical, and when you mix chemicals together, it's additive

If the glow sticks aren’t mixed much I would think they’d produce white light, but since it’s a chemical reaction, there’s too many variables if they’re really mixed together. They could produce no light for all we know. Edit: I would basically call this right. It did produce white light AND there was an extra unknown variable of the red dye.

How do you even get these ideas? I was shocked by the idea itself. Very innovative. Keep making videos like these

It makes a lava color if I remember from tkor vids correctly

I was trying to learn about RGB as a graphic designer, and seeing it in such a way is really cool, I want to hug you 😁

Thanks for clearing my doubt 😀☺👍

my guess is that it is going to be additive and produces white light because anything that emits its own light is working like so: it is EMITTING red, green, blue lights so we have white light, it is not absorbing any colors for there to be black

We’re gonna need you when we’re storming Area 51.

My guess is that it will produce an off white light? We can't perfectly balance all three liquid quantities perfectly nor can have we accurately accounted for varying intensities of light, so that's why I'm guessing off-white

I've always wanted to know why that was - very cool demo! Another related question I've always had is why are red, blue, and yellow primary colors of paint/pigment, while primary light colors are red, green, and blue. I am guessing it has to do with the additive/subtractive aspect, but I can not intuitively resolve that.

I really enjoy the way you tackle questions and not just answer questions but show and explain them. I thought of asking the internet but thought I'd ask you first and this seemed to be the right video for it... Light had to enter the eyes for us to see whatever is reflecting or emitting the light, but where is the light that is viewed thru a telescope? Has that light already reached Earth and we're magnifying it, or does the telescope somehow transport us to the light or reduce the distance the light had to travel to reach our eyes? Just wondering. Thanks for the entertaining videos.

Great video! You should use the polls for the guesses though.

wow, very interesting! now to go get some glowsticks :)

Lol, it was easy to guess because you‘ve mentioned it in one of your previous videos.

My guess: I dont think the liquids will really mix but it's going to produce a white-ish light. I guess I wasnt completely wrong.

Rumour has it that the Action lab stopped replying once he gained 2 million subs

Is it just me or is that one of the most visibly satisfying thumbnails

I totally guessed that it would be additive colour mixing because although liquiditive, it is light so it is white light but with a red tinge

oh you should explain this is not quite correct, or on the other hand you should explain the system a bit more. Adaptive and Subtractive is totally right, but its in red/green/blue in one case and Cyan/Yellow/Magenta in the other case. these are the primary colors depending on the System, meas you can't create them with mixin two other together. On a Circle of Color the Color sit in between each other. So you use green Colour(dye) green contains actually Blue(cyan) and Yellow. Please try to explain this in some new episode. Thanks for you Videos.

Action lab just rocks

The liquid will be white, because light is coming from the liquid not reflecting off of it. with paint, light must come from a source hit the paint and reflect what isn't absorbed, so adding more paint will add more light that is absorbed and isn't reflected. with something that emits light, the more colors of light you add increases the amount of light emitted(reflected in the case with the paint.)

_"What is this for?"_ _"It's blue light."_ _"What does it do?"_ _"It turns blue."_ ;)

thx for this video. color & light are very fascinating. can you make an ultraviolet or inferred..or other light spectrum kaleidoscope? Also, a series on the periodic table would be great...perhaps start with the everyday metals we might not know much about...like chromium(someone told me is the only metal both magnetic & not, in its solid state)

Very interesting buddy. I would have got that completely wrong

It happened as i thought it would, the red stick was much darker, so i expected that to change the overall mixture to a pinkish color, but if the red was made the same way as the green and blue, the combined sticks would be white. Like in pretty much every digital display out there.

We live in a paradox, driven by light. The Star of David is an accurate depiction of two trinities coming together to form our reality.

I should try this at home

You should do a video on scuba diving and light filtration through water as depth changes.

