Graphic Design Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for Graphic Design professionals, students, and enthusiasts. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
The following image has three circles of RGB Red, Blue and Green on a White Background. Each one has 50% opacity. The stacking order is green, blue and red.
The overlapping areas have tints of dark green, purple and brown.
How can one predict these overlapping tints? Is there a theory to predict this?
Essentially, I would like to know how to produce region of a third color using two existing overlapping colors in Illustrator.
If you are wanting to generate a second or third color by overlapping shapes as in your example, and want to do so accurately as it would happen in an RGB color system. You can use the transparency modes in illustrator. 'Overlay' and 'screen' will be your best options for replicating light-based color behavior.
see image below. (tip: you might need to use a black background for the shapes in "screen" transparency mode)
If you want a mixture as far as paint would behave (not light-based colors.) then you can use 'multiply' transparency mode. If you want to use the primary colors you should probably adjust them to cyan blue, magenta and yellow. But I kept your colors anyway.
Finally, if you wish to color pick the overlapping areas you probably will be disappointed when you realize the color picker will just copy the properties of one of the shapes (whichever is over the other). So my advice is to rasterize the image and then color pick the overlapping areas.
To rasterize the image: - select all three circles with the transparency mode applied - Go the menu 'Object' and choose 'Rasterize'
( make sure you duplicate your circles before you do this if you want to keep the original vector)
