Tuesday 8 January 2013

Colour Theory - Part 1 and 2

Systematic Colour, how we see colour and how its perceived.

Introduction to Colour Principles - Part 1;
 Introducing colour to the words changes the way that you read things, some even becomes painful. Illegible and hurts, it moves it wobbles it shifts. If you use colour use it responsibliy, this is why its so important, if you get the colour wrong it ruins the design.


It covers such as spectrum, billions of variation of colour, we don't all see colour the same.All based of basic fundamental theories.


The ability to perceive colour, is from the principle that different colours have different length and strength wave lengths. As light travels in waves, the different frequency of each wave shows different colours.


When a wave of red light hits a cone, it will see red. Combined with the rods you can see lighter and darker versions of those colours. All based the the fact that we perceive colour through light.

  • Primary colours, red yellow and blue, because you can't make those colour by mixing other colours. 
  • Secondary colours, violet green and orange, because they are made up from mixing the primary colours. Mixing only two of the Primary colours.
  • Tertiarys are the colours made up of the primary and secondary colours, the intermediate colour.

A different set of Primarys, designed for web and tvs, anything that that is to be seen on screen or through projection which is known as RGB. The other set of primary colours is CMYK, is used when dealing with print, it is seen as physical colour.



Subtracted colour means that when you mix the primary colours together, you are actually removing colour from one another.


CMYK are the primary colours whereas RBG are secondary, when using a subtractive colours system. CMYK arethe secondary colours whereas RGB are primary, when using additive colour system.


Diffferent ways of producing and developing colours through pigment and light. There is a lot of different colour models and colour modes out there. This is optically mixing colours, rather than physically mixing it, using light. The sky is blue as it is a weaker wave lengths, it gets reflected and refracted into out eyes, whereas red and green are strong wavelengths. Its only perceived colours as it optics.


Primay, Secondary and Turtiary colours on a colour wheel.
Complimentary colours are the direct opposite on the colour wheel. Optically they are directly opposed to each other, and they don't work together, they destroy each other.


When mixing the complimentary colours together you are subtracting the colours, therefore coming out with a dull grey colour.

In effect when mixing complimentary colours toether you are mixing all the primary colours together, e.g. red and green(yellow and blue mixed together). Mixing red green and blue light to see different colours.


All these are colours as well and impact the way that we see different colours around them.
All of this comes down to the ability to read colours, and perceive colours.

Dimensions of Colour - Part 2;

Hue is the chromatic value, but you have to consider the tone and saturation.




Shade - How bright something is and how dull something is, gets duller as we desaturate. Darker colours absorbe more light.
Tint - Reducing the chramatic value, reflecting more light as it has a higher luminance. Chramatic value is lower.
Tone - Desaturating the colour, it has very little colour value in it.


Saturation is how much of a colour is present in its purest form. Look at different dimentions of this colour by desaturating it by pushing the blue towards the grey. Also you could push it through to black. The palest and the darkest is one dimension. You can push it towards a different colour by desaturating the colour by pushing it woards the violet, this removed the blue.

Looks red but only as it is the only red we can see, it is the redest red.

 Forcing us to see the other red in a different way, as it is shown with a lighter red around it.

 Comparing it with an orange it looks to be red.

 But dropping on a red box around it it makes the original red box look pink like magenta, and the orange looks duller, more brown than before.

Adding more boxes makes the boxes look more pink and more brown.

Dimensions of different reds that go through tone hue and saturation. Have a really dense dark in the middle and looks darker than the outer box although its the same colour.

This shows that they are the same colour, and simply by changing the colour of the surrounding its changes the way which you see the colour and perceive it. Lot of different things effect the way you see a colour.


If you chose a colour, that is the colour you are going to get. You can use pantone if your colour blind too. It is a system that is commonly understood, that are printable producable. This is because it has a certain code, therefore its the coding system you can work with.

You can colour match anything through pantone. Incredibly subjective system of interpritation.

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