The darkest black and the lightest white are the final frontiers of this contrast. The two of them give the strongest light/dark contrast.  Between these two is a long scale of light and dark.  

This is the part two of the series of Color Contrasts. The first part was the Color vs. Color Contrast.

Below I played with brightness in Photoshop's color picker and made you a typical scale of gray tones that starts with the lightest (#ffffff) color and ends with the darkest (#000000) one. 

When we compare this light/dark value of some of the basic chromatic colors with this scale, we see how it can match to some fields. If we make this picture grayscale, it would match the first one. What this experiment shows us is that yellow is the lightest chromatic color, and purple is the darkest one.

All colors have their light/dark quality that depends on what company are they in. See how our perspective of this gray changes when displayed with opposite qualities:

White makes it darker:

 

  ...and black lighter:

     

 
Try also to notice this contrast between two same-colored things. The best example is the angle between two walls of a same color - one is always lighter!

If you're a painter or a designer, making  these 6, 9 or 12-part scales of gray is a great start in training your eyes to recognise more tones  of a color. When drawing in charcoal or graphite, it's good to make this little scales in the bottom of your drawing.

Again, I'm leaving you to study this contrast in usage by a master, Rembrandt van Rijn: 

In my next post things are getting a little more interesting with the Warm vs. Cold Contrast. Stay tuned!