How We See Colour
To begin our study on colour we first looked into the scientific reasoning as to why it is we see colour. The first key component is light, without it, we don't see, it travels from a source (e.g. the sun, a lamp) bounces off on an object and reflects into your eye.
Light travels in waves, all with different wave lengths and energy levels, as the wave length gets longer and shallower the light shifts towards infra-red, and as the wave lengths get steeper and narrower the light moves into the ultra-violet edge of the spectrum. Visible light is only a small fraction of the light waves perceivable by humans.
The eye is able to see colour due to it's rods and cones. Rods are responsible for the eye percieving shades and tone and Cones allow us to see colours.
There are three types of cone in the human eye
The first is sensitive to red/orange light
The second is sensitive to green light
And the third is sensitive to blue/violet light
When these cones are stimulated our brian respond by producing colour, when the red cones are stimulated we see red, when the green ones are stimulated we see green, however when the green and red cones are stimulated we would perceive it as yellow. Our whole concept of colour as human beings are based on physiological responses, we can only view all the colours we see because we've fooled our brains through the simultaneous stimulation of cones.
The Colour Wheel
Red, Blue and Yellow- Primary Colours
Orange, Green and Purple- Secondary Colours
Tertiary Colours- 'Greeny-Blue' etc
Additive and Subtractive Colour
Additive colour is colour produced with the addition of light, eventually when all layered up, white will be what's produced, examples include computer screens and our eyes (RGB)
Subtractive colour is the opposite of additive, it get's darker the more you mix until you end up with black. Examples include print (CMYK)
Over the break we were asked to gather up objects all of one colour and when we got back it was our task to arrange the coloured objects around the table akin to a giant colour wheel. I was in the red group.
It seemed the only logical way of organising the coloured objects was by comparing them, only through continual comparison could we arrive at a conclusion as the what kind of red that red was. We found ourselves labelling objects as 'purply-red' or more 'orangey-red' in order to better organise them. The other issues we found was the reflectiveness of transparency of an object. When something was shiny it proved difficult to pin the exact tone, worrying that the light made it seem brighter or the shadows made it seem darker.
An Introduction to Pantone
Pantone is a world wide colour matching system that is universal in it's language. Useful to all creatives from printers to designers, pantones make sure the shade you want definitely turns out the shade you want.
In order to investigate pantones we selected four of our objects and attempted to colour match them.
Post stamp: 485M
Tie: 201M
Jumper: 200M
Top: 7428M
Despite our results we must've gotten them off slightly because when we changed the source of light the colour shifted dramatically showing what a great deal of importance light has on colour.
No comments:
Post a Comment