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How do I unify my color temperature in non-analogous scenes?

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daniellooartist polycounter lvl 11
Hello Polycount. Just yesterday I learned about something called color temperature. I heard the word before yet I always thought it just meant the division between ROY and GBV. Several articles and videos point out that if your colors feel out of place, then the "temperature isn't unified." This makes sense since every one of my complimentary paintings look like they share two different light sources, so I've always just use analogous color schemes to stay "safe." The only time I have made decent complementary paintings is when I screenshot someone else's color pallet on Twitch. It's a good short term solution but it doesn't demonstrate understanding on my part. Plus I'd like to have the same understanding as the guy I stole it from.

The internet doesn't have a whole lot of information on this. Literally every single tutorial on the net just says "ROY is warm, GBV is cool. Everything else will just 'feel' warmer or cooler." They never even talk about how value or saturation. If you read my post history on Polycount, you'll see that I am absolutely useless with non-absolutes. I am hopeless with undefined terms. Which is why I'm posting in technical talk. I wouldn't know what "feels" right. We should have definitions or at least some system for measuring temperature. Is a dark reddish-orange warmer than a light desaturated yellow-orange? Or is it the other way around? If so why? If I do a blue/orange scene, how would I make sure my blues are the same temperature as my orange? Or at the very least, how can I make them look like they share the same light source?


EDIT: I paint from life all the time. Whenever I paint from life, my paintings look great. But that's because I can see which colors to use. When it comes to my imagination, that's when things fall apart.


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  • Eric Chadwick
    It sounds like you could spend a bit more time studying color theory.
    http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/Concept_Fundamentals#Color_Theory

    I do a lot of color work in my job as an environment artist. I've studied a bit of color theory. But I also have a reference library of photos and artwork about lighting, in many different situations. Like desert vs. jungle, night vs. sunrise vs. hot noon vs. overcast. Fog colors. Lighting effects. etc.

    Looking at these really helps, when I'm stuck on something. Bing/Google image searches help a lot too, as does Pinterest, Tumblr, etc.

    But as for how to make good color combos... that just comes with time and experimenting, and getting feedback from others.
  • EarthQuake
    The left square is more warm because it is more towards the red spectrum. Warm and cool mean closer to red and closer to blue respectively.
  • RN
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    RN sublime tool
    I don't think that there are precise points on the hue wheel that are set in stone as "this is the warmest and this is the coolest". Different people may choose slightly different points for subjective reasons.
    This page has some interesting text:
    http://handprint.com/HP/WCL/color12.html#warmcircle

    The only time I have made decent complementary paintings is when I screenshot someone else's color pallet on Twitch. It's a good short term solution but it doesn't demonstrate understanding on my part. Plus I'd like to have the same understanding as the guy I stole it from.
    Can you post this stuff? Maybe someone can discover what was it that made that other person's palette work and your original palettes not.
    One thing I was thinking about but haven't yet experimented with, is that if you naively blend two opposing colours you're going to go through the neutral middle of the hue wheel. That is obvious. But if you "bend" the mixing curve slightly maybe the intermediary tones you find will be more interesting.

    Straight, like it usually is (it goes through the middle):


    Bending it you avoid the middle (imagine the dots connected by a curve):

    The logic behind this is that with a curve, the intermediary tones are all "analogous" and make a bridge between the two complementary colours.
    It should be simple to test which one looks better, you just make a gradient for each in Photoshop, take a black-and-white picture and apply the Gradient Map adjustment to it with those gradients and then compare side by side. But I don't have time right now.
  • daniellooartist
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    daniellooartist polycounter lvl 11
    I think I understand. I'll test it and upload my results either later tonight or tomorrow (busy baking maps).
  • daniellooartist
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    daniellooartist polycounter lvl 11
    I've noticed the end two colors on RN's post are 100% S / 70% B yet the middle colors are 50% S / 100% B

