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I came across an interesting article about digital color a while back, that I can't find now... Anyway, the basic gist of the article was how artists have to be trained to ignore the psychology of color in order to produce realistic imagery. The author used 3-D art, such as digital movie effects, as an example, but I think it can apply to photo restorations and colorizations as well.
When we are young we are taught color identification using very bright and vivid hues. The bright colors help small children to differentiate between hues. Apples become a bright red, the sky a certain blue, leaves green, etc... After a time we begin to associate objects with very vivid hues. When someone says "red", most people think of a very intense, bright red. We become psychologically conditioned to "see" colors in a certain way but in nature such vivid hues rarely, if ever, appear.
One thing I have noticed in many of the Retouch Challenge entries (especially the "glamour" ones) is the intensity of color. I can't help but think that many times when we go to color something, we do not see the "real" color, but rather what our mind tells us should be the correct color. Lips are a good example. Often, the colorization of lips takes on an intensity that would never be seen in real life. We think in our mind "red lips" and color with what our minds have been trained to consider red - a very intense and saturated color.
One of the first color exercises I did in art school was meant to break our mind's concept of color. We took a photo of an intensely colored object and cut it into a pieces. We glued half the pieces to a board and retained the rest. The empty areas on the board corresponding to the missing pieces, were then painted in, as realistically as possible to match the image. The point of the exercise was to get us to understand not only how to mix color but to gain an understanding of how color appears in nature. By cutting the image into pieces we no longer associated the color with an object...just a collection of lines, shapes, colors and shadows. At the end of the assignment we looked at the images, which were all very realistic, and then at the palettes of all the colors we had mixed. To my astonishment, none of the colors seemed "intense" enough for the object I had just painted and yet my resulting image seemed very realistic. After that I never had a problem with reproducing "realistic' colors.
This is not really meant to be a tip in the traditional sense...more like a color philosophy (I can hear the groans!
). Seriously, if you are having problems achieving realistic colorizations, take the time to sample all sorts of colors and build a library of swatches. Start learning to "see" the real hue of things and not just what your mind tells you the color should be. I have a friend in the pre-press industry who is excellent at color correction as well as an accomplished artist. He once told me that he no longer sees hues (red, blue, green, etc...) in a traditional sense but rather, mathematical combinations and mixtures. You don't need to get that extreme to get good results, but just a little bit of that thinking can really help achieve realistic imagery!
-Greg
When we are young we are taught color identification using very bright and vivid hues. The bright colors help small children to differentiate between hues. Apples become a bright red, the sky a certain blue, leaves green, etc... After a time we begin to associate objects with very vivid hues. When someone says "red", most people think of a very intense, bright red. We become psychologically conditioned to "see" colors in a certain way but in nature such vivid hues rarely, if ever, appear.
One thing I have noticed in many of the Retouch Challenge entries (especially the "glamour" ones) is the intensity of color. I can't help but think that many times when we go to color something, we do not see the "real" color, but rather what our mind tells us should be the correct color. Lips are a good example. Often, the colorization of lips takes on an intensity that would never be seen in real life. We think in our mind "red lips" and color with what our minds have been trained to consider red - a very intense and saturated color.
One of the first color exercises I did in art school was meant to break our mind's concept of color. We took a photo of an intensely colored object and cut it into a pieces. We glued half the pieces to a board and retained the rest. The empty areas on the board corresponding to the missing pieces, were then painted in, as realistically as possible to match the image. The point of the exercise was to get us to understand not only how to mix color but to gain an understanding of how color appears in nature. By cutting the image into pieces we no longer associated the color with an object...just a collection of lines, shapes, colors and shadows. At the end of the assignment we looked at the images, which were all very realistic, and then at the palettes of all the colors we had mixed. To my astonishment, none of the colors seemed "intense" enough for the object I had just painted and yet my resulting image seemed very realistic. After that I never had a problem with reproducing "realistic' colors.
This is not really meant to be a tip in the traditional sense...more like a color philosophy (I can hear the groans!
). Seriously, if you are having problems achieving realistic colorizations, take the time to sample all sorts of colors and build a library of swatches. Start learning to "see" the real hue of things and not just what your mind tells you the color should be. I have a friend in the pre-press industry who is excellent at color correction as well as an accomplished artist. He once told me that he no longer sees hues (red, blue, green, etc...) in a traditional sense but rather, mathematical combinations and mixtures. You don't need to get that extreme to get good results, but just a little bit of that thinking can really help achieve realistic imagery! -Greg
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