AuthorTopic: Choosing colors and pallettes  (Read 101321 times)

Offline dragonboy

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Re: Choosing colors and pallettes

Reply #90 on: July 30, 2008, 03:15:58 am
I always love drawing with a 65536 color pallette with 32 shades of blue, 32 shades of red, and 64 shades of green.  32768 is good but the human eye is more sensitive to green than red and blue, so I find the 64k pallette a bit more consistant in contrast.  I don't use the entire pallette when I'm making sprites, I only utilize the largeness of the palette for accuracy, I mostly use about 4-6 shades of colors for everything and I spend a lot of effort making the hues and shades accurate and consistant but I always throw in a lot of fantasy colors like bright blue objects with bright blue-green shadows and bright pink objects with bright violet shadows.  A good trick I use is to first choose the colors off a 4096 color pallette with 16 shades of red, blue, green and then redo the colors in 64k but adjust the colors to as best as possible.  Another thing to look out for is if you have a lot of shades for a color, always make the lightest shade really light, and the darkest shade really dark.  Never use perfect primaries, if you need red use a slightly peach or pink red, for yellow either use Winnie-the-Pooh yellow or lemon yellow (I sometimes use lemon as the tint for Winnie-the-Pooh yellow), use violet instead of purple, and use slightly greenish blues.  As you can see I'm obsessed with pretty colors.

Offline Akira

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Re: Choosing colors and pallettes

Reply #91 on: July 30, 2008, 06:12:24 am
16 colours ought to be enough for anybody >_<
thanks Dogmeat!

Offline Ai

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Re: Choosing colors and pallettes

Reply #92 on: August 26, 2008, 02:11:42 am
16M colours ought to be enough for anybody >_<
Fixed.
Anyway I think you missed the point, which is that selecting from a smaller 'master palette' tends to help you make more appealing color schemes. In the common 16million-color scheme, you have a dizzying array of choices: 256 for each component!!! Realistically you do not need them; they're useful in the computers' representation of pixel colors, but not for your choosing of pixel colors.

My personal preference for color selection is not based on 'N steps of red, green, blue'. Rather, visually clicking on one of say..24 colors which are calculated relative to the starting color, and continuing to do that until your desired color is achieved.
I believe this is more comfortable with the relative nature of human vision, and I'm working on a plugin to make this available in GIMP.

Example of this idea:


Excuse the writing and lines on the image, it's from an SVG design document I'm working on.
If you insist on being pessimistic about your own abilities, consider also being pessimistic about the accuracy of that pessimistic judgement.

Offline Akira

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Re: Choosing colors and pallettes

Reply #93 on: August 26, 2008, 02:35:45 am
Could you post that image at original size so I can read the writing? I'm always intrigued by different colour selection methods.
No problem if its top secret though.
thanks Dogmeat!

Offline Ai

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Re: Choosing colors and pallettes

Reply #94 on: August 26, 2008, 04:06:28 am
That's actually 10x original size :) The writing is 0.2 px in size in the original SVG -- I use zooming to look at the details of what is a very large document. If you want the original svg, I'm happy to send it to you; you would need a viewer that could zoom well though (some viewers just render the svg at one size, and when you zoom it just looks pixelated, rather than gaining detail)

Here's a quick render of the relevant area at some absurd magnification, ending up at ???x1600 pixels big.
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v449/neota/sketch/relativecolorsel-huuuge.png
(290k)

I added labels in yellow to clarify some things.

The accompanying text may also be helpful. I know it's a little complicated at the moment :)
Quote from: text
* Popup with variations on a color, like so:         

Variation grid:
Selecting a
color updates
the grid + FG;
moving       
away vanishes
 the popup. customizable eval() based grid (each cell separately scriptable) with dict of interpolants for each cell.
CTRL+click sets BG.
click+hold on a set expands the set (guaranteed all endpoints preserved)
using smart interpolation. For FG/BG swatches, this opens a more conventional,
exact color picker. (gimp color picking dialog.)

XXX what is color matching behaviour old swatch vs new color?

