This wikiHow teaches how to use the Invert Colors effect in Microsoft Paint to switch an image’s colors to the opposite on the spectrum. To use this feature, open the image in Paint, not Paint 3D, as Paint 3D does not have a tool that allows you to invert an image’s colors. To change paint colors, create your own color wheel using acrylics, tempera, enamel model paints, oils, poster, or other paints.
To change paint colors, you will need a paint color mixing chart (a.k.a. the color wheel), craft colorants (acrylic for latex/acrylic paints, and oil-based for alkyd paints), and white paint in the same sheen as the starting paint. Envisioning new paint schemes has never been easier with online paint visualizers. The first step to repainting is deciding on a color, which can be done using Paint house apps.
To change the color scheme on Windows 11, select Edit Colors from the Colors menu or double-click one of the color squares under the menus. To change the color scheme on Windows 11, go to Image > Adjustments > Replace Color, tap in the image to select the color to replace, and then select the eraser tool.
To change the color scheme on Windows 11, go to Image > Adjustments > Replace Color, tap in the image to select the color to replace, and then click the eyedropper tool. Then, select the color you want to replace as your foreground color (left-click on the color palette), click the eyedropper tool again, and right-click the replacement color.
In summary, this wikiHow provides a step-by-step guide on how to use the Invert Colors effect in Microsoft Paint to switch an image’s colors to the opposite on the spectrum. It also covers how to use the eraser tool to replace complex colors in Paint.
📹 Change your colour scheme with just one click! | Adobe Illustrator CC Tutorial for Beginners
The colour theme picker in Illustrator is AWESOME. Let me take you through how to use it to quickly and easily change your colour …
How do I change the colour of my paint?
To make a color lighter, add white, while for a muted look, add dark brown or grey. Experiment with leftover paint from previous projects and use the color wheel to find the desired color. Mix small amounts of paint to find the desired color. However, avoid mixing paint with children, as they may be too young to handle the process. Enjoy the fun of color mixing but avoid involving children in the process.
How to switch colors while painting?
The process entails the introduction of minute dashes, drags, and pokes, which serve to generate abstract purple elements in the background in a gradual manner.
Does paint have a magic wand?
To select the background, click on it, which will reveal that the majority of it has been selected. However, it is notable that a small area has not been selected. Proceed to the upper portion of the image to modify the tolerance level.
How to change color in paint brush?
The Paint Brush is a Pen tool that allows users to draw lines with a brush style. It is available only on myViewBoard Whiteboard for Windows. To use the Paint Brush, double-click the Pen tool icon from the Main toolbar, select the Brush, and open the Paint Brush menu to adjust size, transparency, and color. Users can also click one of the three colored dots next to the Brush to switch between three standard colors without opening the menu.
How do I add a custom color in Microsoft Paint?
To alter the fundamental hue, select the “Edit Colors” icon, located within the color palette. This will allow you to choose the desired color, modify it with the cursor, incorporate it into the customized colors section, and then click “OK” to confirm.
Can I customize a paint color?
It is possible to combine colors of the same type and finish, such as interior latex paint in a satin finish, using fresh interior paint from the store. In order to commence the process, it is necessary to have the desired paints, a five-gallon bucket, and a paint stirrer at hand.
How to change color scheme in Windows cmd?
In order to establish the default Command Prompt window color, it is necessary to click on the upper-left corner, select Defaults, and then choose the colors for Screen Text and Screen Background. In the event that the identical value is indicated for two hexadecimal digits, the ERRORLEVEL is set to 1, and no alterations are made to the foreground or background color.
How to swap colors in Microsoft Paint?
In order to replace a color in an image, one must first open the Start menu, click on the Windows logo, open the Paint application, select the eyedropper tool, click on the desired color, repeat the aforementioned process, right-click on the desired color, and select the eraser tool.
How do I change the color profile in Windows 10?
To manage color profiles on a Windows display, navigate to Settings > System > Display > Color profile > Color management. Select the display you want to manage color profiles for and click Set profile to set one as the default. This page allows users to add or remove color profiles, set default profiles for connected displays, access display calibration, and enable automatic color management.
📹 Something strange you should know about color | QUICK ESSENTIALS
FULL ART LESSONS: https://www.marcobucciartstore.com Learn a very important color theory for both digital and traditional art.
hi, I am working on Illustrator 28.1 and regardless of the “workspace” I choose, I cannot seem to make the little “recolor artwork” icon appear in the tool bar as yours does. I’ve also tried to go to edit > edit colors and “recolor artwork” is grayed out. Any idea what I may be doing wrong??? Thanks so much
I have an image that I traced from a photo (using AI), that I have expanded. I have ignored white and so now I have a figure and some surrounding paths. I want to spot gradient areas of the image. When I try to use anything besides a linear or radial gradient, the cursor turns to one with the circle with the arrow through it. I want to use a free form gradient on this group of paths. It seems Free Form treats everything separately. I hope you can see what I mean.
It’s because of the cones in your eyes! =D I NEED to make a article about this, but essentially the 3 color receptors (red, green, blue) in your eyes aren’t equally sensitive. Green cones are the most sensitive and blue cones are the least sensitive, so when your 2 most sensitive types of cones are both stimulated (green + red) you see yellow! =D The only color more stimulating to your eyes is white, which is ALL cones. That’s also why blue is the darkest pure hue. Because its the least your eyes can be stimulated apart from NO stimulation, which is black/darkness.
I actually saw this my self a few years ago. I had two water bottles that I would drink from at night, one was red and the other one was blue. All the lights were off, the only light in the room was the faint glow of the moon through the draperies. I remember being surprised that the blue bottle was a lighter gray even though the red one looked lighter during the day. 🙂
I’m a traditional artist, I think something like this is more intuitive when mixing paint. Gray is made with black and white, and white will always lighten. So it makes sense that a mid gray (meaning a lot of white was added) will be lighter than a pure blue pigment out of the tube. Similarly, it’s common to lighten a color with yellow and no white, making it obvious that yellow is lighter than the other colors. I think it’s beneficial for people to at least play around with mixing colors even if they’re a digital artist.
What you’re seeing is just what the conversion to grayscale is doing – it’s setting the value of each pixel to the luminance (not the value) of the original color. Luminance is a perceptual quantity that is the same for two colors that appear to have the same brightness. Value is a mathematical quantity that’s just max(R, G, B); it doesn’t mean much in terms of human perception when compared between different hues and/or saturations.
