Color Matching Tutorial
ebergerly
Posts: 3,255
Are there any artists out there who know of a good tutorial that can teach a non-artist what colors go together in an image? Cuz I'm clueless. And honestly, some of the renders I've seen people post have colors that are absolutely painful to look at. And I'm not sure if it's just me or if there's some grand law of the universe that gives guidance on what works and what doesn't.
Kind of reminds me of what seems to be a new style where guys will wear dark blue pants and light brown shoes to the office. Personally, I think it looks horrendous, and I can just imagine my Mom screaming at me to go back upstairs and put on your black shoes. But I'm sure the pros probably know what people like and don't like. I'd love to get an artist-based color tutorial where they explain all that. I'm always impressed when I see movies how nice the colors are, especially the Disney-type stuff.
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Search YouTube for Color Theory
Wow, thanks...there's like a billion videos on color theory
There's lots of color theory tutorials out there. I found this one very interesting and practical from a professional
Adobe has a free tool for creating palettes based on the color theory rules https://color.adobe.com/
Wow, blenderguru has a nice one I'd never seen before. But I think he covers a lot of stuff I recognize as mistakes we make. Especially saturation, which I see overdone a lot.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qj1FK8n7WgY
Wow, excellent !! And it talks about the same complementary schemes that blenderguru mentioned. Thanks.
BTW, apparently that Adobe Color Themes is actually an extension you can get for Photoshop. So you can have it at your fingertips when you work in PS. Unfortunately I have an old CS4, and haven't figured out how to get it added yet.
Googling Color Palette gives a wealth of websites. Most are for designing the colour palettes for websites but can be used for images too.
https://www.google.co.uk/search?client=opera&q=color+palette&sourceid=opera&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8
This is quite an easy one to use.
http://paletton.com/#uid=74J0u0kllllaFw0g0qFqFg0w0aF
Ok this is so life changing for me i did not realize it was usable inside photoshop lol. Thank you for this :D I adore CC and im constantly suprised with finding new things i didnt know about lol.
Yeah, my old CS4 version has a built-in "Kuler" color theme extension that appears to be similar, but maybe more of a community-based thing where people add their own themes. And there's also an option to connect online to Adobe, presumably to take advantage of their other stuff, but for me the "authentication server is unavailable". I guess the only want the paid-for CC folks to take advantage.
Ahhh, okay...the Kuler is another way to get the matching color themes for those using CS4. Under Window/Extensions/Kuler, you'll get a window where you can Browse thru lists of color themes. On the top right next to Browse is Create, and it brings up a color wheel with a dropdown where you can apply the different rules: Complimentary, Analagous, etc.
Cool.
But as Al Pacino says, "just when I thought I was out of Photoshop, they keep pulling me back in". Oh, and I even found an OpenEXR plugin for PS, which was one reason I liked Gimp.
By the way, I'd strongly recommend for people to consider applying some of the color rules to your stuff. It really can make a huge improvement. And when others look down their noses at Poser/DAZ renders, maybe part of that is the lack of knowledge of basic color rules like these. At least it can't hurt. BTW, the blenderguru video shows some excellent examples of some gorgeous images that follow the different rules.
I'm thinking I'll start to do some renders, and then tweak them in PS or Nuke to change the colors to match some of these rules.
There are. Enough for every learning style. It's important to find things that are going to cater to how you learn.
Yeah, I'm going to have to check this out too. Thanks on that info ebergerly!
So for those who understand color theory...
Okay, I have the Kuler extension working okay. And my thought is this:
Let's say I have a character with some clothing of a certain color. I can do a render, and bring the render into photoshop. Then what I can do is use the eyedropper to sample the color. It also places that color as the Foreground color. And in the Kuler window I can click on the "Add current foreground color as base color", and it adds that color to the color wheel. I can then decide if I want Complementary, or Analagous, or whatever color rule. From that I can generate the 5 colors from that rule, and add it to my Swatches. Then I can just draw on the image with any of those swatch colors to design the other colors I want for the surroundings.
Is that how artists do it? I guess when you're designing your render you need to draw out the colors you're gonna use?
So what I did is take a recent Star Wars fighter render I did, and make some Complementary colors from the general sky blue of the image. And I painted the 5 colors using a brush, then tweaked the brightness and painted 5 more with lower brightness. And below is the result.
Off the top I'm not liking the complementary colors. Brown and blue or whatever. Although I think I'm partially color blind (red and green), so maybe I shouldn't judge
Okay, I tried Analogous, and hastily (and poorly) drew in some mountains with one of the analogous brownish colors, then threw a bunch of PS filters at it to make it look a little bit more like mountains. And actually I think the colors look okay together. Although, like I say, I'm kinda color blind. But at least if someone says they look terrible I can say "HA !! Shows what you know !! That's a KULER color !!"
I think you may have stumbled across this already, but bad news. In color theory these colors are complementary, one of the safest bets for "looks good together," and in fact blue and orange (brown is actually a shade of orange or vice versa depending how you look at it) is one of the most commonly professionally used, "safe," sets of colors for movie posters. I'd actually recommend playing around with it a LOT for dramatic renders. Orange key light paired with blue rim and fill lights, etcetera.
This color set looks really good to me.
Maybe it's more about my subconscious view of brown. I've never really liked it. It's drab, and it's dirt, and other stuff that's kinda nasty. I mean if you're gonna do some pretty images, brown is probably last on my list. But I guess I'm learning about colors today. Before I was clueless. Now I'm dangerously clueless.
And color blind.