Colour Theory ~ The secrets of hue shifting, how to do it?

[heyy13]

I've been working on improving my art of late and my current hump is colour. I tend towards mid saturation with odd mixes of hue. I've been reading up alot of colour theory and one thing that seems to stand out to me is that most art schools teach traditional sliding scale shading. In that, if you wnat a shadow add black. Want a light add white. I've not found almost anything on hue shifting unless it's a rant from Helm, Adarias complaining about his art professor, or a vague referance to it potentially improoving interest, coheasion and the totality of an image.

I understand the basic principle of dark colours tend towards cool colours whilst light tends towards warm. It's all based on their greyscale index values and such. But what i need to know is how to know how deep to go in either direction. Atleast as a newbie, i know it can be taken to extremes beautifully (pretty much anything by Helm)! Or exicuted with masterful subtlty. But whenever i try to construct my ramp i end up with clashing colours, it not looking right, or looking "artifical" and not in a good way. neutral

So i ask humbly for an explanation on pallet picking in relation to hue shifting, how to do it with coheasion and how each of you pulls it off.

 

[Errol McGillivray]

Well, there are three really great tutorials that we have here that really do a good job of looking at the separate ways that color/light work together and how to understand and use them together.

This one talks about different things to look for and different things that happen with light and color to different surfaces.

I got some great advice from people here about picking colours for digital painting. I've been told to mix my colours on the pallet the way I would paint and then use the color picker. To mix, set a low opacity and just paint one color over the other til you have what you want. start with a very desaturated color and work your way up. (I have problems with making my colours too saturated myself.)

The color chooser tool doesn't really give you the option to warm or cool a color with it. Just to shift the hue, or the saturation. (If you use the CMYK or RGB. If you're going to print, you should use the CMYK.) In photoshop if that's what you're using, there are also other letters. You can numerically change the H (hue) S (Saturation - to grey) B (Brightness - to black). There's also an L a and b. I'm not exactly sure what they do, but you can play with them. Also, when I get a colour I want, and use the color picker, I can save a swatch or write down the hex value (that letter and number combination under the RBG values) and punch that back in when I need it.  

[heyy13]

Sorry but that advice is almost useless to me, (yours, not the tutorial which is verry interesting and has hilighted some interesting things that i apply in certain situations but not in others and it's pointing out other places i should be doing it and a more developed tecnique.) because i mostly want this knowledge for my pixeling on ms paint and manual colour pick from the sliding view. ;D

But thanks for trying. I know how to make colours more "cool" or "warm" from identifying with their values, i don't need an automated tool to do it for me and i'm not asking for one. I'm more interested in how people determin the shift though your go with what feels right approached would be nice if it wasn't completely unrealistic in my mediumn. ;D It's pretty much how i go about it when i'm painting (with real paint, not cg) but because it's painted irl and not on a computer i can't colour pick and analize the mathamatical relationship of the ramp i choose by feel in order to translate that into a more structured approach for my pixeling. Which is what i'm currently investigating.

I should have been more explanitive in my first post. : ) Thanks for the link, i'm reading it right now.

 

[MukashiMukashi]

Were you talking about the use of Complementary colors? As if, you can darken and light one color by using it's complementary? As for shading and such with color. If you observe real life material, it isn't simply black added to it's base color, but rather a darker hue, plus a tinge of blue for shade, or orange for highlights. The reason for this is because light acts like a wave and can reflect. Therefore, color can also reflect off of the other color, resulting in the slight tinge of either blue, or orange.

I hope that helps, but I'm still not entirely sure what you're asking for.  

[Freiheit]

heyy13

Sorry but that advice is almost useless to me, (yours, not the tutorial which is verry interesting and has hilighted some interesting things that i apply in certain situations but not in others and it's pointing out other places i should be doing it and a more developed tecnique.) because i mostly want this knowledge for my pixeling on ms paint and manual colour pick from the sliding view. ;D

But thanks for trying. I know how to make colours more "cool" or "warm" from identifying with their values, i don't need an automated tool to do it for me and i'm not asking for one. I'm more interested in how people determin the shift though your go with what feels right approached would be nice if it wasn't completely unrealistic in my mediumn. ;D It's pretty much how i go about it when i'm painting (with real paint, not cg) but because it's painted irl and not on a computer i can't colour pick and analize the mathamatical relationship of the ramp i choose by feel in order to translate that into a more structured approach for my pixeling. Which is what i'm currently investigating.

I should have been more explanitive in my first post. : ) Thanks for the link, i'm reading it right now.

wow... How about trying to improve on social skills until you realise that was a very VERY rude way of telling someone he hasn't understood your question quite well.  

[Comet 2062]

Well technically to portray a value change (Shading), all you have to do is make sure the value is right and the hue doesn't really matter.
like here you can see the trees are rendered in diff colors, but you can still tell that it's a 3d tree xD
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/archive/0/07/20060502042804!Hue_shift_six_photoshop.jpg
image courtesy of google.  

[Mogtoats]

If I understood well, you're asking how to use those coloured shadows without making your piece seem like a patchwork of random colours.

So my answer to that: A trick I found very useful to dim the clash is to lay a, say, 30% layer of the darkened (plus black) base colour ("absolute" colour of the object) on top of the shadow.

Here is a very badly done example:


If you see what I mean.