I’m going to wager the perceived “darker” values of red and blue hues has more to do with the sensitivity of our eyes to those color frequencies rather than their physical wavelengths directly. Since seeing “yellow” requires two of our three different receptors to be firing that excess of signal travelling along our nerves probably overloads our sense of ‘value’ and makes that hue appear “lighter” other hues. You’ll see the same effect happen with cyan, which requires our blue and green receptors to both be sending signals at the same time as well.
Keep in mind, all of this was done in sRGB space. While it’s useful for storing colors, it isn’t so great for picking or modifying them. Using a perceptual space, such as Okhsl (which has been added to Photoshop since this article was made), will alleviate some of these issues. Also, the triangle-type pickers work somewhat better because they are an approximation of a perceptual color space. If you take a slice of hue in a perceptual space, you will get a roughly triangle-shaped “flag” of color, with grayscale on one side, and the most saturated point at the tip. However, the shape you get will not be a perfect triangle, and its shape changes depending on hue.
A function I learned in a CS class that might be helpful to understand this phenomenon is how to calculate luma. When converting RGB to grayscale, there are a couple ways you can do it. A naive way is to just average the R, G, and B values, but this has the same problem as removing saturation did in this article. A way that’s more accurate to our eyes is to calculate the “luma” of each pixel, where luma = 0.2126*R + 0.7152*G + 0.0722*B. (The reason this is more accurate is probably something to do with our eyes being more sensitive to green light than to red and to blue). This is almost certainly what photoshop is doing under the hood when you change colors to grayscale. It also reveals why the blues end up so dark, because there’s a very low coefficient on the blue values of the pixels compared to red and green. Yellow, having both red and green, ends up the brightest after the luma conversion.
Ok here’s a bit of explanation on a few things you seem to be confused of. The color picker: Your color picker is set to HSB/HSV (same thing), not to HSL (technically there is a difference between HSV and HSL – the L stands for luminance). If you pick two colors with different Value they should in theory stay different in Value when you desaturate them, and that’s exactly what happens when you use the HSL-saturation slider shown at 4:50. The HSL-saturation slider does exactly that. It decreases the saturation while keeping the hue and value staying the same. Interestingly enough photoshop now calls it HSL (Lightness), but it’s actually HSV as seen in Coral Painter. Oh it gets worse.. in Clip Studio Paint they call it luminocity (but with a V in brackets.. wth). Anyway. Let’s say you’re using a different way to desaturate the image. How does the desaturation work? One way would be to extract only one website from the RGB websites and apply it to all the other websites. Cheap digital cameras use this method when applying a build in black and white filter. They overwrite the red and blue website with the green website, to get a greyscale image. But that’s actually a bad idea. Why? because areas with strong colors like magenta that doesnt have any green in it at all will come out as black or really dark. Moving on what else could you do? You could convert the colors to HSL (luminance) where bright colors like yellow and cyan actually stay bright and visually darker colors like blue and violett stay darker and then strip away the saturation.
I can’t tell you how much this will help me! I’m a 7th grader and I love art. I’ve been doing it since 2nd grade and I’ve improved A LOT! But I do have to say I’m not good with color theory, I just recently learned about it and it still hurts my Brian but perusal this article helped me understand a lot. It will help me improve my drawings in the future and help me get more comfortable with drawing in color instead of just black and white 😅. I’m mostly self taught. The only thing that I didn’t pick up by myself is anatomy. And I still suck at it. I would ask my art teacher for some guidance and help but I don’t have one. I’m an online student and the program I’m in only allows 4 classes to be worked in! While I do have to admit it is great only have to worry about 4 classes it honestly sucks because art isn’t one of those classes. Like I said, I love art. It’s been my dream to become a professional artist since I was 7! Not being able to have access to someone that knows a lot about something I’m really passionate about really does suck. But i only have half a year left of online school and I’m going to be going back to real school next year! But until then I’ll stick to perusal articles like this to help me understand how certain things in art work instead of perusal tutorials on HOW to do something. articles like this really help with understanding art, instead of just copying mark by mark of some famous artist. Trust me, not something you would want to do. Biggest regret in life.
i just see it as the “darker” colors absorb more light, the “brighter” colors reflect more light, so the darker colors will have a darker hue. kinda like color changing light bulbs. you can have the brightness set to 100%, but the white light will light up more of the room than the yellow light, yellow will light more than the green, green more than the blue, blue more than red, etc.
Oh my God, I had a problem with “Hue” blending mode a few weeks ago, and it had me pull my hair out. But this explains a lot. The description of the Hue mode says: It keeps the brightness and saturation, but replaces the hue. So I was wondering, why the brightness and saturation changes after I use this mode? I asked so many people and nobody had any idea why it happens. But now I realize, there is nothing wrong with the blending mode. It was our fundamentals that was wrong. Great article! Thank you so much.
this honestly helped a lot because im so used to painting traditionally/irl with guoache and its harder to get really saturated colors irl so im always careful with paint choices and studying photos when painting irl. for some reason all knoweledge goes out the window when i do it digitally despite the fact ive been doin it for bout 4 years.
this can be fixed almost entirely by switching to the LCH colour space. It’s essentially the same, but hue and saturation are properly decoupled from value. This is because it’s mapped to human perception of colours, not the RGB gamut. I don’t know if you can do that in Photoshop, but I tend to design on the web using chroma-js which supports this colourspace. AFAIK the reason this happens is due to the cones in your eyes having different sensitivities to wavelengths of light.
So I oddly learnt about this in one of my computer science modules (possibly computer vision). Its got to do with the way we perceive colours. We have 3 receptors to see, red green and blue. Green is the most sensitive, red sort of in the middle and blue the least sensitive. The way we convert from RGB to greyscale is based on the way we see the different colours and if you looks up the formula used to convert to greyscale its Gray = 0.299R + 0.587G + 0.114B. Im just looking at the formula for converting RGB to HSV and it doesn’t really make sense to me… Id have guessed that it would be the same as the conversion but turns out that would be the lightness value and there are different conversion standards… the above is SDTV standard (aka recommendation 601). Adobe used Rec. 240 and it is Y = 0.212R + 0.701G + 0.086B. HDTV used Rec. 709 which is Y = 0.2126R + 0.7152G + 0.0722B. UHD and HDR used Rec.2020 which is Y = 0.2627R + 0.678G + 0.0593B. Interesting! To get the value of HSV it its the intensity of the colour thats has the highest intensity so which is bizarre to me because that implies that if as long as you only change the values of colour websites that aren’t the highest intensity the value won’t change? (255, 0, 0) will have the same value as (255, 200, 200)? Back to to the brightness if you have pure blue (0, 0, 255) and pure green at 20% (0,51,0) they would have the same lightness which according to my quick test pinta (I don’t have photoshop) yes they do as they grayscale for both are (29,29,29).
