Understanding Color Relativity in Art and Perception

Color relativity reveals how colors shift perception, enhancing the realism in artwork through subtle adjustments.

### Understanding Color Relativity: Enhancing Realism in Art
* 🎨 In this video, Jeremy discusses the concept of **color relativity**, which, alongside **color temperature**, is essential for achieving **realistic colors** in artwork.
* 🌈 Color relativity is particularly effective in **deep saturated zones**, complementing the use of **color temperature** for vibrant color representation.
* 👁 Jeremy illustrates how optical illusions can trick the eye into **perceiving different colors**, despite them being **identical in hue and value**.
* 🎥 Drawing from his experience on the film Ratatouille, he explains how **adjusting foreground and background colors** can create **depth and separation** in scenes.
* 🖌 He emphasizes the importance of **avoiding white on the canvas**, as it can **distort color perception** and suggests starting with a **uniform tone** to maintain **color relativity**.
* 🌞 An experiment is proposed where viewers can observe their eyes' **color adjustments** in different lighting conditions to understand how **perception shifts** based on surroundings.
* 🖼 Jeremy concludes by encouraging artists to explore the subtleties of color relativity, asserting that "**gray is where the magic happens**," allowing for a nuanced approach to color selection.
* 🎉 He invites viewers to apply these insights in their own art, highlighting the **significance of understanding color relativity** for effective palette choices.

hi, my name is Jeremy, and on this channel, I talk about color and light. Today, I'd like to talk about color relativity. This is another powerful tool meshed alongside color temperature that I talked about in my last video. This is where the power of gray really exists, and this is how to get more realistic colors. The idea of color temperature is really great for super-saturated situations, and it's seen when you have strong colors. Color relativity is best in the deep saturated zone, so these two will complement each other in a way that I think should really help your artwork. So, you might have seen before optical illusions where you look at this sphere and this sphere. This one over here looks like it's a darker color than the one over here, and this is because your eye will perceive colors differently. They're actually the exact same color and the same value, but it's a trick that happens in your eyes. There are times where a color can look like something your eye will tell you it's one color like

If I look at this tone right here on, you know, the character's shirt and go, What color is that? I would say, I mean, that looks like a warm color in this blue background. But if I were to change this background and say, Well, what color is this right here, right along the shirt in the same place? And you would say, Well, that's like a purple color. But if I select it, it's actually the exact same color as was in the blue. So when you see this desaturated red color in a blue tone, it looks very warm. But when you see that same color, a desaturated red tone with a bunch of worms, now it looks cool. In my last video, I talked about how I learned a lot about color temperature from working on the film Ratatouille. And another thing that I learned on that film is about color relativity. I was working on this shot where the Director of Photography wanted the foreground to be really warm and the background to feel cooler to be able to separate the character. So you

can really see them in this background, and when I started working on it, we put in cold-colored lights, blue lights into the background, and it just really didn't work. It kind of looked something like this, and it was, yeah, it was too strong. It was like too many saturated colors. So, in order to give a more natural feel, what we did was we had warm lights in the foreground, and then we also had warm lights in the background that were just more desaturated. So, this is a tricky thing. It's also a very powerful thing. In order to make your art look cohesive, try here's an experiment for you. If you go outside on a sunny day and you cover one eye, look into the nut directly into the Sun. But if you look into a sunny place and then hold one hand over this other eye and just kind of like look into a Sunny Spot and hold that for maybe 30 seconds, then when you take this off, look at the difference in your eyes. Like, I can see it right now just in this room. There is

a color temperature difference. Your eye will try to white balance everything, so if it's very cool outside, it'll white balance and make everything warmer, and if it's very warm outside, it'll white balance and make everything cooler to try to find a level of white. Your perception of colors depends on your situation. I was working on The Incredibles, and there was a scene that I brought into the Director of Photography, and you know, she was like, Your scenes look too blue, way too blue. Why are yours blue and all of our monitors in the studio were calibrated exactly the same, so it should look the same at my desk as it did at her desk. And she's like, Your scenes just look so blue. So I kept compensating, and she's like, Let me come see your monitor. I think your monitor is broken. So she came to my desk and realized I had a red wall behind me, and the red wall was making a slight reflection of red onto my monitor, which made me overcompensate, you know, my colors because my eye was color

