When you add the Hue/Saturation adjustment layer, you can set the layer style to “color”. Now we can go through the different color options and manually adjust each color spectrum of; Red, Yellow, Green, Blue, Cyan, Magenta with the Saturation, Hue and Lightness of those selective colors. This allows us to color match two or more images much easier and more accurately. This way is also more mathematically accurate.
Mixing the colours: experimenting with saturation
Saturation refers to the intensity of a colour. This is different from hue (what colour family it belongs to) and value (how light or dark it is). Saturation is the strength of a surface colour, its degree of visual difference from neutral grey.
The objective of this exercise is to learn why certain colours are bright or dull, and how to decrease the saturation of a colour. There are four different ways to lower the saturation of a pure colour. You can either add grey, add white, add black, or dilute a pure colour using its complementary colour.
Here you will lower the saturation of a colour by mixing it with its complementary colour. The complementary of a colour is simply the colour opposite it on the colour wheel: red-green, yellow-violet, blue-orange. Mixing a colour with its exact complementary colour can give you an achromatic grey. By mixing more or less of the complement, you can lower the saturation a lot or a little.
Method
1. Using cadmium yellow and cadmium red, mix an orange that is the complementary of pure cobalt blue. You will now use these complementary colours to create a saturation scale ranging from cobalt blue to orange, with grey in the middle.
2. On a piece of paper, make a swatch of pure blue on one end and one of pure orange on the other. On your palette, add a little orange to some blue and paint a new swatch right next to the pure blue before it so that no paper shows. Next, make a new mix on your palette, using more of the orange than before, and paint another swatch next to the previous one. Continue like this, keeping each mix separate on your palette, until you reach grey. Keep going, painting a swatch of each new mix, until you get as close as you can to the initial saturated orange.
3. Now paint a free composition on primed paper, using all the colours from your saturation scale. Painting geometric shapes such as squares and rectangles will help you focus on colour effects without being distracted by other associations. Create a space with a balance of bright, brightish, dullish and washed-out colours. Think about the placement and proportion of your colours, and how this allows you to demonstrate your own sense of colour.
Hue/Saturation Fundamentals:
In color theory, hue is one of the main properties of a color. It’s the parameters of the colors appearance, the degree to which a stimuli can be described as similar to, or different from, stimuli that are described as red; orange, yellow, green, blue, purple. To understand this we need to know what stimulus is.
Stimulus is a detectable change in the physical or chemical structure of an organism’s internal or external environment.
Essentially it’s how light (that is hitting the object in the environment) affects the elements that make up that object.
Saturation: Values of -100 to +100
Saturation is the intensity (purity) of the hue. When color is fully saturated, the color is considered in the purest/truest version. Primary colors are red, blue, yellow and are considered the truest version color as they are fully saturated (value of +100). The color value of -100 is the absence of intensity of that hue making the image look black and white (I.e. Grayscale).
Quick Tip:
When working with saturation, we rarely add more saturation to an object. Most often, if not all the time, we tend to desaturate images, especially when getting stock photos from websites like Shutterstock or Adobe Stock which have already been adjusted. This is why I gravitated towards MattePaint.com and one reason they exist: to service artists who are looking for realism.
Lightness: Values of -100 to +100
Lightness is known as value or tone. It’s the representation of variation in the perception of a color or color space brightness.
Quick Tip:
In your work you should almost never have pure whites or blacks. Remember that black is the total absence of light, so the closest we could get to pure black is in outer space. It’s similar for white. White is a mix of all colors in their pure form.
Here’s our example image with less values of black and white.
The Hue and Saturation stay the same yet the “lightness” in that color spectrum alters between black and white. Interestingly, you might perceive the image on the right as less saturated but in fact it is the same.
Using Complements to Create Depth and Control Saturation
Complements are opposite each other on the color wheel, the complement pairs are red and green, orange and blue, yellow and purple. The following example is another way to remember it by visualizing how the colors are made.
Primary colors are yellow, red and blue. Let’s pretend that you can make all the colors in the world with these three colors. When you want an orange, you mix red and yellow. When you want a green, you mix yellow and blue. When you want a purple, you mix red and blue. To make complements you need to remember these three primaries: red, yellow and blue.
To find the complement of blue, ask yourself which of the three primary colors are missing? Answer: red and yellow. When you combine red and yellow you get orange, so orange is the complement of blue. Let’s check the other colors. Start with green. What colors of the three primaries are missing? Green is made by mixing yellow and blue, so that leaves red as the missing primary. Red is the complement to green. What colors are missing when you are trying to find the complement to purple? Purple is made of red and blue, so yellow is the missing primary.
Complementary color pairs:
Red and Green ( Green is made from Yellow + Blue)
Blue and Orange (Orange is made from Red + Yellow )
Yellow and Purple (Purple is made from Red + Blue)
Complementary pairs are always opposite on the color wheel; they are opposite in temperature also.
Complementary color pairs:
Red is warm and the opposite of and a complement to Green which is cool
Orange is warm and the opposite of and a complement to Blue which is cool
Yellow is warm and the opposite of and a complement to Purple which is cool
When you mix a warm and a cool color, the same thing happens as when you mix a warm and a cool drink. Your color becomes lukewarm, or a neutral. In color, a neutral is brown or gray. When there is more of the warm color in the complementary mixture, the result is brown. When you have more of the cool color in the mixture, the result is gray. Anytime you mix a warm and a cool color, whether they are complements or not, the result will be a more neutralized color than either of the original colors. Sometimes this is hard to see because it is so subtle. In fact, the best use of complementary colors is to slightly neutralize the color to make it more natural. When you add a slight amount of the complement, you can control the color by turning down its brilliance. This is helpful in establishing atmospheric perspective.
Mixing Complements for a Variety of Beautiful Neutrals
Creating Rich Color Drama and Brilliance Using Complements
When you place the complements next to each other, magic happens! Red next to green will make the green much more alive and vivid. It is in comparing and contrasting the opposite colors that the vividness occurs. Blue-green next to darker blue-green has no flicker or contrast, but blue-green next to red creates drama and excitement, even if the red is used in small amounts.
These are some of the lessons in my workbook on color called “The Philosophy of Color” to order go to:
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