In RGB, on digital screens, it is vital to understand that there’s a huge difference between the objective brightness between RGB and CMY the reason is simple: for red we have one light active, just the R in RGB, yet for yellow we also add green G, so digital yellow, magenta and cyan are about twice as bright as red, green and blue respecticely. add to that the specifics of how human cones perceive color and it becomes a bit messy, but that inherent distinction between the hues on digital screens is important
“Different colors saturate to different levels” Is this not something we all understood as children, just in a different way? It’s completely understood by everyone that some colors are darker than others. a sunshine yellow is always going to be lighter than a deep purple. bringing in how saturation works doesn’t change the initial understanding of it.
Well, the problem really comes from thinking value and brightness are the same things! Brightness is how much additional white you add into a hue. Hues themselves have varying degrees of brightness in them, Blue is darker than red darker than green darker than yellow. So value is sum of all the white contained in brightness + hue + saturation, which is why brightest blue is darker than mid grey because you inadvertently add more black by adding a blue hue.
yup is related to color wavelengths first thing i wanted to say when i watched ur first 2 minutes. photoshop using it so when you draw a landscape you can represent the colors in real world like color light wavelenghts and not solid colors. this gives you more freedom to blend and combine colors and get proper real like color blends when you are using alpha threesholds.
That solely comes from the human color 3D spectral locus shape, which in turn comes from the nonlinearity of retinal cone response to different wavelengths. I can easily explain it to you in correct scientific terms with graphs if you want 🙂 (That’s my primal interest of research for last several years.)
I do a bit of character design, and after perusal this article I went and checked the range of value for some of my characters. I’ve noticed a few are a bit flat in that regard, but I’m at a place with them where I’m very satisfied with their colour palettes. Is there a way I can give them a higher range of values without changing the palette all that drastically?
I’m a painter. I use oils, and I find I squint a lot when painting. One reason I find myself squinting is to reduce light levels entering the eye, making saturation and hue less well perceived, allowing for what we would call tonal values across the painting to be compared or matched. I guess it’s rods and cones etc. 🧡
Hi, I am colorblind and I found this extremely interesting. Since I often have problems differentiating or identifying specific colors, I usually rely on the values (unconciously). For example, I sometimes can’t tell if a color is green or brown, but I see that one is “darker” than the other (even if on the same saturation), and that helps me know which one is which. I do this very often and it is usually hard to explain to others… believe me, this article made me understand how I see and why I do what I do. This will be very helpful for my art and even my everyday! Thanks! So believe it or not, you unintentionally made the perfect article explaining how colorblind people may distinguish color.
The reason why red isn’t the absolute brightest probably has something to do with cone cells as you can see here en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cone_cell our eyes use these to detect different colors and yellow happens to activate a lot where blue and violet don’t Oh wait did CD actually make a article about this? oops
I study image processing, the reason why blue is darker than 50% of value is because how blue was placed on the color space, addictive primary (red, green, blue) usually placed on lower lightness while subtractive color (yellow, cyan, magenta) on higher lightness. This depends on what type of color space you are using. Another cheaper way of calculating value is by using weighted average. Representing 3d color position on 1d line usually doesn’t look good, it’s all depends on how you perceive it.
This article is helpful for a game I’ve been modding. In The Binding of Isaac: Repentance DLC, there’s a mechanic where enemies can be tinted a color that slightly modifies their properties (these modified enemies are known as champions). In previous versions, this was done by lazily using multiply or additive colors all over the original sprites of the enemy, but Repentance changes this system dramatically. The new system allows you to prevent details like eyes or teeth from being colored, and it also greyscales the enemy’s skin to ensure the tint’s color isn’t lost (i.e., tinting a blue enemy with red is no longer purple but a dark red). Now I know why certain enemies with saturated colors are tinted so darkly when they become champions in-game, and I’ll make sure to lighten up on the tint in cases where greyscaling the skin makes them too dark.
Wow I never knew this, but after editing photos on lightroom these past 2 years it makes sense because every time I use the HSL feature I tend to increase saturation when I feel skin tones could use some more intensity but then I always felt the need to increase luminance so it looked right and natural. Sometimes it was the opposite I felt the skin tones or whatever color I was adjusting felt it needed more luminance/brightness and proceeded to increase it but then increased saturation so that the colors maintained the same intensity at higher brightness and didn’t look washed out or unnatural. Now finally I know why it happened.
This can be explained easily, converting to grayscale doesn’t take equal weights for RGB components, blue has the most weight. This is kinda missing in the article, there are many cool experiments with taking colors and turning them to grayscale, even with real life picture, but nobody questioned how the magic conversion happens!
This actually has nothing to do with color theory or the fundamental properties of color at all. Rather it is a consequence of how computer screens mix colors to form more colors. Here’s a simple explanation: Colors on a computer are a combination of red, green, and blue color websites. Each of these has a brightness ranging from 0(black) to 255(brightest version of that color.) White is lighter than bright red because white is formed by maxing out all three color websites, meaning it is 3 times brighter than red which only uses the Red website. Similarly for different hues such as cyan and blue, cyan is brighter than blue because cyan uses two color websites(green and blue) whereas blue only uses one(blue).
The reason for this is from research first done in 1931 to define the CIE color space. They determined the we perceive the brightness of the primaries differently and found the relative weights of each. Green is weighted approximately 71%, red 21%, and blue 7% See the wikipedia articles on “Grayscale” and “CIE_1931_color_space” for much more detail.
