Yeah, I did the same thing with the eyedropper. I mean, I knew, sort of, in theory that color perception takes into account what light it is, but I hadn't thought it would be so extreme.
That explains *a lot* though, for why my colors often don't look right (especially when I want to have a different light, like night time or firelight) when I color things, because I fall into the trap to color via the "grass is green" fallacy of what the colors "ought to be" and don't take into account that instead I ought to draw the wacky colors, so that I'd fool the viewer into employing the same compensations they would need to when looking at this for real.
Wow, thanks for that link, really fascinating. I tried that thing with the slider in the second illustion, and it's interesting to see how the eyes adjust - when you slide it back to the original colors, the eye first sees the middle pieces as grey and then quickly shifts them back to blue/yellow. Very cool.
Yeah, it's really amazing how our eyes work to make recognizing colors easy and compensate. Of course it also kind of sucks because you always have to work against what you think you perceive when you paint anything in color. I mean, I know that in theory, but I always forget to account for that when I color things, and then of course it doesn't look natural or like the light I want, because I get stuck on the "grass is green" model of coloring. It's harder even than perspective, because there at least the distortions follow fairly logical rules, but color depends on so many things that all influence it.
For some reason this is something I don't have too much trouble with when I'm working in traditional media -- probably because the paints I use are transparent (watercolor and acrylic), so they change color with overlays anyway, and I usually work from a very limited palette, which helps a lot. But wow, have I ever had a hard time getting the hang of relative colors in computer coloring. I've slowly managed to move myself away from flat, oversaturated colors, but it's still kind of freaky to me how the color blocks change color as I add other colors around them.
You could do the color in transparent layers in the computer? Have you tried that? Then you can even fiddle with your overlay to determine how the colors are mixed and change opacity and the kind of overlay with a button (whether multiply, which is good for overlaying grayscale shading with color, or the soft/hard light overlays, or the plain ones just with changed opacity, and there are a couple more, but I actually have never used any besides normal, multiply and light, so I don't know what those do).
*nods* Yeah, I've done the color overlay thing; actually, I do it a lot -- I've found it hugely helpful at figuring out how colors work, especially for night/rain/underwater scenes or sunsets or other situations where the colors are very different from how they'd normally be. Even when I think I'm desaturating the colors enough, then I'll add a 10% opacity blue overlay and discover that it looks so much better when it's pushed that little bit farther.
Yeah, that overlay feature is neat, I've done that too with computer colored things, like add an orange layer to make the scene cozier, or a blue one for night scenes. As I've colored in the computer before trying traditional media I've found it somewhat unfortunate that physical colors don't quite work like that when you do glazes to change the mood. I guess because colors turn out when layering pigments depends on so many things, whereas digital colors are quite predictable.
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ratcreature) wrote2010-01-16 06:20 pm
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That explains *a lot* though, for why my colors often don't look right (especially when I want to have a different light, like night time or firelight) when I color things, because I fall into the trap to color via the "grass is green" fallacy of what the colors "ought to be" and don't take into account that instead I ought to draw the wacky colors, so that I'd fool the viewer into employing the same compensations they would need to when looking at this for real.
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For some reason this is something I don't have too much trouble with when I'm working in traditional media -- probably because the paints I use are transparent (watercolor and acrylic), so they change color with overlays anyway, and I usually work from a very limited palette, which helps a lot. But wow, have I ever had a hard time getting the hang of relative colors in computer coloring. I've slowly managed to move myself away from flat, oversaturated colors, but it's still kind of freaky to me how the color blocks change color as I add other colors around them.
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