    Is this intentional? Is saturation important, or is it just value and hue? If saturation is important, than what roll does it play? I understand hue is derived from the values and the values are derived from the enviromental lighting conditions. But is saturation even important? Can you just go with whatever? All the color tutorials (except Sycra) only talk about the hue component, but almost never touch on saturation.
  • Add3r
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    Add3r polycounter lvl 11
    One thing I have taken out of feedback as my time as a lighting artist, is people will say that a scene feels warm when there is color's resembling sunlight.  Example: When a surface becomes brighter, you see less saturation in that surface as more light is reflected and less absorbed, think of a matte paint compared to a glossy paint.  The matte paint is going to feel more saturated because it is saturated with that light since it is reflecting less of it.  The glossy paint is reflecting a lot more light, and will appear brighter since more light is coming back off of that surface and directly pointed at your eyes.  A bright matte paint Vs a bright glossy paint, the glossy paint will most likely be pointed out as being hot at first glance.  So in a painting or any sort of digital media, it's less of is it "physically correct?" but "does it look right while being physically correct?".
  • RN
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    RN sublime tool
    I've noticed the end two colors on RN's post are 100% S / 70% B yet the middle colors are 50% S / 100% B
    Is this intentional?
    No, I forgot to change the brightness. I didn't even know you could do that in color.adobe.com, but it's possible. Changing brightness (so you have a cool dark end and a warm bright end), you can get this:


    But to get back on what you were talking about, when you ask "how to unify the temperature (or the physical location on the wheel) of my hues", Gamut Masking comes to mind:
    http://gurneyjourney.blogspot.com.br/2011/09/part-3-gamut-masking-method.html
    It is literally a restriction on the variety of hues that you can pick, so the palette that you build this way will, naturally, be more unified.

    Saturation and brightness are not involved in the gamut masking process as far as I know (EDIT actually saturation is involved, since that wheel shows both hue and saturation), you just use saturation and brightness to control other aspects of the colour you're using.
    The decisions you make with saturation and brightness depend on what you're painting, and there's some science on this. You probably have already seen this website but it's worth pointing to it again:
    http://www.huevaluechroma.com/101.php (the link is to the interesting part, but you should read all sections)
  • daniellooartist
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    daniellooartist polycounter lvl 11
    I've noticed the end two colors are 100% S / 70% B yet the middle colors are 50% S / 100% B

    Is this intentional? Is saturation important, or is it just value and hue? If saturation is important, than what roll does it play? I understand hue is derived from the values and the values are derived from the enviromental lighting conditions. But is fffff
  • daniellooartist
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    daniellooartist polycounter lvl 11
    Hey guys. I took what you guys have taught me and tested it to see if I really understood it. I have to say it didn't feel like an uphill battle like a lot of my previous paintings. It felt much easier. I used to have problems "blending" but I think much of that came from the fact that I was trying to mix two colors exactly directly opposite of each other which is why the boarders on my shadows looked grey and poopy.

    Image 1: Ice cold. Use VERY low saturation and used mostly dark. Mostly analogues because I don't think cold images can have a complementary scheme (correct me if I'm wrong)
    Image 2: Medium. Orange/yellow and green were the schemes. It has orange mixed in as well as some blue so it's not fully analogous. I chose those two because of where they fall in the color zones. I wanted a certian value.
    Image 3: Very hot. high saturation to. I used orange and blue. I mixed some red in with the green so even the shadows looked warm. The values are also higher universally.

    I don't know though. You think I'm doing this right?

  • RN
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    RN sublime tool
    I think you should make a thread about this in the 2D area, there should be more people there to help on this.
    Each of those versions gives a different feeling of lighting and material, so if that's what you were trying to do then you were successful.

    See this:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sbz1IT_Xizk
  • Eric Chadwick
    Moving this thread from Technical Talk to 2D Art Showcase & Critiques.
  • daniellooartist
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    daniellooartist polycounter lvl 11
    Thank you very much for the help. Dang, painting actually feels like fun now.
  • korpehn
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    korpehn polycounter lvl 10
    There's a lot of factors playing into whether an image feels cool or warm. Not just the hue choices. From a scientific standpoint saturation is basically the thing that makes a specific color warm or cool.

    For example, a more saturated blue feels more warm than a less saturated blue. However in the case of  relationships between different hues, the old warm colors (red) vs cool (blue) colors is a nice way to look at it. It's not the end all be all for painting, but at least its a starting point.

    Another major factor is the environment or context that is depicted as it will also play a role in what a color represents. Blue can be sky or water, Green can be forest or toxic etc. So there's basically no rule book when it comes to what each color represents, rather there are tropes or cliches (which differ between cultures) that are useful as starting points, like archetypes for characters.

    Btw, Gurneys gamut mapping is awesome xD


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