How is the mixture calculated?

Each channel of one colour is multiplied by the corresponding channel of the other. It is the same operation as a multiply blend, and it models two ideal filters or translucent inks.

Why does mixing always produce something darker?

Because multiplication moves towards black — each colour removes part of the spectrum, and the removals compound. That is the defining behaviour of subtractive mixing.

Does this match real paint?

Approximately. Real pigments scatter light and contain impurities, so a physical cyan and yellow give a duller green than the ideal arithmetic predicts, and the result depends on the medium and proportions.

Can I control the proportions?

No — the mixture is always equal parts. For an uneven blend, approximate it by mixing a mid-tone first and combining that.

Why does the result differ from mixing paint in real life?

Because the arithmetic is an ideal per-channel multiplication rather than a model of pigment: real paints scatter, absorb unevenly and carry fillers that keep a mixture from going fully dark, so the tool is best read as the idealised version of the process rather than a prediction of a specific tube.

Subtractive Color Mixer

Pigment A

Pigment B

Mixed (subtractive)

#00ff00

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The subtractive color mixer combines two pigment colors by multiplying their channels, so cyan and yellow produce green the way inks and filters behave.

What is Subtractive Color Mixer?

The subtractive color mixer takes two colours and returns what you get when you mix pigments, combined the way inks, filters and translucent layers combine. Each colour has its own field, and the mixed result appears beside them as a large swatch. The defaults are cyan and yellow, which is a deliberate choice: multiplied together they produce a pure green, which is the answer most people remember from school and the quickest proof that the tool is modelling the right thing.

The arithmetic is per-channel multiplication.
Each of the red, green and blue values is scaled by the corresponding value of the other colour and divided by the full range, which is equivalent to treating both colours as filters or translucent inks that each remove part of the spectrum and letting the two removals compound.
It is the same operation as the multiply blend mode in image editing, and it is the correct model for ideal subtractive primaries.
Cyan removes red, yellow removes blue, and layering them leaves green — which is exactly what the arithmetic returns.

That model explains why this differs so sharply from mixing the same two colours of light. The additive mixer in this domain adds channels and moves towards white; this one multiplies and moves towards black. Every pairing here produces something darker than either input, which is the signature behaviour of pigment — mixing paints never yields a brighter result than its brightest component, and past three or four colours almost everything heads for a muddy brown.

What the tool does not model is the behaviour of real pigment, and it is worth being clear about the gap. Real inks and paints scatter light, contain impurities, and vary in particle size and transparency, so a physical cyan and yellow mixed in a jar produces a green that is duller and greener-yellow than the ideal multiplication predicts, and the outcome depends on the medium and the proportions. There is also no black channel here, so this is not a CMYK conversion — it is two-colour multiplication rather than a four-ink model, and printing work would need a proper profile-based conversion.

Where the ideal model is genuinely useful is in reasoning about overlays and filters rather than about paint. A translucent coloured panel over another colour, a multiply blend in a design tool, and a coloured gel over a light all behave the way this arithmetic describes, so the tool is a reliable predictor for those cases and an approximation for ink. It is also a compact way to answer the questions people actually ask about mixing: what does blue and yellow make, what happens when you layer these two tints, and why does mixing more than three colours always end up brown.

Limits: two colours at a time, no proportion control — the mixture is always equal parts, so a two-to-one blend has to be approximated by mixing a mid-tone first — no opacity, no black channel, and no output beyond the resulting hex value.
As a pigment mixing calculator for ideal primaries it is exact, and as a subtractive color mixing demonstration it makes the important contrast with additive mixing obvious in one glance: cyan and yellow make green here, and make a pale grey in the additive tool beside it.

How to use Subtractive Color Mixer

Set the two pigment colours, starting from the cyan and yellow default if you want to see the classic result.
Read the mixed swatch for the combined colour.
Copy the resulting hex value if you need it in a design file.

When to use Subtractive Color Mixer vs related tools

Use this when reasoning about layered translucency, multiply blends or ideal subtractive primaries. Use an additive mixer for light, or a profile-based CMYK conversion when the target is print. The additive mixer is the light-side opposite, and the CMYK channel mixer works the same subtractive idea through ink percentages.

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