Saturday, May 14, 2011

Color wheel masking in Italian

For those of you who are more comfortable reading in Italian, Alessandro Pedroni has begun a series of posts about the color wheel masking method on his blog PracticaL'Arte.

 
Color Wheel Masking on PracticaL'Arte
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Previously on GurneyJourney:
A digital gamut masking tool
 Series on rethinking the color wheel:
Part 1: Wrapping the Spectrum
Part 2: Primaries and Secondaries
Part 3: Complements, Afterimages, and Chroma
Part 4: Problems with the Traditional Wheel
Part 5: The Munsell System
Part 6: Cyan, Magenta, and Yellow
 Series on gamut mapping and masking:
Color Wheel Masking (Part 1)
The Shapes of Color Schemes (Part 2)
Gamut Masking "From Mask to Palette"(Part 3)
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Color and Light signed from the Dinotopia Store
Color and Light on Amazon internationally: USA | CA | UK | FR | DE | JP

7 comments:

My Pen Name said...

side note but these new, fairly cheap 3d printers could speed up maquette building
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/14/arts/design/makerbot-is-a-new-3-d-printer.html?_r=2&smid=tw-nytimesarts&seid=auto

but i wonder if the 'hands on' process actually contributes the conceptualization.

James Gurney said...

Thanks for that, MPN. 3D printers are amazing. But I agree with your second point. Once a form is in the hands, it's also in the head.

Daroo said...

Along those same lines...

I've been using the YURMBY color wheel and your suggested palette (plus some convenience colors) since I got my copy of Color and Light. It has really sped up my ability to match colors and chroma intensities. So, thanks.

Having an accurate color wheel in your head (or beside your palette) lets you place the desired color in a location on the wheel and "move" your mixture around until its accurate. ("no that's too red I need more magenta --now that's too intense I need to knock it back with some green, yellow shade etc).

Thinking of the color/chroma as a location in "space" is much more successful than the more linear, warmer/cooler approach and then trying to adjust for chroma.


In making my own wheel I realize, I don't have a good method for recognizing peak chroma value and as I work around the wheel I have some issues with saturation cost where I didn't use tube colors.

James Gurney said...

Daroo--thanks for that. Can you explain a bit more what you mean by:

"In making my own wheel I realize, I don't have a good method for recognizing peak chroma value and as I work around the wheel I have some issues with saturation cost where I didn't use tube colors."

Daroo said...

Sorry that wasn't clear.

Well, I'm assuming that the colors at the outer edge of the yurmby wheel are at their peak chroma value and not necessarily at the value that comes from the tube. This is based on trying to match the wheels in Color and Light -- some of the darker tube colors need to be lightened. Correct?

So I can match the colors (value and chroma) that I see in the book -- and that's all I really need to do to make the wheel -- match colors. But, If I weren't matching colors and had to do it on my own I have a lot of trouble seeing the most intense chroma when the value is changing. I guess the value change is easier for me to identify than the intensity change.

Put another way, I can see intensity change across colors of the same value but find it hard to determine chroma intensity across different values (even when I look at your charts on pg 76).

I think this is a deficit in my thinking process and was wondering if you have a good method of getting a mental handle on this? Do you use numbers when evaluating chroma like Munsell? Or do use terms akin to Handprint's "gray, very dull, dull intense, very intense" ( most intense)?

As to saturation cost (maybe I'm not using the term correctly?), I used tube colors for Y,O,R,M,B,C and G and then tried to mix the inbetween sections using the colors on either side and noticed a loss in saturation compared to the colors on either side of it -- especially between blue and magenta. (Ultramarine violet solved the problem)

I guess I was curious as to your technical method in making the wheel: did you lay in the titular colors (YRMBCG) and then inbetween them like I did? Maybe a future post? "YURMBY:DIY

Eric Lynch said...

For those of us NOT comfortable reading in Italian, depending on the browser you use, you can dynamically translate the page.

I use Google Chrome and when foreign language pages come up, the browser just asks me if I would like it to translate for me. It's pretty cool.

James Gurney said...

Daroo, thanks for clarifying, and you used "saturation cost" correctly.

I was indeed trying to use colors at their full chroma at the outside edge of the wheel, which means that the wheel varies in value as you go around.

I should add that the color wheels as printed in the book aren't perfect. Certain colors are really hard to capture in the 4-color process. What I tried to do when I painted the wheel was to find tube colors as close as I could to all six Yurmby colors, and mix them a bit to get them right, then mix a neutral gray and gray them down in steps, correcting where the mixtures sometimes veer off hue.

David Briggs explains saturation cost in wonderful detail in his website HueValueChroma.