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Imagine I have a painting out of dots of all the colors. All colordots together would give a black painting, but it is not perfectly black so what is the color we receive or theoretically perceive?

Is this white but with a very faint strength? Because if all the dots are still there reflecting there own colors you still would get white light??

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  • $\begingroup$ If you mix all the pigments together, you get black. If you paint the picture with small dots of all the colors, and the dots are on the painting in a random order, the painting is likely to be white when viewed from a distance, not black. $\endgroup$
    – David White
    Commented Apr 22, 2018 at 20:23
  • $\begingroup$ @DavidWhite, that depends on whether the OP is talking about small dots of opaque color, or small dots of transparent colored ink. $\endgroup$
    – Solomon Slow
    Commented Apr 22, 2018 at 23:14

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If you see an object emitting faint white light in an otherwise completely dark environment, it will look white, while in a light environment, it will appear black.

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Just having a bunch of dots of different colors does not guarantee that the whole think would be color balanced - some color could dominate.

But, if we assume that all colors are reasonably balanced, we'll end up, by definition, with some shade of gray.

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  • $\begingroup$ Why would it end up with a shade of grey and not white? $\endgroup$
    – Marijn
    Commented Apr 26, 2018 at 9:17
  • $\begingroup$ Because for any white there is a brighter white, so it could be viewed as a shade of gray on a light side. It will even look like gray on a background of a brighter white. In the case you've described, we don't even know if this gray will be on the light side, because we don't know how bright the colors are. So calling it a shade of gray covers all possible scenarios. $\endgroup$
    – V.F.
    Commented Apr 26, 2018 at 11:18
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If you mix all the colors together as a liquid it will look brownish but seeing a photon mixture of all the colors/energies, it will be seen as white.

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  • $\begingroup$ Why would it look brownish and not black? $\endgroup$
    – Marijn
    Commented Apr 26, 2018 at 9:17

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