Tutorials |
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| Digital color pickers are based on the pure pigment system of colors and their mixing. Reading through the traditional media Palette section will still be helpful to you. If you are a traditional media artist this should help make sense of the digital swatches. |
| On the standard Photoshop color swatch, the traditional pigment colors are laid out like this: (in the two rows circled) They are not laid out quite evenly, because in real life the pigments near the bottom are stronger. This swatch is an even gradation of value, which doesn't quite exist naturally in real-life pure pigments either, although you can mix colors to become that way. |
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| Digital colors are unfortunately diluted with white and black for Hue, Saturation and Brightness. On the Photoshop swatch this is generally what the colors are mixed with white added (top circle) or black added (bottom circle): |
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| On the Corel Painter pallet, the triangular color picker lets you pick your own amount of added white or black, and the manual mixing window will let you mix colors without any added white or black.: |
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| Scumbling, or transparent colors are laid out on the Photoshop palette here: |
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the Chromatic Toners, Raw Umber and Burnt Umber are shown here in
gradations mixed with white. If you add a color layer to any of these it
makes Chromatic Greys in warm or cool tones. You can also use these two pure colors to make chromatic adjustment layers by paint bucketing a 'screen' with them and turning the opacity down. |
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Additive and Subtractive Color |
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Color mixing digitally is very intuitive, because there are scale sliders and layers, and opacity and you can mess around a great deal before having to
commit, and you can see the effects up front.
The difficulty when starting to use digital color, if you have been a traditional artist,
is the concept of additive color. In the physical world when we add one layer of color on top of another, less light is able to escape and we wind up with dark browns and black. TOO MUCH COLOR
(light absorbed by layers of pigment or ink) is subtractive. = black |
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Losing color |
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Early in your digital work when you are really sweating over images, you will notice the Problem with Purple. Your images will
slowly develop a purplish hue that will not go away. You can slide the color slider to green, and the purple will either just move to somewhere else, or the image will look splotchy and stark without it. What's been happening is that every time you do any color, saturation, or brightness adjustment, the image: 1. loses color information by desaturating, or adding contrast (and losing color increases light) 2. has light added by lightening 3. has more color added to increase saturation (and more color equals more light) 4. has more color added by using multiple layers at low opacity (and more color adds more light). When a digital image is overworked it loses lots of color. It still LOOKs bright and colorful, but there is less color information there. You might notice that the contrast has increased, but especially if you are working on subtle colors, you won't notice until you start to see the brownish purple. What has occurred is that less and less pixels have color information, and with dwindling color the light drifts toward the end of the color spectrum; which is the red end. It's not that your pixels have CHANGED color, it's just that our eye can no longer see enough of it to perceive it as a color except as a reddish color. So when you try to use the usual color adjustment sliders, suddenly they don't work, or they work in erratic ways. Unfortunately to cannot fix an image that has lost too much color, so ALWAYS have a copy of your source material somewhere else, and it helps to have your adjustments OFF of the source image (on a separate adjustment layer[s]) instead of adjusting the image itself. It also helps, just like with regular pigments, to do your main color mixing with only one or two steps, and then just a little adjustment layer. There is another thing about adjustment layers that is important: when you take a solid color and lower the opacity to make it transparent, this not only adds a lot of light, but you will see it makes your source image underneath a little hazy. If you add several of these layers it dims your image, and then you have to adjust contrast, and saturation, and you are back in the loop of losing color information. |
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Using Screens |
| Instead, apply your adjustment layers as screens. Screens are like fine chicken wire or mesh; there are actual holes in them. The advantage is that they can alter a color WITHOUT adding as much light as a transparent solid layer. And then, if you alter the color or opacity of just the screen with contrast or saturation adjustments, you are adding light to just a percentage of the pixels instead of to ALL of them. |
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Digital Reflectivity |
| Reflectivity
is a critical tool in building 3 dimensional form in 2 dimensional
space, And it's a great difficulty in digital media, because there is no
true 'surface' to utilize. It's also easy to make the mistake of
thinking of the virtual area as 3D, but it isn't. Even with 3D graphics,
the image is on a 2 dimensional plane. If you are planning to print you artwork out, you have the advantage of influencing reflectivity through your paper choice. The textured papers make both the dark inks richer and the light areas have more reflective matte illumination. Watercolor paper with a plain paper setting is nice, or the velvet and fine art papers at their special settings. If the artwork STAYS digital, there are challenges. Photoshop is very poor in having texture tools, but is easy to MAKE textures with Photoshop. Scanning textured papers, stained and textured glass, fabrics, and photographing interesting surfaces can be applied in layers and tints for painting. But it's kind of like tissue-paper collage. Photoshop's paint tools are mostly of the soft smeary kind and colors don't directly mix, but the colors from the palette are easy to adjust. Cutting, masking, and graphics tools are easy to use. Rich and smoothly reflective paintings are easy in Photoshop, but subtle rough and matte reflective