I’ve just found this article. Maybe someone has mentioned the following already: The RGB values could help to understand what’s happening here. The RGB values are what really makes up your digital color. The HSL sliders are ways to maneuver within this colorspace, like cars with different properties driving on roads, so every tool (car) can lead to different results. But the RGB values are what the streets are made of, so to speak. Each RGB website is its own brightness / intensity. And the easy-to-understand part in comparison to HSL is, that you can add each of them. It’s pretty linear / straight forward. 255 is max brightness for each website 255+255+255 RGB is the max, pure white. 0+0+0 is black. The RGB values also explain your gray vs violet example. The gray is 128+128+128 which is more than the violet with 77+0+255 in total “intensity”, so it’s the brighter color. We do need the HSL (or similar systems) to navigate within a 3D color space intuitively, because no one can just perfectly assume RGB values. (“hey give me that slightly desaturated dark violet”, ” oh you want an 118-76-119, I knew it straight away” not going to happen) The way the wavelengths of light add up is not that intuitive to work with. That red light and green light add up to yellow and are in total brighter than the separate colors. 255+0+0 (red light) added to 0+255+0 (green light) will end up as 255+255+0. The RGB system and colorspaces are a really precise way to describe the characteristic of the addition of light wavelengths and also works well in a digital code.
This article is very helpful for someone new to digital painting like me. Thank you. There is a question the article has raised for me which I have yet to find an answer to. Aren’t there any tools or techniques available for selecting colors with equal or similar values to a base/starting color? Every resource discussing this overall topic seems to go over the idea of checking your values after you’ve put color down, be it directly in your work or in an off-canvas swatch of some sort. If our computers can “do the math” to show us the true value portion of those colors, then shouldn’t they also be able to somehow “do the same math” when selecting colors? In other words, isn’t there some way to effectively get a two dimensional color picker that only changes hue and saturation while keeping the value the same as a starting/base color you choose? They key being that it would take into account the important “different hues saturate to different values” concept Marco illustrates in this article.
Yeah, this also blew my mind. Btw, Krita has Ctrl+Y. But it uses weird names for colorspaces. It’s called soft proofing and I think you need to set it up to Gray-D50-elle-V2-g22.icc under settings-setup krita-color space-soft proofing to make it work like dot gain 20. I’m not sure, I don’t know much about technical part of it yet. Some say the best option is actually …V2-g10… PS I use krita in my native language so «settings-setup krita-…» is my best try at translating it. Idk what are those tabs called originally.
Here’s a somewhat over-simplified explanation of what causes these phenomena: Hue based value shift (TL;DR version): Grayscale is calculated using an old standard from 1993, which doesn’t treat all colors equally, neither do cameras or the human eye. Hue based value shift (long version) The lightness value isn’t just the average of the RGB values. In digital color, there are standards that define the relationship between the color values in software, and their real world counterparts. The most commonly used of these standards is REC.709, which defines lightness as being a mix of colors, consisting of: 21.26% red, 71.52% green, and 7.22% blue. These numbers are chosen as they roughly match the sensitivities of the human eye’s cone cells. As for why this effect shows up with the paints: it’s mostly because the camera uses the REC.709 (or some other) color standard. Saturation based brightness shift (TL;DR version) 100% saturation is only mathematically possible between 33-66% brightness, so “value” was re-defined to not mean brightness. It actually just equals the highest value in any of the 3 color websites: Red, Green, and Blue. Saturation based brightness shift (long version) The Hue Saturation Value model is designed to be predictable and intuitive, not to preserve the mathematical properties of the RGB model. As a result, you can do things like have 100% saturation at any brightness, which isn’t really possible in RGB, at least in software with limits on the RGB values. For example, if we have a color with maximum brightness, R:255 G:255, B:255, there is no way to increase the saturation without going over the 255 limit.
I see no surprise. If you notice the top of the square color panel it begins in white and ends in the hue you have selected, so the lightness/darkness of both ends is not aligned horizontally right from the start, since white will always be lighter regardless of the hue you pick. Why would you assume that moving your picked hue to the left would give you the same lightness value? The unmixed hue alignes somewhat oblique or curved to the grey side. This alignment changes progressively to finally reaching horizontal at the bottom of the panel.
That is because the formula to convert from color to greyscale may be the weighted method. A formula that can give you a different behaviour than simply lowering saturation. If you desaturate instead to convert to grayscale you will get the same value that selected but with no saturation. It eventually will be the same grey, no matters the color you choose. The color choosers that you are showing maybe adjusts your selection to represent a visual perception not a exact math result. Then if you use a color chooser that does not do that then you will not give modified values that you didnt choose. Source: Tested on Gimp: Go to Colors -> Desaturate -> Desaturate… and choose Mode Value (HSV).
This is interesting. I’ve been wondering myself how color pickers work. Though I think it makes more sense to approach it from color theory. Value can be thought of as being related to the amount of light reflected from an object (luminosity). Blue and purple appear darker because your eye is less sensitive to that spectrum of light. Green and yellow are the opposite. Therefore, a blue/purple color at the same value (light intensity/luminosity) as a yellow will always appear much darker when juxtaposed. In fact, it does not matter what the true value is, only how it appears in context. I suggest people look into Josef Alber’s interaction of color to deeply understand the relationship between color, intensity and value.
As someone who reads manga, as the art is usually black-and-white, it’s often that the readers are the ones that imagine what color of hair they have. But then when an official art releases, it’s drastically different to what you or readers imagine. My guess is that because some artists/authors does not know this, and thinks; “Oh, I should just make this person’s hair lighter/darker.” Which in turn, changes the value. While obviously us readers aren’t the actual people that decide what direction of color the characters should have. I think it’s an important step to realize, you can’t just suddenly have a character’s hair color added afterwards without checking whether or not the value’s correct to the color. It’s like a character in black-and-white having a much darker value, and then have the character suddenly have bright red hair. That betrays how color works, and is a giant whiplash to readers. Of course, this probably doesn’t matter. It’s just hair color. But you need to be mindful of how color works. Even in black-and-white, people will fill In the gaps.
My best guess is that it has to with absorption spectrum overlap of the proteins in the eyes (rods and cones). I believe green and red absorbing proteins have the highest point overlap around yellow frequencies, so summing the response from the red absorbing proteins and the green ones gives you the one of brightest values. Meanwhile blue has very little overlap with green and red proteins, so that side of the spectrum is darker, plus the blue absorbing proteins don’t send much signal when they do absorb light, compared to the same amount of light in a green frequency absorbed by the green proteins, so blue appears the darkest out of the three primary colors.
So I saw this and it made me want to dive into it more. I was doing this all in procreate on my ipad, so I had to use the “solid white layer set to color mode” trick to check this, BUT, here is what I found using the RGB sliders: – 1 point of red was worth 2.72 points of blue – 1 point of green was worth 1.96 points of red and 5.33 points of blue Based on this, if the websites are isolated, 255 points of blue is equal value to 93 points of red or 46 points of green. Full blue was equal in value to 11% gray, full red was equal to 30% gray, and full green was equal to 59%.
