#relative colour

[shelandsorcery]

an aside on our eyes and relative colour

I wrote a HUGE post on digital camera white balance, and this is just a little excerpt on one of my favourite aspects of colour: how slippery it is!

So!

If you light a scene with a flame, say in a campfire or on a candle, you know it’s giving everything a warm glow, right? The way it’s doing that is: the light produced by the flame is itself made of mostly red and yellow wavelengths of light. It’s not producing any light on the blue wavelengths.

The way we, or a camera, perceive color is by coloured wavelengths being reflected off the object we’re looking at. The object doesn’t create the coloured light, it requires light of the right color to hit it for the colours of the object to be visible. Sunlight, white light, contains the full spectrum of colours, and so in bright sunlight the light itself shows us all the potential colours – which means it changes none of them, which means the light itself feels white.

When the flame on a candle produces light, it’s mostly producing red and yellow light, which means if it encounters a red object, it shows us the red, but if it encounters a green object, it can only show us the molecules inside that green color that are yellow, and the molecules inside that green that are blue don’t reflect any light. To our eyes, this tints the object yellowish in the candlelight.

However, if you stay a long time in a room lit only by candles, you probably feel like you can see green and blue and purple colours a little still. As I understand it (and my neurologist family members will I’m sure be haunted by this maybe oversimplified info so please follow the rabbit hole here if you’re curious, it’s really interesting stuff!) this is your brain compensating for the tinted information by shifting your identification of colours, maybe to try and help you discern as much information as possible from the limited visual data. You don’t stop knowing it’s warm light, but you adjust to it.

As an example, and here I’m talking about your eyes, remember, not the camera tech yet (we’ll get back to it shortly), here is a photo of a candle.

First off, let me assuage your dress-related paranoia – this is a teal candle.

To me, looking at the photo, this is clearly a teal candle. You can see it’s a lovely seafoam green at the top where it’s warmer and glowing through the melted wax, and a much more vibrant blue farther down, away from the flame.

So let’s take a closer look at these colours! I have isolated a few into bigger dots and overlaid them on the image where they were eyedroppered from:

And here are the same colours just on a neutral 50% grey background.

Here I have eyedroppered that brightest blue in the dots, the one on the bottom right of the image. This is how blue it is: not very blue! Pretty green still! Because that candle’s light cannot show us blue and purple wavelengths, we end up with an image where a cold green-grey starts to feel blue.

Our eyes work to compensate in limited-colour situations. We’re actually really good at it! And anyone who makes art commercially, anyone who designs colour for film and tv, advertising, fashion, games, etc? They all know this and use it when creating images. It’s why, given full colour vision, at a candlelit dinner, you can still tell your green veggies from your red ones.

And it’s not at all new! You can see this in Georges de La Tour’s famous candlelit paintings. The brightest light feels white, and colours still have some vibrance to them, and the scene feels rich, but, there’s no actual blues on the canvas, even though we have no trouble identifying the woman’s dress as light blue:

If you want to read more about how this applies to white balance settings on your cellphone or digital camera, the rest of the post is here:

[ruvigapo]

Run boy run!! The sex monsters eat salmon!!

In which i arrive Fashionably Late to the fishssek party

[nelsaqift]

sillies i forgot to post here

[kijeu]

BANG CHAN ★ [deadpool & wolverine] 내·친·소 ⋆ marvelkorea@YT

[cartarg]

early 2020 jerma streams be like

[laboratoryrats]

Toastyglow: “local colors!!!! relative hues!!!! listen I love a good adjustment layer they are so helpful especially when you need to work fast. but I also love picking special colors myself so here is a crash course in that–as I understand it, anyway.”

Source: Twitter toastyglow

[bastart13]

Do you have a process in how you created the sprites in the L&L cuz they look simple but fit with the background really well!

This general process is the same for each character, though the complexity depends on what the character needs.

Unsurprisingly, the MC has the most... everything, while a character like Veda only has one body sprite and a handful of expressions.

[spontaneite-fr]

Meet Animus and Avarice, two lovers ensnared and animated by a long-forgotten cursed hoard of gold. They are a part of the hoard now.

This pair was six years in the making. First the target was grapefruit sanguine sanguine, then grapefruit sanguine crimson after realising how sick koi looked that way. @hor-wod-flir took over the final leg of the journey, ending a breeding project that has been going since at least May 2018.

(They are now a hatchery pair, and will produce little cursed goldlings together.)

[oscartwofoxtrot]

Generation Kill + scenery 🌈

[slaymate]

Hidden Ones

[pebbleaf]

I got a new laptop today to draw on and tested it out with the boy ! He’s blue now

Blanji (blue sanji)

[filurig]

birdified my blorbos

[solstrix]

Thalassophobia - 2/4

Scripting a room full of people is all fun and games until you have to like. Actually DRAW a room full of people.

1

[whatudottu]

Have a Skyquake I made studying intently at tfp concept art plus also made using green and pink shading/highlights as opposed to my usual purple and yellow combo :)

His pose may be a little stiff but well it's more of a study (ignoring half of the body that i might've wanted to study lmao)

[hostilecityshowdown]

"Seeing Swerve Strickland with that Killmonger type gear from #BlackPanther along with the robe of the Late Jimmy Rave, that was just a whole Vibe!! #AEWDynasty #ProWrestling #WrestlingTwitter Jimmy Rave would have been impressed with that entrance." - posted by @MrKingCoop on twitter, april twenty first, 2024

[i-dont-talk-for-days-on-end]

Pt. 1 - Pt. 2 - Pt. 3 - Pt. 4 - Pt. 5 - Pt. 6 - Best of

I didn't expect this to be a good Sherlock Holmes adaption, but it is!