The color wheel acts as a reference and monitoring guide or template. You can see how the colors that are 180 degrees apart are complements, and how the RGB and CMYK points are distributed around the wheel.

Because RGB is an additive color model, magenta, cyan, and yellow are expressed as combinations of two other colors.

The default display of the color wheel is the following:

• Red is at 3 o'clock.
• Blue is at 7 o'clock.
• Green is at 11 o'clock.
• Magenta (red plus blue) is at 5 o'clock.
• Cyan (green plus blue) is at 9 o'clock.
• Yellow (green plus red) is at 1 o'clock.