paintings are difficult. Corel Painter is more awkward for the graphical tasks, and has terrible adjustment tools, but has many painting advantages; there is the option of APPLYING papers after the image is finished, or on different layers for texture. The color picker is nasty with it's hue/sat/brightness triangle which makes ugly color, but it does have an interactive mixer where you can mix richer colors without added black and white. You can also store your own palettes if you have the patience to re-read how every time. Corel Painter brushes are a treasure but many react differently, so you have to have familiarity. Their chief advantage is how delicately and specifically you can set them up. You also can paint with pattern and a brush setting combined. You can make erasures behave as you want. And some brushes will combine colors. Others will combine layers. The chalk and dry brush settings in Painter make the best rough and reflective surfaces of any digital brush, and they can be set very fine for delicate scumbling. Alternatively the oil brushes make rich saturated strokes similar to glazing, so you can take full advantage of the painting tutorials described in the rest of this website. Once you get used to painter's color mixer, you can mix very gradual color changes to quite drastic ones without any trouble at all, and they can be handily stored in the custom palette. A lot of artists do their tonal sketch, then scan that into painter and start their color painting right on top of that. Making a copy of this tonal sketch is amazingly useful later as a single tonal and contrast adjustment layer when the painting is closer to being finished. |
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Digital Color Mixing |
| The first thing you'll notice when using digital tools is that it seems like you've lost your subtlety. It seems impossible to make bright colors anything but glaring. And if you are not used to color, then you have the problem of everything you do seems to be greyish or brown. So these exercises should help. Corel Painter is by far superior for this, but you can do it in Photoshop by using all the basic brushes in large sizes with the opacity turned down (and airbrush button on). To make a very light texture switch to dissolve and turn the volume down also. |
| Using just black, turn the opacity and volume down. Make the brush size mid-to-large. Work on controlling the density of your strokes using different brushes. This sample is with Painter fur and chalk1 brushes, opacity .06, grain .09 |
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| Next put down a solid layer of opaque color, and use your brushes in both light and dark strokes on top (same layer). Then try the blend tools across them. Try texturizing or adding a paper texture when you are done blending: |
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| Now pick two contrasting colors, and using one brush, try to mix them (without using a blending tool) to create a third color on the same layer. This sample is a Painter chalk brush. Note that it blends with a felt-like finish rather than a super-smooth satin finish. It looks a little grainy, and the colors don't actually blend; they sit on top of each other. This type of brush makes a very good reflective colors. This chalk brush would equate with Scumbling in the painting tutorials. |
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| Next blend transparent colors on separate layers using just a soft brush and an erasure, but no blending tool. I began to notice that Dark Blue colors don't like to blend. They're kind of 'sticky'. Try blending three colors on separate layers This transparent layered blending will equate with Glazing in the painting tutorials. |
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| Now put down a solid opaque color, and then roughly spread a contrasting color over it (on the same layer) try for dark over light and light over dark color combinations. This time use the blending brushes only across one edge to see how that affects color mixing. I again found that dark blue was 'tacky, and didn't mix into vibrant hues. |
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| Finally, using your brushes, erasures, and your blending tools, choose two colors and mix them seamlessly. Try three colors. The most outstanding thing to notice is that the color intensity of these mixes is very high, but the subtlety is very delicate. This technique not only mixes very vibrant hues, but it gives you very quick and accurate control over the texture and color variation. |
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Why use mixed digital colors? |
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Digital Black is chromatically cool. Normally in painting an artist does not use true black, but rather mixes a cool black and a warm black, and the warm black is most often used, and then sparingly. When digital contrasting is used, it adds true black, which contains no warm overtone. I find myself with almost every image, having to apply an light yellow adjustment screen at the end to counteract this. Also; digital contrasting tends to add additional black and white, and decreases color. Avoid it all you can, or until the last step. Dark blue not only doesn't like to blend easily (the dry
layered chalk brush works best for it) but when it does mix it results
in very dull muddy hues. Instead of mixing it, when it's needed
apply it as a top coat on a separate layer. Brown is hideous; don't use it. Brown is generally a monochromatic hue which depends significantly on reflection. Digitally there is no reflection; there is only self-illumination, and illuminated brown is the ugliest thing on the planet. If you NEED to use brown try this: -copy the image to a separate document. Change the mode to greyscale. Take a look now: if your image is mostly grey, then forget it, choose another color other than brown. If your image has a good contrast spectrum of lights, darks, and mid-tones, then proceed. Change the mode again to either monotone or duotone. Adjust to get the color hue of brown which you desire. Change the mode again to RGB. Cut and paste the chromatic brown back into the original file. |
| Other
Notes: as shown above, not all digital colors behave
alike.
-Different types of brushes work better/worse for different colors. -Losing color information through allowing too much additive light into the image results in purpling and unpredictable slider adjustments. -Adjustment layers in screens help minimize additive color complications. -Mixing your own colors makes richer color than the color picker will
give you. But mix a minimum number of steps/times.
Jess Bates jessbates (at) gmail.com |