Scratch area for ideas:
*keep it up until explicitly dismissed
*dismiss on little movement after click + timeout.
Shift-click to insta-dismiss.
'Little movement' means -- the user clicks on an item.
Then, if they don't move outside that item before the timeout,
the popup is dismissed. (I've coded this)
*Dismiss if the user moves outside and doesn't return before timeout.

* sort colors by L* (IF they are in a set) -- as in the 'randomized interpolation' set above
* rightclick -> Edit

The idea is you bind it to a key -- eg. 'c', and then dispose
of the normal GIMP colors dialog, since you can see at a single keypress what FG + BG are, and modify them to what you want in a few clicks more.

DnD behaviour:
*Drop:
  *swatch insertion (fg, bg should be insertable in this way)
  * throw distance?
* Drag:
  * if dropped on BG, inform the user that CTRL+clicking
     does that.

Statusbar:
Hovering on a color should show the formula in the statusbar(red)

Interpolation:
swap old color to BG, or just remember the old color
and provide the possibility to use it as an interpolant.

upon mousebutton press (NOT press+release), update the grid.
This allows the user to wait as long as necessary to
scope out the new colors.
click+swap: we can eliminate the 'swap' button by making a click
on either FG or BG swap them. It might be useful to position the mouse
initially on FG, so you can swap with just hotkey, click
If you insist on being pessimistic about your own abilities, consider also being pessimistic about the accuracy of that pessimistic judgement.

Offline Shrike

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Re: Choosing colors and pallettes

Reply #95 on: December 15, 2008, 01:39:52 am
Wow, this topic kicks arse.

I use Graphics Gale, and I was wondering..
It looks like i can only get RGB (Which is what i usually use) and HSL. Is there a setting/hack I can find to change this? I have photoshop, but i like sliders better than numbers. Also, I have blue eyes. IMMA MUTANT! omfg.

Offline Mathias

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Re: Choosing colors and pallettes

Reply #96 on: December 16, 2008, 05:17:11 pm
I always regret it when art is transformed into mathematics and science, yet color theory is inherenty technical and necessary for the artist to have at least some grasp of. I'm disposed to ignoring the finer details and just trying to get away with knowing the basics, thinking that a true 'artistic eye' will carry me through, making up for the lack of technical comprehension. "The masters" didn't delve into color theory in this manner, yet look at their amazing work. Yes, I'm comparing renaissance oils to pixel art, why not?

It may've already been addressed in this maze of a thread, but I have questions, as we all should:

What colorspace do you guys work in?

A lot of discussion so far on picking colors, but while working inside which color model?

For example, it was referenced somewhere in this thread that RGB is only capable of displaying a portion of what LAB can display, LAB having a much greater gamut. LAB is the common choice among photographers afterall. But would it not defeat the purpose of using LAB to pick colors from if still working in an RGB formatted document, or is it obvious that if one is picking from LAB, that he work in LAB color mode as well?

Additionally, internet browsers are said to use the sRGB colorspace, not RGB. So even if you do careully plan out your color picking plan of attack to get max colors, etc, your pixels on the net are dumbed down to sRGB, a color model that just about fits inside of RGB because it is so limited.

Photoshop, which I use, makes these colorspaces readily available. I don't know about you GraphicsGale, ProMotion, etc., users.
« Last Edit: December 16, 2008, 05:25:28 pm by Mathias »

Offline Ai

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Re: Choosing colors and pallettes

Reply #97 on: December 16, 2008, 09:19:24 pm
Quote
But would it not defeat the purpose of using LAB to pick colors from if still working in an RGB formatted document, or is it obvious that if one is picking from LAB, that he work in LAB color mode as well?
No. LAB just behaves in a more predictable and sensible way than RGB. (though I have to say, I pick colors in RGB and then mix them in LAB to get the best quality+most predictable result). Anyway, from a point of view of color *selection*, LCH is preferable to LAB (LCH is a polar transform of the AB coordinates so they become chromaticity and hue). I would still keep the image itself in RGB, though.
If you insist on being pessimistic about your own abilities, consider also being pessimistic about the accuracy of that pessimistic judgement.