“Hey Blake, that Color Wheel you teach us is incorrect. It should be Red, Yellow, and Blue. That’s what they taught us in grade school…”
How many emails and comments I get that goes something like that would blow your mind! I get it. What I teach with Color Theory goes against all the molds of Color Theory out there. To some degree, I even get a little confused sometimes, being a former painter. But there is a reason for it!
In this event, I want to take a look at Color Theory from a different perspective to help tie in the theories of the pigment-based RYB model and the digitally-based RGB CMY model. This is not intended to be a basic look at Color Theory and will expand on what I have taught you over the years. It will give you some clarity about color and the multiple Color Theory Models in circulation.
Great discussion, Blake; I missed the live version because I was out of town, but glad to see I can leave a question.
You teach about color harmonies and I think we naturally look for harmonious combinations; I wonder about the opposite: What color combinations would produce dissonance? In other words, are there theories about what to avoid if we are seeking harmony or even using color to produce dis-harmony depending upon the subject?
There certainly are. Some colors just don’t work well together, but its a lot harder to spot them in images as opposed to fashion. Brown and orange are not good in clothing, but in an image, we usually don’t see the full vibrance of those colors, and therefore they don’t look bad per se.
I think for us; it’s more about the amount of color or the potency (saturation) of color that tends to bite us. Too much, especially in colors that don’t work well together, and it just doesn’t look pleasing to the eye.
Blake, thank goodness for replays. I’m a night owl and living half way around the world from you the timing doesn’t always suit when the versions are live. When I started school we were told to draw in the grass and then the sky. Woe betide if we were to draw the sun in ahead of time. Stick figures filled a little of the in-between spaces but apart from that those pastel drawings were my only art experience at school.
I haven’t been using the colour wheel as a reference lately. Well, I still don’t have the panels added in to ACR/PS yet. Well, I’m on one of the newer Macs but I’m never going back to Windows! Enough said. You’ve no need to hear negative comments. For now I’m using your resources in ACR and if I want to make another adjustment in PS then I take a layer back over to ACR. One has to be resourceful.
Last December our cruise went to Milford Sound whilst enroute to the Sub-Antarctic Islands and I fiddled with one of the shots I took. In the foreground the colour was whited out so I cropped that out and worked on the sheltered bits. The beach had a stone foundation and it reminded me of blue metal wedged between the water and verdant background. I decided to enhance the blue, making it more prominent, and took it along to my camera club for a discussion. In the end, someone asked that it be opened up in Lightroom! Well, no matter what was done to it it didn’t work. I never said one word about what i’d done and I still find it hard to adjust to LR… The only time I use it is to stitch together massive panos which I then take into FS and maybe ACR to process! I shall have to get the colour wheel out and take another look at that shot. I’d reprocess it but I’m not getting rid of what I’ve already created b/c I want to use my ‘overdone’ analogous creation in a fantasy compilation one day. Maybe I’ll need to add in King Neptune’s pitchfork so people will back off…
lol, it happens. Lightroom and ACR share the same engine behind their program though, so anything done in one can be done in another.
Like Robyn said, thank goodness for replays. This was a really great session. I like how you emphasized “theory” and how your vision should be driving. Also not forcing in colors. Now that masking skies is so easy, I have to be really careful about putting false/forced colors in the sky. 🙂