AW Tech Support's Tip of the Month

Why doesn't the command "create light color=black" make objects darker?

Lights (in AW and in the real world) are purely additive...meaning they can only add additional brightness to objects they shine on, never take away. Furthermore, colored lights will only increase the brightness of the corresponding colors in the objects that they shine on (which is why, for example, a pure red light will have no effect on a pure blue object, because blue objects are blue precisely because they only reflect blue light and absorb everything else.) A "black" light, by definition, has no color, so it has no effect on anything that it shines on.