AuthorTopic: help creating colour palettes  (Read 2960 times)

Offline Vercingetorix

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help creating colour palettes

on: October 10, 2009, 01:18:41 pm
Hi, i was wondering if anyone would be able to help explain something for me regarding colour palettes.
I've been doing a fair bit of browsing lately to help me with colouring pixel art and i came across a tutorial on OpenGameArt.org that advises using the following as guidelines when creating your colour ramps;

"- The darker it gets, the greater the saturation
- The lighter it gets, the less the saturation
- The darker it gets, the more blue your hue becomes
- The lighter it gets, the more yellow your hue becomes"

The tutorial uses HSL for picking colours, and i was just wondering what exactly is meant by making the hue more blue or more yellow?
say i had my sliders etc infront of me to change the Hue, Saturation and Luminosity what would i do? am i increasing the hue up or down in a certain directions, or am i jumping straight to the blue hues, or perphaps something completely different?

If it's not too much trouble i'd really appreciate it if anyone could step me through the process of taking a colour and making it more blue or more yellow using HSL
although i'm not sure it would be necesary it's probably really simple i'm just a bit...confused about it

any help would be much appreciated
Thanks

Offline Helm

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Re: help creating colour palettes

Reply #1 on: October 10, 2009, 04:26:36 pm
That's just one color scheme, it's not law. These are arbitrate choices actually, so go right ahead and try the opposites as well. Less saturation towards darkness could be interesting. Also blue/yellow are just a combination of complementary colors, you could try any other tints towards either directions.

To add more blue or yellow, just use the RGB sliders. If you want to do it with HSL, remember that in order to go from your color towards a different one, the most direct route is not through all the other colors in the hue slide wheel, it's through less saturated iterations that stand the middle of the way between the two colors.

Offline lollige

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Re: help creating colour palettes

Reply #2 on: October 14, 2009, 09:26:32 am

To add more blue or yellow, just use the RGB sliders. If you want to do it with HSL, remember that in order to go from your color towards a different one, the most direct route is not through all the other colors in the hue slide wheel, it's through less saturated iterations that stand the middle of the way between the two colors.
That is really the most useful lesson for me of the year 2009.

Of course it is logical, but I never consiously realized that!
Thanks!

Now I just need to find out how to find that middle color ;). Working with rgb sliders is more difficult than hsl of course ;)

Offline Doppleganger

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Re: help creating colour palettes

Reply #3 on: October 14, 2009, 10:23:06 am
I work with rgb sliders a lot, and while it's more tedious than the color picker on photoshp, it does have its advantages. Like, all of my pixel art is done with rgb sliders. And I find that it allows me to create a more precise color than using the color picker would. Mostly, because it takes a bit of time to create a color via rgb, so a lot more thought goes into it. The method I use for choosing colors with the rgb slider is to first create a gray that approximates the value that my color is going to have. From there I start adding and subtracting from each color in varying increments until I am happy with the color I've made. Having an indexed palette is also helpful, that way you can easily change a color and see its effect in real time.

I also don't typically ensure that my darkest colors are the most saturated. Often times I find it advantageous to tone down the saturation of the shadows on a sprite in order to make the lighted regions pop more. Although, looking at a lot of my recent pixel art, I notice that the trend seems to be that of the opposite. Either way, both methods have their place and my statement still stands.

The best way to learn about picking colors is to study artists that you like, and even some you don't, and try and figure out why what they're doing works. Of course, you can look at it obversely and question why what they're doing doesn't work. But no amount of studying will make up for practice. It is always the best case to get in there and start doing the things you want to learn about. I think a great way to truly start understanding color is to work with a bunch of similarily colored grays that just have slight hints of color. Play around with warm tones, cool tones, color harmonies, contrasting colors, and anything else you can think of. The subtle differences from the nearly monochromatic colors will really stand out, and you'll be well on your way to being able to apply color theory in more pragmatic work.



And here is my own quick study with what I just suggested. Obviously when all the colors are around the same saturation and brightness they're not going to convey much depth, but that's one way to learn important roles for each color. When hues are all around the same brightness and saturation they begin to create a natural depth, just by the way our eyes are able to take in certain colors better than others. I added a few darker pure grays to boost up the depth on the dinosaur heads. Something interesting is that only about half of the colors used on either dino head have an actual hue. The others are completely desaturated. What's interesting is that the neutral grays will pick up the hue from the colors surrounding it as well. So that the grays on the red dino appear warm, and those on the blue one appear cool. It's kind of hard to see it because I surrounded them in opposing colors, but the effect is there.
« Last Edit: October 14, 2009, 10:53:28 am by Doppleganger »