RGB transtint

[woodchucker]

Hey guys trying to put an order in for Transtint on sale at Rockler. Any of you ever buy the Red Green and Blue to mix and make your own tints?

[Amy Guarino]

I bought a bottle of Trans-Tint Cordovan some years back and mixed it in alcohol with some powdered dyes. I had a six-foot strip of oak 1x2 with a slightly altered dye mix every two inches until I (kind of) matched the color of some furniture we had. So you can mix the colors. But your mention of "Red, Green and Blue" suggests that you think dyes mix the way pixels do on your monitor. I'm no expert, but I'm pretty sure that's incorrect. As a f'rinstance, red plus green will yield yellow on your monitor, but not with dyes.

[woodchucker]

I am thinking they are the primary colors. I have used transtint in the past and I still have some. Was thinking I could get more versatility and come up with the shades of brown that I want, be it reddish brown, or yellow brown, or orange brown just by using the rgb... I guess I was thinking wrong.

[FrozenNorth]

Assuming they are like paints, probably a safe assumption, red, blue and yellow would be the primary colours.

[Amy Guarino]

t Cordovan some years back and mixed it

You'll get different colors when you mix them, to be sure, but think of the difference this way: If I "mix" full values of red, green and blue on my monitor, I get white. It's a different process. Inkjet printers typically use Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Black.

[dadiOH]

No, you weren't thinking wrong.

There are two sets of primary colors: additive and subtractive.

The additive primaries are red, green and blue. However, the blue is not what many people think of as "blue". They are used when dealing with light oriented things such as photography. A proper mix of all three creates white light.

The subtractive primaries are those you probably learned in grade school as red, blue and yellow. However those really aren't the colors; the colors are actually magenta, cyan and yellow. They are used more in applying color

*to* things as in painting and printing. A proper mix of the three yields black.

Get the subtractive primaries and you are good to go. You might want to add black as it is easier to create a shade (greyed down color) with it than by adding the correct complementary primary.

More here...

[Leon]

If you use equal parts of red, blue, and yellow stains you will get brown.

[Father Haskell]

Outcome will depend on which red, green, and blue you start with.