An RGB LED is an LED module that can produce almost any color using these three primary additive colors: Red, Green and Blue. The simplest version of an RGB LED has a combination of 3 separate light-emitting diodes in one package, housed under a clear protective lens. This LED package will have 4 pins, one for each of the three colored diodes and one common anode (+) or cathode (-)
The 3 primary color LEDs use the principal of additive color mixing we talked about above to make more colors than we can imagine. LEDs are dimmable by nature which allows each red, green and blue color to produce all the different hues of that color.
Technically, each colored LED can produce 256 shades. It takes a high quality and premium DMX controller to actually get every shade possible but we will go over that more in the controllers section. For now, you can see that light manufacturers combine the 3 primary LEDs with their 256 shades (256 x 256 x 256) to come up with the ‘16.7 million different colors’ slogan that so many RGB lights come with.
So how does an RGB LED create the different color combinations? It is as simple as adjusting the brightness of each LED. Increase the brightness of red and blue LEDs while lowering that of green to make purple. Turn down the blue LED and turn up the red and green LEDs to make yellow. You get the deal….the color wheel below demonstrates this process and is what you can expect to see on many RGB Control Smart Phone Apps.