It has to do with the population of cone cells activated by each color. There is a significant overlap in frequencies that activate red and green cones, but blue cones don’t have much overlap with the other types of cones. So yellow appears the brightest because it activates the highest number of cone cells. Bluish frequencies, on the other hand, appear darker because they activate relatively fewer cones, almost entirely just blue cones. Reducing saturation simply means activating all the cones of your eyes more evenly- which explains why yellow of a higher value may look brighter than gray of a lower value.
Wow Amazing article. Really cool insight. If you wanted an answer for why certain colours are lighter, I don’t think its really related to the energy of the wavelengths as you suggest, but its actually more biological. Human eyes have different colour sensing cells and their sensitivity curve are centred on 3 wavelengths. The most sensitive being Green; greens and yellow always look much lighter or closer to white to the eye. In JPEG compression the Red website is actually reduced in resolution, because it is the one human eye can detect the least difference in.
The reason is that when converting to greyscale, each of the RGB websites is given a different weight (more precisely: 0.2989, 0.5870 and 0.1140 for R, G and B), to better represent human perception. We see greens as the brightest, and blues as the darkest. As such, the value sliders aren’t wrong, because the change in brightness only occurs during the transformation process to greyscale, not when adding saturation or changing hue.
lol I watched this because I accidentally pressed xD and I do not regret clicking. This was insane and blew my mind!!! It was pretty entertaining and fun to figure out as well! I really enjoyed perusal this article! Imma go check out this guy’s other articles (Which I expect to be as incredible as this) 😀 Most likely gonna sub because of how he noticed this and how creative he is! 😀
Another thing of note is cultural associations for reading color. A subdued red might catch more attention than a saturated green because red says “!!!” for a lot of people. Not to mention how different colors contrast when put next to other colors, regardless of value. Color is really complicated to me tho so I’ll just stick with one piece of advice at a time till I’m more confident in color haha
I wonder if the digital apps like photoshop are just mimicking traditional paint mixing systems like the Munsell Color Tree? The leaves in that system are clear and rational. A fully saturated hue is inextricably linked to a particular value (yellow and blue are inherently different in value), so increasing the intensity of grayed hues that are lighter or darker that the pure hue will ultimately shift their value towards that of the pure hue. This is why I imagine the blue samples were darker than the red samples when converted to black, white, and gray. It’s because pure blue is inherently a little darker than pure red.
For the people that want another approach the “true value” of a color is not the same as what is indicated as value in drawing softwares. True value is a function of all the other numbers Value, Saturation and Hue. In other words the value that softwares refer to is independent of hue and saturation but the true value depends from all the above
looked like the “bright” colours were the ones involving at least some significant proportion of green or yellow, perhaps because that involves the middle colour-receptor type in our eyes, with the most overlap with other colours, and also with the range for the rod-cells; dunno, entirely a hypothesis on my part, there actually, it’s also worth noting that the thermal spectrum we identify as “white” (the one our sun makes) peaks on green, so (yellowish) green is the most closely associated with “whiteness” (with yellow as the runner-up, often being the new peak after atmospheric scattering)
So this is (kinda) due to the way that luminance is encoded in just about every article signal. Or rather, the way luminance is encoded by the L*a*b* spectrum which is supposed to be more-or-less how our brains perceive colour. The L is made up of a specific combination of the R, G and B signals (what exact combination depends on the RGB colour space) but it’s always dominated by green. For example, the Rec.709 coding to YUV (kind of the same idea as Lab) used in pretty much all HD article content has its luminance defined as 21% red, 72% green and just 7% blue. No wonder blue ends up looking so dark! If you want a fun exercise, try setting your colour picker to Lab, with the slider set to luminance and the field set to a/b. You might be surprised at the colour harmonies you end up with!
5:55 but that red, purple and blue are not bright. they are saturated but not bright. especially the dark blue looks dark when you take away the color saturation. the next example is pretty good, how you can use a highly saturated color (that appears bright but is actually dark, like that blue) to make an actual bright thing next to it pop.
As far as I know, the difference comes from the concept of ‘value’ differs between HSV and grayscale conversion. In Photoshop each data of dots (pixels) is to be stored as RGB website. The ‘Value’ of HSV simply refers the maximum value of the RGB (or V=max(R,G,B)). On the other hand, the ‘Value’ of grayscale refers to the average value of the RGB (or V=average(R,G,B)=(R+G+B)/3). Now considering picking up red(R=1, G=0, B=0) and yellow(R=1, G=1, B=0) as an example. Ofcourse the ‘Values’ of HSV of the both colors are same since V=max(R,G,B)=1 in both cases. However the ‘Values’ of grayscale differs since V(red)=(1+0+0)/3=1/3 and V(yellow)=(1+1+0)/3=2/3, which means yellow looks brighter than red.
When I use emissive lights on 3D, the colors tend to follow the same rules, yellow is brighter so will always pop more, purple is terrible to work with, I need to create fake purple lighting for it to pop in almost anycase (or lower the light of everything else lol), since increasing the strength of the emission tends to make the values of the color increase resulting in a pink color xP.
well. this happens at least on computers because it’s manually programmed to do that. when we were first developing black and white TVs they needed to tune their cameras so they saw lightness the same way humans did, so it would convert color accurately into a greyscale that human eyes would understand.
Our eyes have red, green, and blue color cones. The green ones are the strongest, red second strongest, and blue is the weakest. Therefore, yellow is the lightest hue because it activates the red AND green cones, cyan is second lightest because it activates the green and blue cones, 3rd is magenta because it activates red and blue cones. Conversely, blue is the darkest because it ONLY activates the blue cone, etc. Purple activates the blue cone and a bit of red, and orange activates the red cone with just a bit of green
I’ve seen an explanation of this in these comments but I’ll throw my own out there anyways. We can pick up three different wavelengths of light in real life – red, green, and blue – and it is that which makes up the visible spectrum. On displays, accordingly, every pixel is made up of a combination of these three colours at varying brightnesses. To make pure blue, red, or green, one light is at 100% and the other two are at 0% (I think you can guess how that works). When all three are at the same brightness (all at 50%, all at 75%, et cetera) none stick out, and so it is unsaturated. Think of the value as a sum of the brightness of each colour. When everything is off, that’s black. When everything is on, that’s blue. This is why, as you approach the extremes of luminosity, saturation decreases – to get lighter colours, you eventually reach a point where you have to decrease the difference between values. How do you make 100% R 0 G 100% B brighter? You have to add more green. So cyan is made of blue and green both at 100% with red at 0%. Does it now make sense why it’s lighter than blue? So yeah, the wavelengths thing, not quite there.