adjusting, and it was just this crazy thing. So, I had to paint the wall gray in order to be able to do my work. I have a friend who's an imagineer who does lighting at Disney theme parks, and he told me that they have to vary the colors because your eyes will adjust so quick to a new color that you'll lose the vibrancy and the saturation. So, as an example, the Pirates of the Caribbean ride is a very blue, strong color to make it very rich and vibrant, but if it was all the same blue, just a 20-30 seconds in, and those blues will settle in your eye and start looking gray and blah. So, they have to vary up the ride with warm tones to kind of go back and forth so that everything will still feel magical and vibrant the entire time. Another thing that I think is really interesting is if I'm sitting inside, my eyes will be adjusted to the lights on the inside, the warmer incandescent light on the inside, and outside the sky will look super

saturated blue right at that zone as the sun has just set, the blue hour. But if I walk outside, I saw this happening a few nights ago, so I snapped a picture with my phone. And then I walked outside, my phone color temperature balance to the cool light outside. And now the light that looked light to me on the inside is now very warm. And out here, it doesn't look so blue. The color temperature shift that will happen in my phone also happens in my eye. Okay, so I want to look at this image, gonna do a color study really quickly with you. I'm going to make it kind of rough. I'm not going to get into all the details, but I want to show you the power of this tool of color relativity. An image like this has a very beautiful color palette, and I can look here, and most people will say, Okay, I get that. There's kind of a yellow sky, and there's this haze, and there's some purples back here, and there's some

greens in the front, so let's go ahead and try painting this. Before I do any color picking, I have a brand new layer that I'm going to paint on. Common mistakes that I see is that people leave white on the canvas, and they'll just start painting a color that they find, and they'll say, Okay, I'm going to color over here, that's it. It needs to be more yellow, and I'm just going to keep painting over here until I find the right tones. But I highly suggest that you don't ever leave white on the canvas because of color relativity. It will look like a lighter color, or this yellow will look like a darker yellow on white than it will on the darker yellow. So I don't want to confuse my eye by leaving white on canvas, so I'm going to just flood this whole thing so that I'm working with that one tone overall and go, All right, I can already tell that I've got some of the tones in here. This is good enough as a start, and maybe in this

corner it goes kind of more yellow, well more saturated and more yellow up here. And I'm just going to paint really quickly. I'm also very light touch, you know, on my Wacom tablet, so I can just barely touch and just kind of add in a little bit of color. Okay, so if I look into the background and say what colors, what colors are down here. I know that there's like a darker color, kind of like this orangey type color, maybe like that something. But when I look at my eye, this looks like purple right back here, doesn't it? That little tree back there. So if I go and I say, let me pick what I think that color is, a light purple, make my brush a little smaller and paint this in. Ah, wait, okay, wait, uh, it's too strong. Okay, well, what about these greens? I'm gonna mix, I'm gonna pick some green because that's what I think I see. I'm gonna paint greens in here. Ah, this just looks like hyper color. Why does this look so bad? Okay, thing here is color relativity and

instead of moving my color into these greens and purples, I'm gonna, no, I'm gonna undo these. I'm going to try a different trick. If I know that a saturated color in front of a desaturated color will look different, maybe we can find our colors in a more subtle way. How do I pick that color of that purplish-looking tree in the background? What if I start with picking the color of my general warm tone, and instead of shifting it all the way to purple, I'm going to desaturate. And then on my color wheel, I'm going to shift it slightly. I'm going to lean a little bit towards the purple around the wheel. I'm going to go color temperature-wise towards purple. And now look, if I paint this color, and like, whoa, okay, now this is starting to look like what I'm seeing over here. This is no longer, this feels more correct than actually going all the way to purple. Let me try the same with these kind of like greenish-looking

tones, so I'm going to select again my color here and say, All right, well, what if I were to desaturate and lean towards green? Let me make this a little bit darker and desaturated here. Oh, maybe I leaned too far. Maybe it needs to be more subtle. Oh, I gotta discover these tones. Okay, this is getting into the range, sort of like this, these tones. This is a discovery process too along the way, but trying to find the right tones. Like maybe that's actually a little bit closer to what I think is these kind of greenish tones. And maybe as I get up into here, maybe some of that is a little bit more orange. Look like there's kind of like light back here, some oranges. Again, I'm staying really rough, and the idea here is to instead of going all the way to the colors, follow color temperature and just kind of lean a little bit one way or the other. So let me fill in here. I'm gonna go really fast just for the sake of this video because I don't want it to be too

