Primary, Secondary & Tertiary Colors

The primary secondary tertiary colors reference lays out the three groups of the color wheel — red, green and blue, then yellow, magenta and cyan, then the six in-between hues — with hex values for each.

What is Primary, Secondary & Tertiary Colors?

The primary secondary tertiary colors reference is a fixed set of three cards. The first holds the color wheel primary colors: red, green and blue. The second holds the secondary colors list: yellow, magenta and cyan. The third holds six tertiary colours, the mixtures that sit between a primary and its neighbouring secondary. Every swatch shows its hex value and a copy button, and there is nothing to configure — this is a reference page rather than a tool.

What makes it worth reading is which system of colour mixing it describes, because the two familiar systems disagree, and the disagreement is the source of most confusion about primary colours. On a screen the primaries are red, green and blue, because those are the channels a display emits; mixing all three at full strength produces white, and pairs of them produce the secondaries — yellow, magenta and cyan. In pigments the relationship inverts: the primaries are cyan, magenta and yellow, their pairs produce red, green and blue, and the secondaries you learned at school are different again. Both tables are correct, and a page that only showed one would leave the other looking wrong.

The tertiary row follows the additive system, which is the one this page is built on. Each entry is a half-and-half mixture of two channels, counted as two hundred and fifty-five down to one hundred and twenty-eight: red with half green gives orange, half red with full green gives a yellow-green, half green with full blue gives an azure, half red with full blue gives a violet, full red with half blue gives a rose, and full green with half blue gives a spring green. Those six complete the wheel, sitting between a secondary and a primary.

• A detail that surprises people is that these are not merely the most saturated versions of their hues — two of them are close to the widest colours a screen can produce at all.
• Pure green sits near the edge of what the display can render, which is why it appears almost unnaturally bright next to its neighbours, and pure blue is markedly darker than the other two at full intensity.
• Both facts are useful when judging a design that uses them: equal numeric intensity does not mean equal perceived brightness, so a set built from these three values will look unbalanced even though the numbers are symmetrical.

In use, the page is a reference for explaining and for starting points. When a brief asks for a colour wheel primary colors set, these are the values a screen actually uses, which differ from the pigment set a traditional colour wheel illustrates. When someone needs a tertiary colors hex lookup — the six hues between the primaries and secondaries — the third card supplies them, and the copy buttons make lifting a value into a design file a click. Bring the color theory primary secondary tertiary diagram from a classroom next to this page and the disagreement is immediately visible, in a way that a written explanation rarely makes as clear.

It does not attempt to be a full colour theory course: there is no subtractive table, no discussion of how pigment mixing differs from light, no named tertiary terminology, and no tool for building a wheel from your own colours. What it does is lay the three groups out accurately for the additive system, with the hex values attached, which is the form most people actually need when working on a screen.

How to use Primary, Secondary & Tertiary Colors

1. Read the primaries card for red, green and blue — the channels a display emits.
2. Read the secondaries card for the pairs: yellow, magenta and cyan.
3. Use the tertiary card for the six mixtures between a primary and a secondary.
4. Copy any hex value from its swatch.

When to use Primary, Secondary & Tertiary Colors vs related tools

Use this as a reference when explaining or checking colour relationships, or when a design needs a wheel-derived starting point. Use the harmony tools when you want a scheme generated from a base colour rather than the textbook sets. For the neighbouring steps, see the color wheel theory guide and the bezold effect visualizer.

Privacy & Security

This tool runs entirely in your browser — no data ever leaves your device. There is no server round-trip, no upload, no logging, and no account required. Your input is processed locally using client-side JavaScript and is never stored, transmitted, or accessible to anyone else. When you close the tab, everything disappears.

Frequently asked questions about Primary, Secondary & Tertiary Colors