When using the HSV (Hue, Value, Saturation) color model, you don’t talk about Lightness. Lightness is relevant when using the HLS (Hue, Lightness, Saturation) color model, as that color model is designed to handle Lightness correctly (so that conversion to grayscale is easier) And RGB is used for on screen color, and CMYK for print color. And the LAB model has certain mathematical advantages. (Like better simulating human vision and color blindness) The HSV model is designed to be easy to convert to RGB while still allowing preserving relative color (hue), not to produce good grayscales.
The photometry, being the study of colors perception (like radiometry, but working with luminance instead of radiance (I am just joking, overcomplicating my language)), can tell us what is going on here. There exists so called Photopic Spectral Luminous Efficiency Curve or CIE curve, which measures how much light’s intensity has VALUE for our eyes. Somebody in the commentaries talked about “luma” measurment, which is the same thing, but more practical for calculators, than understanding. Luminous efficiency is different for our cones in eyes because all three of them are setted up practically for surviving. This whole information I got from awesome Acerola article “Your Colours Suck” and I lied, when I told, that I can explain what is going on, but I really think this works that way.
I don’t think this works in paint. Its the colour model’s fault. As a reference i just use CIECAM LCH and found a colour wheels of paints. Lch is lightness, chroma, hue so hold different definitions as saturation has a link to value, so that you cannot go lighter without desaturating. But that somewhat makes sense like adding whites to ‘tint’ paints. Yes blues are down low “lightness”, red/green middle, yellow is light (with exceptions of course!). A problem with RGB is the VSH model that will mean 255,000,,000 which holds a third of the lumination of 255,255,255 surely into the same value. I have never tried digital conversion to this space though. As ‘analogue’ painters we have plenty of other problems like non-linear curves or glazes producing different colours to mixes and all sorts, plus difficulty of making greys not look like crap ETC
One possible explanation for this mistery is that ‘value’ is not the same as ‘brightness’. That means that there are at least two ways to make a color image grayscale, one is value preserving and the other one is brightness preserving. We humans just prefer the last one because of our own biological equipement, but, other than that, there is really not a ‘correct’ one. About the relationship between hue and perceived brightness, and how brightness in more diferent from value for some hues but almost the same thing for others, there is a possible explanation too. This is pure spectulation, tho: Perceived brightness through hues peaks at yellow and diminishes both to blue and to red. So, what we need to explain is why yellow is perceived as more bright than other hues. Now let’s remind what brightness means, biologically speaking: it means just more light, or, in other words, more receptors in our eyes being triggered. We have three types of cones in our retinas to identify colors: red at one end of the spectrum, blue at the other end. That’s what we all would expect. We also have a third type, green, but it doesn’t sit comfortably at the middle point of the other two extremes, but it is instead very close to red and far away from blue. I’m simplifying this a lot, but we perceive colors this way: the color is inferred by comparing how many of the RGB cones are being triggered. If lots of R cones are triggered and few G and B are triggered, we perceive red. Same for green and blue.
There’s interesting observations here, and while it’s true that hues reach saturation at different values, I’d be careful with Photoshop’s color management and proof settings. The reported grayscale values change depending on your color settings. s-gray is equivalent to using monitor color as working space, which should be effectively un-managed, this is good for color / grayscale round-trappable srgb content. If your destination is web or game art, this is good. Dot gain 20% is print, and will transform your grayscale values in a way that they may not round trip.
This is a helpful insight, but completely backwards in its explanation. What we are observing is the interaction of colour with the medium. The medium is a light box. A screen punching out only RGB coloured light. The constant that holds this article up is Value. The lumens of brightness emitting from the screen. There is no gradual “hue” in a digital display, that is artificial, the value discrepancy is an artifact of the synthetic blue hue. What you do have is (+/- Red), (+/- Green), (+/- Blue). Full blue is the “blue screen of death” that’s almost sky blue, due to the level of luminance (fully bright) so to accomplish saturated blues the system is reducing value, which is less bright. Hue in RGB displays is tuned to preference for the viewers. (We call this color space calibration) It’s completely artificial, with artifacts (which this article points out), it’s not mechanical.
Nothing strange here. Problem in color picker which can be quite deceiving. Just think about it. When you change from white to some pure color (blue for example) with the same value you loose 2 of 3 colors (red and green) so value should be plus-minus 3 times dimmer. The other reason is that your color receptors’ sensitivity inside your eyes is very different. So standard formula for grayscale is this Val = 0.2126 R + 0.7152 G + 0.0722 B. As you can see the weight for blue color is way smaller then red and green. Blue color is cold and dark
THe greyscale is rather due to how our eyes perceive color. It’s awfully obvious, that our eyes can detect the most eyes from orange/yellow/green colors, while approaching the borders of our visible spectrum, it will tend to get darker, until it’s just black for UV and IR light. I’m sure there has already been research done on this, so someone probably already made a “quantum efficiency” graph for naked eyesight, and how intensive each wavelength is. That can then be translated into color values. It should be a function similar to a Gaussian distribution.
2:50 “It’s almost like (they’re) measuring different properties” – that’s because they are! One is using Value (V) and one is using Luminosity (Y). The different color models are called HSV and HSY. Edit: there’s also HSL, where L stands for Lightness. It’s kinda similar to HSY. I’m posting this at the risk of being one of those idiots that post a comment before perusal a article until the end, but from the way you presented the article up to this point I don’t think you realized this. Edit: finished the article now, the different color spaces didn’t get mentioned. It’s an important bit! I am not an artist but I imagine that if you can change the active color space of your color picker between HSL, HSV and HSL you can use that to make much better color choices! You’ll have to look it up yourself though, as I said I’m not an artist and I don’t know the tools.
