Colour - Building a Library of Colours (3.2)

Requirement

6 x3 = 18 photographs

Purpose

To identify primary and secondary colours and reproduce them in images

Technical learning

• 2 main systems of colour: 1. Painters (aka reflective, substractive) and 2. Light (aka transmitted, additive)
• Primary colours in the 'Painters' are: Red, Yellow, Blue. Primaries in 'Light': Red, Green and Blue.

• The colour wheel helps to understand the relationship between colours: firstly, how some colours are created from others; secondly, how individual colours work in combination with each other.

Colour Wheel (Primaries, Secondaries, Tertiaries)

• Primaries (Red, Yellow, Blue) combined produce Secondaries (Orange = red + yellow; Green = Blue + Yellow; Violet = Red + Blue). 
• Primaries and Secondaries combined produce Tertiaries

Exercise instructions

• Find scenes, or parts of them,  dominated by a single primary and secondary colours (red, yellow, blue – green, violet, orange).  
• With each colour that you find vary the exposure slightly (+/- half a stop) to improve the chance of an acceptable match with the colour in its pure state. 
• Limit the choices of man-made decorative surfaces (e.g. paint on doors).  
• Spend time examining materials in their natural colour (e.g. greens in vegetation, colours of flowers). 
• Seek out backlit colours to avoid surface reflections (e.g. yellow flowers) against a dark background. 
• Consider underexposing bright colours (organge, red, yellow) to make them more intense.  Note, however, that it takes time to find pure, simple colours: uncommon in real life.

Images and review

Warm Colours

Red

Coca Cola Cans

As shot - contains an orange cast

Minus 0.5 stop - more saturated and closer
to pure red

Plus 0.5 stop - increases orange
colour cast

Orange

Carrots 

As shot - 

Minus 0.5 stop - more intense

Plus 0.5 stop - washed out

Yellow

Grapefruit

As shot - yellow is darker than pure

Minus 0.5 stop - has slightly more intense

Plus 0.5 stop - dayglow grapefruit

Cool Colours

Blue

Rain on glass looking up to the sky

As shot - most faithful rendition

Minus 0.5 stop - becomes muddy

Plus 0.5 stop - too pale

Green

Golden Delicious Apples

As shot - correct

Minus 0.5 - too dark

Plus 0.5 - too light

Violet

Lucozade bottles

As shot - most accurate

Minus 0.5 - murky

Plus 0.5 - over bright

Control the strength of colour (3.1)

Requirement

5 photographs

Purpose

To show how colour brightness changes with exposure, whereby under-exposure darkens hue

Technical learning

• Monochrome images, with their currency of contrast and brightness, help focus attention on line, shapes, textures and tones
• However,  colour - as a design element - works differently and often produces a strong response, emotional as well as physical

3 qualities of colour

Hue

• Essential quality of how we name colour e.g. red, blue, etc. 
• Primary colours are 'irreducible', i.e. they cannot be created from mixing other colours. 
• 2 basic systems: reflective (or painters') and transmitted (light). 
• Painters' primaries are Red, Yellow and Blue. Light primaries are Red, Green and Blue. (the Red and Blue of each system are different)
• Secondary colours are created by mixing 2 primaries in equal amounts. 
• In the painter's system: Green = Blue and Yellow, Orange = Red and Yellow, Violet = Blue and Red. 

Saturation 

• Purity or intensity of a colour from grey. 
• At full saturation a colour contains no grey at all. 
• Conversely, at low saturation the colour would be mostly grey.

From desaturated to fully saturated

Brightness

• Degree to which black (shade) or white (tint) is mixed with the hue at a given saturation. 
• At one end of the scale is pure white, at the other pure black.  
• Judge brightness from ‘very dark’ (shade) through ‘average’ to ‘very bright’ (tint) 

Tints of yellow

Shades of yellow

Note - charts sourced from Designing for the Web by Mark Boulton 

http://designingfortheweb.co.uk/book/index.php

Saturation interacting with brightness 

• The chart below shows how for a red hue of the car body part extreme changes in saturation and brightness interact. 
• I created this chart from the photograph of  a red car, shot in RAW and adjusted the saturation and lightness in Photoshop. 

• Central image: The (impure) red car body part as shot by me
• Min Saturation: Min Brightness: Desaturation towards a grey tone, darkened by lowering brightness (adding black) to produce a near black. If the car body was pure red, the result would have been black
• Min Saturation: Max Brightness: Desaturation towards a grey tone,  lightened by increasing bightness (adding white) to produce pink. If the car body was pure red, the result would have been white.
• Max Saturation: Min Brightness: Full saturation of red content, darkened by lowering brightness (adding black) to produce a deep maroon
• Max Saturation: Max Brightness: Full saturation of red content, lightened by increasing brightness (adding white) to a day glow red

Control over saturation - exposure

• Several techniques give you control over colour at the time of shooting – one of the most basic is saturation

Project and review

Find a strong colour, e.g. a painted door. Fill the frame with the coloured subject. Take 5 bracketed exposures: average +/- 0.5 and 1.0 stops.  The underexposure reduces the brightness of the image and conversely overexposure increases it.

Leaf in close up

- 0.5 stop

- 1 stop

Average exposure

+ 1 stop

+ 0.5 stop