That's my childhood doubt!!!!!!!! Thank you

White - as it emits light. Unless you shine much brighter light source at it then it will be black.

Here goes my guess: It will produce a faint white light, but the liquid, with the lights on, will be dark. Edit: ok, k was wrong😂

The mixture of all 3 glow sticks will produce a white glow since they're emitting light instead of absorbing light to produce the color.

I guess while the lighting effect is operational it will be whitish (based on the correct portions of liquid mixed). Then as the glow effect wares off it will become brownish like normal paint.

Im guessing it will glow kinda whitish (though not completely), but the liquid itself might be brownish or greyish? As a side note me and my brother one day had a lot of glowsticks in different colours, and we opened them up and splashed it all across the walls in the bathroom...my mother was furious...until we turned off the lights and the bathroom wall turned into one of those NASA space photos that has been enhanced with colour (which is like all of them, heh). Was amazing. (We used those thin, party-sized ones though, not these "survival"-use types) EDIT: I was at least a little right? :3 EDIT2: Ooh, looking at the liquid when it seems to have stopped glowing so much and the light is turned on it kind of looks a bit reddish-brown, or well, reddish at least.

I think it will be some weird third option that will surprise everyone and then he'll explain why Or maybe it'll just be white and what everyone expected, but I don't think it'll be black

Looks like a mad scientist mixing all of those lol

The white glowing color reminds me of The Vex from Destiny

I think white but i'm not sure. I like the fun in this video you made.

Can you please do a video about the faucault's pendulum? Would be very nice

So I finished the video but my guess was that it was gonna fool you and stay as 3 separate colors due to densitys of the glow stick liquid. I was wrong, this is a really cool way of showing how the idea of RGB works. Too bad the red is pigmented, that beaker would have been awesome if it just glowed bright white.

Dyes and inks are subtractive color mixes, but paints can behave in ways that combine additive and subtactive characteristics, because they contain particles that reflect light of particular wavelengths. if one mixes yellow and blue paint, additive theory would suggest one should get white, and subtractive theory would predict black, but the actual result is green, even when the blue is genuinely blue and not cyan.

I guess it's additive color mixing. The colors from the glow sticks are not being reflected from some other light source, they are being emitted, so mixing them together wouldn't stop the emission of light from each individual component. That is, unless there is some sort of reaction between the two chemically, which could potentially add another variable as such. But I don't think that's going to happen.

The idea is spreading it thin on paper, so that the liquid absorbs less light, but still the liquid in the cup was translucent enough to emit light and appear much brighter than the red stick.

Different phosphors will have different rates of absorption and emission. The phosphors that emit lower frequency light may fluoresce from light from the other phosphors. These may cause the color to deviate from purely additive.

pls make a video on radium and radioactivity

Reminds me of the chimera color "self-luminous red"

I guessed correctly that it would be white, but not pure white. I didn't know about the dye, though, so it was a bit more off than I thought, and once the dye was nullified, it was closer to pure white than I thought, probably because of how the dye affected the red glow stick, making it look a bit off from pure red.

Hey Action Lab! I don't know if it's with everyone, but this weird thing happens with me wherein whenever I cover my phone's loudspeaker while listening to audio, my ears feel a pressure, as if I'm on an airplane!

Litterally prooved my comment from last video and that is that green and blue produce cyan and combined with red it makes the whitest hue of pink, but also, green is not a base color

Before you mix them...my guess is its not gonna be either. For some reason I think its gonna be orange. Edit: Well now I feel like a dummy. Lol Can you do a video explaining how colors reflect/absorb different colors?

It will give off white light. This is because the chemical mixtures within the glowsticks are producing their own light, not reflecting the light from another source. It is a clever experiment, one way or the other. Nice setup too, you may have thrown off some people showing subtractive mixing beforehand.

Why doesn't the argument work in the opposite direction? If the red paint reflects the red light, blue paint reflects the blue light, etc., then for each of type of light (red/green/blue) there should be molecules in the mix (red+green+blue paints) that reflect exactly this type of light? I.e., why do we have to focus on the absorption aspect and not on the reflection aspect (which would've resulted in white, as shown above)?

