How do I unify my color temperature in non-analogous scenes?
polycounter lvl 12
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?
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.
Replies
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.
This page has some interesting text:
http://handprint.com/HP/WCL/color12.html#warmcircle
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.
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.
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)
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
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?
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:
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