Choosing colors and pallettes

[Soup]

I have found that certain colors look beter when Hue Shifting twoards another color.
For a skin tone, I sugges have something like this.
SHADE 1

R 233 G 202 B 160
Midtone
218 147 129 ( Note the pinkinsh hueshift.)
2nd Shade
175 121 88 (Now note the brownish shift.)
Darkest Shade
131 71 71 (Finally a maroon-purple shft)
All the colors look great together.
But that is just an opinion.

[Ai]

Hello. After using HSL selection for quite some time, I tried out L*a*b color selection. Selecting along the A+B dimensions is confusing to me.
So I made a hybrid color selector -- HSL (where L is L of LAB). The way it works is, when you change the H or S, it converts that to LAB and applies the A and B components to the final color (discarding any changes to the L); changing L works directly.
That is in my experience the most intuitive color selection method -- you have the intuitive grasp of hue and grayness given by HSL combined with accurate control of brightness given by LAB.

A sort of demo: hue cycles, then sat, then L.



EDIT: The non-bastardized version of the above is CIE L*CH -- it's a view on the L*a*b colorspace, with C mapping to saturation and H mapping to hue. Naturally because it's LAB based, it doesn't have the brightness variance problems that HSV/HSL does. see this visual example:
http://www.colourphil.co.uk/lab_lch_colour_space.html
I am currently mostly-finished with porting my color editor to use L*CH.

[heyy13]

I think that there is a good argument for light-eyed people being overly sensitive to light (might be interesting to research someplace where blue eyes are very common, see if it's less damn shiny.)

I think this is bullshit. I have verry (verry) dark hazel eyes (mostly dark chocolate brown with an extremely dark green ring) and my eyes are light sensitive. To the extent that i have photo-sensative lenses in my glasses that change shade (from clear to verry dark sunglass colour) depending on the brightness of the light hitting them. This is because otherwise i get constant miagrains, eye pain, tempory blindness and watering eyes i can't hold open, in bright light or whilst looking at especially bright colours or shiny things.

So from personal experiance i see a big flaw in that argument. I think it's person to person and gender related rather than anything to do with your eye colour.

[Akira]

@heyy13: a single piece of anecdotal evidence doesn't mean there's a flaw in the argument. because the eye is made up of many different parts which all contribute to light sensitivity, there will be many different combinations that cause an individual to be sensitive to light. having lighter eyes may well increase an individuals chances of being light sensitive, this isn't to say that people with dark eyes are definitely not light sensitive. you weren't interpreting panda's theory correctly.

@panda: the blue-eyed mutation occurred rather recently in humans and recent research has pointed to just one original blue-eyed individual, so it is unlikely that there will be less blue eyed people in shinier areas - there will be more blue eyed people in the area where this individual lived.

[Conzeit]

only one blue eyed person in the whole world? that seems like the perfect setup for one of those boy coming-of-age RPG stories :p

where'd you gather that info?

[vedsten]

only one blue eyed person in the whole world? that seems like the perfect setup for one of those boy coming-of-age RPG stories :p

where'd you gather that info?

http://www.springerlink.com/content/2045q6234h66p744/fulltext.html

very recent study, and a very interesting one

[chriskot]

http://www.springerlink.com/content/2045q6234h66p744/fulltext.html

very recent study, and a very interesting one

That is interesting, although I didn't read all of it. Too tired to even try to understand it all right now.
Everyone being descended from one blue-eyed person makes sense to me, except for the fact that blue eyes are a recessive trait. Did they explain somewhere in the study why blue eyes didn't die out immediately with the first person?

I should add that females can distinguish more colours in the red/orange range compared to males. Apparently women gathered flowers/fruits/leaves etc. while the men hunted animals which were less colourful, whilst we were evolving. 

Women generally have better/more vibrant colour vision because they have more cone cells in their eyes. Men have more rod cells, so they can generally see contrast better. Also, apparently due to some sort of abnormality on the X chromosome, some women are tetrachromats:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrachromacy

I think that there is a good argument for light-eyed people being overly sensitive to light (might be interesting to research someplace where blue eyes are very common, see if it's less damn shiny.)

I think this is bullshit. I have verry (verry) dark hazel eyes (mostly dark chocolate brown with an extremely dark green ring) and my eyes are light sensitive. To the extent that i have photo-sensative lenses in my glasses that change shade (from clear to verry dark sunglass colour) depending on the brightness of the light hitting them. This is because otherwise i get constant miagrains, eye pain, tempory blindness and watering eyes i can't hold open, in bright light or whilst looking at especially bright colours or shiny things.

So from personal experiance i see a big flaw in that argument. I think it's person to person and gender related rather than anything to do with your eye colour.

He didn't say anything about dark-eyed people all being less than over-sensitive. Only that light-eyed people are more often. I have blue eyes and also own a pair of Transition lenses. Handy, aren't they?


Anyway, back to the choosing palettes topic: I usually select my initial palette colours by picking straight off of the board and rounding the RGB values to the nearest multiples of 5, but if I edit the colours later, I use HSL to fix them up.

[Antago]

How does Lab look smoother? You can get any colour onto the monitor with HSV or RGB you can get with Lab, it's not like Lab magically enables the screen to display different colours.

It's about color selection, not about color availability.

Personally I think Konspiracy has the most beautiful color selection of anyone's work in this thread. Harmonically I think it makes sense to use some sort of order to your color selection considering the brain is a giant mathematician whether anyone realizes it or not. I think the brain appreciates the effort put into harmonizing color. Still, to each his own.

[Fingerfoods]

I'm really unorthodox with color. If this shade of brown looks good next to that shade of green, I'm putting it there.

Man, I should learn me some color theory. :/

[Xion]

no, that's pretty much how I do it.