It also depends on grayscale processing algorithim plus the human color spectrum. A completely saturated yellow might not even be the strongest yellow in existance. The computer, which is made by us, knows that certain yellow is the most saturated. Grayscale algorithms work in various ways. One is to simply take the average of RGB values. A color may be r23 g74 b97… grayscale algorithm may proves that color by adding all 3 values and dividing by 3. But you can do grayscale by averaging other types of color representation that are not rgb and get different gray tones. Think that a picture is made out of pixels. And each pixel in a LCD panel is build with 3 colors. But that is just a representation of the actual color. Grayscale happens when all 3 colors have the same brightness (80r 80b 80g) that is why averaging is a general form to get grayscale but not necessarily precise
I can help break down what’s happening. Digital colors are represented by RGB values, so there is a Red component, a Green component, and a Blue component. You can think of the RGB colorspace as a 3d coordinate system. White is 255, 255, 255. Black is 0, 0, 0. The brightness is the distance away from those two points. Pure red, green, and blue will be about 360 away from white and 255 away from black. Yellow is 255, 255, 0 and is 255 away from white and about 360 away from black. Magenta and cyan are the same distance as Yellow. If you look at the hue picker, yellow, cyan, and magenta are the halfway points between two of the RGB components. The closer to yellow, cyan, and magenta, the brighter it will be in grayscale. The closer to red, green, and blue, the darker it will be in grayscale. Value is a percentage of the distance away from black, so it scales differently depending on the hue.
It seems to me that you are confusing ‘Value’ and ‘Luminance’. When converting to grayscale, ‘Luminance’ is calculated. Treating color as it appears on the monitor, that is, in RGB: ‘Value’ is the largest value from RGB divided by 255 V = max(R,G,B)/255 ‘Luminance’, on the other hand, is the sum of all RGB values in their respective ratios. L = (0.2126*R + 0.7152*G + 0.0722*B) (There may be other proportions, there are many conventions)
You have ten times more green sensors in your eye than blue ones. So grayscale converters give more weight to the green value of a pixel than to the blue value. So a pure blue pixel will convert to a much darker shade than a pure green pixel. This was originally done by the creators of color television, trying to make it backwards compatible with black and white. There is a logic to it. It’s simple and completely linear, easy to implement with old electronics. The creators of these color pickers went the other way. They imagined a physical box under a light. If you turn the light to 100%, a blue box will give a pure blue pixel. They tried to make a system that reflects this. The actual formula for V from RGB is kinda arbitrary though, it’s just MAX.
It depends on how you going to convert to grayscale Simplest way (with HSV, a.k.a. HSB) you’ll get flat (only mathematical brightness of pixel’s hue used in HSV to calculate RGB of pixel, you’ll get white on fully saturated brightest colors), same simplicity with HSL (quite similar to HSV but on fully saturated colors you’ll get 50% gray), both of this result the same on any graphics redactor More advanced method is to calculate luminance, and there are a bunch of them, and result will differ which one implemented in the app you using. According to Wikipedia (google “Grayscale wikipedia”) common ones: sRGB Luminance=(R*0.2126+G*0.7152+B*0.0722) I assume that most graphics redactors uses this one by default, including Photoshop, ofc unless you change your color space PAL and NTSC Luminance=(R*0.299+G*0.587+B*0.114) HDTV Luminance=(R*0.2126+G*0.7152+B*0.722) HDR television Luminance=(R*0.2627+G*0.6780+B*0.0593) *0 – black, 1 – white
The way hue is calculated is that values slide linearly one color at a time. For example, for some hue to another, we have the red value stay at 0, green stays at 255, and blue slides from 0 to 255. That would be green -> light blue. But, the sum of the colors divided by 3 (which is the value) doesn’t stay the same. 255 + 0 to 255 + 255 over 3 does not stay the same. Therefore, the value changes. Saturation has a similar proof. Saturation can be calculated by saying that it’s a gradient from white at 0 to the hue at 1. If you want to get the same value as white, you need to have white. 255+255+255/3 is the maximum value that a color can get to. If any color gets smaller than 255 then it is not the highest value. These assumptions are left as an exercise to the reader. With that knowledge, we now say that since white is the only color with it’s value, we now look at the value of the other color, and we can see that it is darker. Information about the hue in the final color is destroyed, and it also proves that it changes value as well. Brightness is multiplied by the color, and we will put that into an equation. Say A is the brightness, and the red, blue, and green values are R, G, and B. Putting it into an equation, the value of the final color is (AR+AG+AB)/3. We separate it into (R+G+B)/3 and A. A multiplied by the original value changes it unless it is equal to 1. All 3 of the sliders affect value. If we want to see the grayscale, removing the saturation will affect the color’s value, and not give accurate results.
@marcobucci you should check pete & peter they’re questioning and experimenting on this themselves, i think our color theory is wrong on purpose to ignore how brightness affects color, red + green = yellow ? wrong, greens brightness makes red yellow, and if bright enough, white, this relates to all colors producing white, i think they manipulate this to hide the aether
I can explain. But first, the rainbow colours are wrong 7:13. The green is not true green, and the “blue” is more like cyan, and the “indigo” is more like true blue. Cyan used to be “blue” hence we call the sky “blue” even tho it’s clearly a different from true blue (just google 0000FF) and Indigo used to be the true blue. And violet is a lie. Now, Red, Green and Blue being the primary colour of light, they are the darkest of colours. Beocz when you mix light, it gets, well, lighter. Coz there is literally more light. That’s why Yellow, Cyan, Magenta are way brighter than the primary color of lights becoz they are mixes of two primary lights. Opposite holds true for pigments. Yellow, Cyan, Magenta being the primary colour of pigments. They are the lightest of colours. When you mix pigment, there is more substance to absorb more range of light, the resulting pigment gets darker. This leads to, Red, Green and Blue having less value than Yellow, Cyan and Magenta. As for why green is lighter than red and light than blue. That’s becoz of a mix of light sensitivity and population of visual cones, we perceive green stronger than red stronger than blue.
Isn’t this just the mix of RGB for human perception of colors? Camera’s saturation are sometimes way off in saturation because the engineers have set the saturation based mostly on their perception of what good skin tones are. So the mix going will and should change how we see it. In the Photoshop – it is being shown on a display that has a gamma curve display function that sets the levels and it in most cases has more green than blue or red – that mix is made from the inverted gamma values – humans in nature have more trouble seeing detail in highlights and less trouble in shadows. So the software and your display reflects that in a gamma curve when it adds the display function and reads the linear digital value.
