Two colors of gels are placed in front of a lantern.

• A. Additive Color
• B. Subtractive Color
• C. CMY
• D. RGB

Answer: (B)

Using gels in front of a lantern is an example of subtractive color mixing. White light from the lamp passes through the first gel, which filters out certain wavelengths and lets others through. Adding a second gel filters the light again, removing even more wavelengths. The color you finally see is the overlap of the wavelengths that survive both filters, which is the essence of subtractive mixing—colors are created by removing parts of the spectrum rather than adding new light. This is different from additive color mixing, where you combine different colors of light to create new colors, such as with RGB lighting. CMY describes a subtractive color model used in printing, which aligns with this filtering approach, but in the lighting context the key idea is that gels subtract wavelengths from white light to produce the observed color.