fascinating optical illusion

[ratcreature]

It is really cool how color perception works.

Comments

[sholio]

Wow, that's an awesome link. :D

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.

[ratcreature]

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).

[sholio]

*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.

[ratcreature]

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.