This must be applicable to computer graphic design. I match color for a living and chroma is the purity of the hue ( how intense the color is) If I took any pure chroma blue and added black to it to any degree it would make it darker but it would also kill the chroma or intensity of the color. My point is the colors that have darker pure chroma colors do not have as much black in it as you computer design program needs to add to make sense to itself. Just because it appears darker does not mean the presence of black is being evidenced in real life .
I was trying just now to put white text on a nice gold yellow background, it looked neat, but I knew the contrast will be terrible. One interesting result of this is that if you use a color contrast checker with white text and full saturation colors, blue works best followed by purple, while yellows and oranges and greens are the worst contrast. I those cases you would want to use a dark text to avoid the low contest problem, but personally I think it looks horrible, I much prefer white! But I can’t have it the way I want it, I know it will be difficult for other people to read 🙁 Ohhh and another thing! If you choose to lower the saturation to solve this problem, yellows get really murky and ugly, same with oranges and greens to a lesser extent, while blues and purples work beautifully at any contrast! One day I’ll figure out a solution to this problem, until then using yellows oranges and greens will continue to be a dread for me in choosing shades for UIs -_-
In my opinion. Because our sun is green Yes, we see it white but majority of the white from our sun is green, not uniformly all wavelength. Our atmosphere also let green penetrate the most. So the brightness are strong correlate with green and yellow. And red is second from green because it near yellow Violet is special. It was borrow brightness from red because it was double wavelength of the red. So it brighter than blue alone, which is the darkest
It’s just all about the color conversion to grayscale. Different colors have different preceived brightness. For our human vision the green color contributes to the brithness the most and the conversion algorithm accounts for that. So that’s why the cyan, green and yellow stay the brightest after the conversion.
I kind of wish this talks about saturation, value, etc more technically in terms of how it’s made, instead of clicking along the color picker. That would help me understand. For example, does the saturation of the hue change depending how much white is mixed into the color? When we say it’s desaturated, what does that mean, other than I clicked further one way on the screen?
Excuuuuuuuse me? Of course my eyes deceive me: why else would different wavelengths be “inherently” LIGHTER than others?????? The computers are conforming to the bias of our eyes when they get so technical. (Also there’s lots of different methods of greyscale conversion) fact: 72% of the light we see is green according to a section about luminance/luma in GIMP document about desaturation even worse fact: we perceive ultraviolet as black. What would happen if you converted THAT to greyscale??? lol
Yeah, it’s actually sort of complicated! Under the hood at a very low level computers store color as how much red, green, and blue are in that color as numbers form 0 to 255. Like this (255,123,8) first number is the amount of red, second green, third blue, (R,G,B). But this means certain hues are actually brighter then others! For example, pure red would be (255,0,0) and pure cyan would be (0,255,255) telling the screen to display pure cyan literally tells it to make more light then pure red (for reference pure white would be (255,255,255)). That’s before we remember our eyes don’t care about this stuff and perceive pure red, green, and blue light at different brightnesses which changes things up just a bit more. If you’re trying to figure out the brightness of a color by adding the red, green, and blue then you would have to look up the numbers to multiply the red, green, blue values by before adding them up.
That’s because the black and white filter DOES NOT convert a color to a gray tone with its same luminosity, it converts the colors to a gray tone with the same perceived luminosity. Blue looks darker than yellow, right? Well, they both have the same luminosity (or value). Do you know those old TV’s color banded screen? Well, if you convert it to black and white, it will go from the lightest hue (yellow) to the darkest one (blue). That’s the explanation, it’s just how our eye’s conecells work.
You are confusing value, brightness and lightness. The terms aren’t super consistent, but I actually write software dealing with colour, so I’ll try to explain how these are usually implemented. Value goes from 0 to 100, corresponding to black and the brightest colour with the given hue & saturation. So as you go horizontally across the colour picker, the value stays constant. Lightness (or luminosity) is the physical measurement of the intensity of the light. Or just the sum of the red+green+blue websites divided by 3, after converting to linear space. Brightness is based on human perception of light intensity. For that, we have several experiments done on many people to find the average perception of brightness of each of the three colour websites. This is why you’re getting different results when you set the saturation to 0 vs converting to greyscale. One gives you the value of the colour, the other gives you the perceptual brightness.
Oh boy I remember how confused I was when I accidently discovered this while trying to make an oc for a game. You know those 6 digit color codes? (Yeah that one where pure white equals to ffffff) I thought I could play with values by only changing value number, but, when hue and saturation started to affect value number, I just gave up in shock
I suspect the change in value with hue stems from the fact that the human eye does not perceive all color equally, but has a peak of sensitivity around green and yellow. Those colors coincidentally are also the brightest colors in your tests. Black and white filters are designed to imitate the intensity with which you perceive the color and as such process the colors brighter, which are most readily absorbed. The reason why a higher saturation is darker, is that to get saturation of a color you have to take away the other colors, reducing the overall amount of emitted light. Pure blue for example is (0 0 1) in rgb while less saturated blue is (0.5 0.5 1). To saturate it you can only take away the 0.5 decreasing the overall value.
The wavelength idea may hold something. The mids are lighter as greens and blues are most visible to us, overall more light absorbed. If you see the world beyond violet, things become darker and foggy from light just not getting as far. Although the red side can see the edges of the universe, perhaps it’s ability to pass through objects makes it slightly dimmer from what light got away.
The scientific reason is that our eyes perceive the different hues at unequal brightness. There’s a more complicated way to do it more accurately, but for most applications you can use the algorithm for to convert from RGB to YUV to give perceived brightness. This is a format that was used back in the days when color TVs were new and not everyone had them, so broadcasters needed a way to display grayscale accurately from color article. I needed to research this in order to develop a tool that could calculate the “distance” between two colors so that it could convert from one palette to another as accurately as possible.
The book “Color and Light” by James Gurney talks about this phenomenon called “peak chroma value”. So essentially whenever you have a hue, that hue’s strongest chroma will be located on a spot in a value range from light to dark. Yellow’s strongest chroma is always a light value, red’s strongest chroma is a mid, and blue’s strongest is a dark. If you paint many gradations of chroma and value of each of those colors you’ll create a graph that visually shows where the chromas concentrate on the value scale.
I was doing these types of expirmebts myself trying to figure out why the value kept changing when I would eliminate the saturation. This article made me feel like I wasn’t crazy haha My question is, is there a way to use the color picker to only pick colors based on value? That would be immensely helpful!