Crafting Images
COLOR: the technology of color
What is most important to understand when learning about the technology of color?
First of all, it is important to differentiate between mediums when talking about color. Color for print is different than color for computer monitors, which is different from color for television.
COLOR FOR PRINT
When we use color for print, whether it’s in Photoshop, Quark, or another desktop publishing program, it needs to be created as a CMYK color space or Spot color space.
CMYK is an acronym for Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and blacK. The K is used to avoid confusion with the B in RGB. CMYK is also referred to as process color (most printing presses will refer to it this way). These 4 colors are combined together in the printing process to create a full color spectrum. Each color value is represented as a percentage in CMYK color space, so 100% means that the color is applied at full saturation. When using Photoshop for process color printing, it is best to choose CMYK as your Photoshop color mode.
Spot color is a more expensive printing process where an exact ink color is used from a universal industry standard color matching system. Pantone is the most widely known and used color matching system for spot color. A specific spot color is often referred to as a PMS color for Pantone Matching System. Each PMS color is numbered according to its hue. When using Photoshop for spot color printing, it is best to choose Lab Color as your Photoshop color mode.
COLOR FOR COMPUTER MONITORS
When color is produced on a computer monitor it is created as RGB color. RGB is Red, Green, and Blue, which make up additive primary colors. Meaning that when you add red, green, and blue in different capacities, you get the full spectrum of color.
Great. That was easy, right? Not quite.
RGB is the most unreliable way of creating reliable color. On a computer monitor there are lots of different variables that make up the look of a color. Brightness, contrast, and gamma greatly affect the way your eye sees a color.
Brightness is a subjective way to refer to luminance. What? Say that again? Brightness refers to how bright our own eye sees something. Luminance is a scientific measurement of the “luminous intensity” in a per unit area, usually a pixel on a monitor.
Contrast refers to the degree of tonal separation or gradation in the range from black to white. Photoshop refers to this as “levels.”
Gamma is often confused with brightness. Gamma is often confusing period. Let’s explain it this way. Monitors are electronic. Electronics require electricity. Electricity takes voltage. Voltage can be variable – it is the pressure flow of electricity. Gamma creates the relationship between the voltage and the brightness of your monitor. When the gamma is changed, it only changes the value of the middle tones, leaving the shadows and highlights unaltered.
Gamma is responsible for the differences in the way that PC monitors look versus Mac monitors. PC monitors always tend to look darker than Mac monitors. The standard for gamma on Windows is 2.2, and on Mac 1.8. What? You thought standards were supposed to be, well, standard? Sorry, the war of the platforms continue.
Mac gamma gives you a lot more detail in the whites at the expense of the blacks. This is better for print projects, but less ideal for video. Mac OS Color Sync gives you the ability to correct gamma according to the project you are working on.
COLOR FOR TELEVISION
Composite Color – Composite color is what first made up color television. When Color TV first came out in the 1950’s, everyone had a black and white TV. Someone came up with the brilliant idea to just add a color signal onto the existing black and white signal being broadcast to the world. It simplified the broadcast signal and allowed people to upgrade to color at their convenience.
Black and white TV was made up of a Luminance signal only. (Luminance is the brightness levels of an image.) When Color was added to the TV signal, they added a Chrominance signal. (Chrominance is the hue and saturation of color.) It is also called Y/C, where Y stands for Luminance and C stands for Chrominance.
Component Color- Component color is what makes up the color for High Definition Television. The video signal keeps the Red, Green and Blue color information separated from each other, each having their own “Component.”
COLOR: the psychology of color
WHAT IS COLOR?
Color is simply the quality of light.
When we speak of color you may hear the words, hue and saturation.
Hue is the gradation of color of light.
Saturation is the intensity of a specific hue.
Isaac Newton discovered that when you hold glass (a prism) up to light, the sunlight splits into red, orange, yellow, green, cyan, and blue beams. He realized that there was a natural progression of this color and was the first to join them together in a circle.
Another color theorist, Johann Wolfgang Goethe began studying the psychological effects of color more than a century after Newton. He divided colors into plus and minus fields. The plus field stood for the colors that produced excitement in the viewer. The minus side stood for the colors associated with disturbing feelings.
+ -
Red, yellow, orange, etc. Green, blue, purple, etc.
A man named Johannes Itten created the form of color theory still in use today. Itten was a teacher at the Bauhaus School of Art in Weimar, Germany and his color wheel contains 12 hues with three primary colors as the basic building blocks of color. (See the jpg called Colorwheel.jpg in your tutorial CD). This color wheel looks similar to the numbers on a clock.
When people talk about color scheme, they are talking about combinations of colors on this color wheel developed by Johannes Itten. There are several different kinds of color schemes that you should be comfortable with.
Complimentary colors are colors that are found opposite each other on the color wheel.
Monochromatic colors are variations of a single hue of color.
Analogous colors are colors that are close to each other on the color wheel. For example, red, orange, yellow.
Now it gets a little more confusing, but bear with me, there are two more important ones:
Split Complimentary colors uses the two colors that are adjacent to the opposite complimentary color on the color wheel. What? For example, the complimentary color of purple is yellow, right? That means the split complimentary colors of purple are orange and green, the colors right next to yellow.
Triadic colors are three colors that are equally spaced around the color wheel. For example, red, yellow, and blue are triadic colors.
COLOR MEANING
RED –
ORANGE –
YELLOW –
GREEN –
BLUE –
PURPLE –
WHITE –
BLACK -