Cool

Additive light mixing - So it will be white. However, knowing glow sticks - I know that the color of the liquids are different too. The blue glowstick has colorless liquid. The green has green liquid. And the red has reddish color liquid. So assuming the light must travel through some of the liquid, I'd say that actually, it will be a dull yellowish orange (based on the ratios of the liquids and their relative brightnesses)

I'm guna go with a white liquid... Although in saying that i believe it'll only be white as the glow works otherwise it'll turn a weird black afterward

depends on whether the lights are on or off I'd say, and whether it's in a cup or on paper.

Anna( brother) do edwin lander black and white slide ( one slide is taken with red fliter and another just black and white). But after mixing two slides it will different colours. From walter lewin videos

You mentioned that the red glow stick contains red dye. What about the blue and green ones? Don't they have dyes? If they don't, what will happen of you do add green and blue dyes to balance out the red dye? Will it be subtractive (since they're dyes) or additive?

I guess it will make a glow-in-the-dark black paint, that is normally black, but glows white.

I would like to see you mix blue glow stick with red paint, or green glow stick with blue paint. Visa versa, would it be black or white?

I think it depends on how those glowsticks function: if there white light shining on to colored liquid it's subtractive color. If the liquid itself is glowing in the color, it'll be additive color. So my guess on how those glowsticks are engineered is with a white light -> My guess is subtractive color

You should do something on Goethe's concept of light.

Edit: I was right?! I think it’s going to be a weird color, but at the moment, I’m unsure if it will be brown or something else. When there are chemicals producing the light, it’s probably not going to be a perfectly white light to begin with. This makes it very challenging to come up with a genuine answer.

What's that liquid can we make that home did u put neon glow paints ?? Plz do reply I want to experiment with my kuds too

Can you explain the cold welding?

But what if you add green and blue pigment to glowstick red dyed white glowing liquid? The pigments should make black, but the liquid should stay white!

If emitted lights are directly added, it's additive and if reflected lights are added, it's subtractive.

Awesome awesome awesome…

I liked the video. I was wondering why use green when you can use yellow as the primary colours are red blue and yellow

I thought it would be black but shine white light. Does that make sense?

You kind of gave away the answer when you held all the glowsticks in one hand. It was white! :-)

Wow

What colour would it be after it’s finished glowing

If the liquid itself is colorless and emitting colored light, then it will be additive. If the liquid is colored and emits white light, then it will be subtractive. Which of these is a glowstick? No idea, but I *think* that when not activated they are still colored, so I'm gonna go with subtractive. EDIT: Huh, so it's a mix of both, depending on the color of the glowstick.

I'm early! Finally!

When you say Wow! with him at 2.23

What’s the color of the liquid residue (w/o dye) after its glow is finished?

I think one of the video of him shows that if the light emits from that combination is brighter than background light then it'll show black right.... Is this might one of the reason for seeing black colour when we mix RGB?

well i thought it would give white because i thought in the rainbow effect with light and water! so in my head if the water have all those colers inside and dont make a dark tone but a lighter tone in the sky that means that if i mix 3 of them should give me something close to white! it could be a stupid thinking but at least got it !

Imagine being this dude's kid and not getting to play with glow sticks because Daddy needs them for work.

I'm pretty early today

My guess is white on the surrounding, but depends on the intensity of the light, the liquid will appear noticably black, or not much. Ah, almost

what are the chances of him making the video of my current study of this topic

I thought it would be white cause it's light (Also you can see that it turned white while you where holding them in your hand b4 you cut them)

I guess White, because it is produceing light, should be additive. But with chemical reactions mixing i am not 100% sure. I like your aproach to RGB

2:10 my guess is that it would be subtractive, so a dark liquid would be created. Since it is not light, but produces light?