long of a video, but I want the idea to come across of how powerful this is. And for down here, I am seeing more saturated oranges, a little bit more dark in here, so I'm going to pick again, being very subtle. They're not really that saturated, is it? It's just more, uh, just kind of a darker orange. And then this, a desaturate, and lean a little bit more towards green, but not actually turn green. But because of color relativity, it will look green to my eye. This is a hard concept to master. This is one that whenever I show people this, they're like mind-blown. This is amazing, but how do I apply it? Like, just take this as your tip for this one video. Try this kind of like slight lean, just a little bit in your paintings. It's amazing what you can do with the subtle color. You know, it's funny. I had an artist friend come to me one time and say, You know, what do you think of gray? Gray kind of sucks, doesn't it? Like, No, gray is

where the magic happens. A lot of things, you know, the saturated colors. Get those down first, like my color relativity video. Super saturated colors follow color temperature. That's cool, but this, this is where the subtlety can happen and the amazing thing. So gray, gray is an amazing area of just taking colors and desaturating them and leaning them slightly. So as I continue to paint in here, I'm just going to have different levels of saturation, desaturation, and it's going to give me this whole range of tones that feel cool or warm or purple or all these kind of different tones through here. And then I'm going to, for this color, this looks pretty green down here. So I'm actually going to lean even further. Notice the color is still in the orange zones. It's not actually green, it's orange. It's not even fully yellow, but on the canvas, this looks amazingly green. Make this darker and less saturated. Well, no, maybe a little bit more saturated just to get these tones in here, to find these colors. And I'm going to take that kind of color.

through here maybe this type of color through here, and then there's a really dark character in here. This is my initial blocking. It's really important to try to find all of the colors really quickly, and I mean I can refine these later. Maybe this type of tone is trees here. Let's just wiggle in some colors, and we can find uh trying to make this video fast is a little bit bigger, and this kind of comes up here [Music], and then this gets even brighter through here, and little bits through here. foreign another half an hour kind of refining this, and even that's too strong. Boy, these are really subtle tones, just trying to find just those right tones, man. Now I'm messing it up. I'm gonna undo this entire process. It's very iterative, and it takes work. It takes time, even with somebody who's done this for a really long time, finding those tones. Yeah, I'm just like going sloppy here. Then there's this one light strip across there, so I'll paint that in just to find that light strip.

and behind this guy, maybe along this edge, it needs to be darker. Foreign super crazy loose. This would be my first 10-minute draw-in on this just to find my colors, and then I can go in and I can add the extra shapes, and I can, you know, get the proportions right, and I can get the little fine details, make my brushes smaller, and get those little lines and all that kind of stuff in here as I kind of come in and do the final painting. But for now, hopefully, this is enough to show you the power of color relativity, that it can actually be a tool and not just an optical illusion. So, as you look and do more studies, pay attention to color temperature and how that color shifts as a light wraps around the surface of something. Pay attention to color relativity. Okay, now moment of truth. Let's go back and actually color pick from this original to see if my theory holds. Okay, that first tone, pay attention to the color wheel over here. Actually, I'm going to go to the big one. Watch the

color wheel over here, and this right here shows the hue, and this shows the level of if it comes over towards this line, it's desaturated, it comes towards this, and it's saturated, and then of course light and dark. So if I select through here and just kind of drag around, these are all yellows like we'd expect, a desaturated yellow color temperature as it gets brighter, more saturated, and shifts a little bit more towards orange, following color temperature. But when I select this, what looks like purple, it is just shifting a little bit more towards those purples, it's going towards red, it's leaning towards red into all these areas that kind of look purple. And I come up here to these areas that look green to me, and some of these just kind of like they shift, they're still yellow, but it's just a more green-yellow. Totally amazing. I love this piece of artwork, Alexandra Jacob, from about 100 years ago painted this, and there are some just really, really interesting looking at no matter where I

pick on this image the range of hues stay right here between yellow and orange and never shifts anywhere else. Even this green is orange. This color looks green to my eyes. Orange. This color that looks red to my eye. Well, it's red, but it's just kind of in that range. All the colors of this canvas merge beautifully together. And that, my friends, is another tool for you to consider. And the thing to start observing is the idea of color relativity and how you can use this in your art to kind of pick your palettes and choose your colors together. Thanks again for watching. I'll see you next time. Bye.

Power In The Grays

Lighting Mentor

Color relativity is a powerful tool for achieving realistic colors, complementing color temperature.

Our eyes perceive colors differently, leading to optical illusions where identical colors appear distinct.

The speaker shares an experiment and personal experience from working on the film Ratatouille to illustrate the impact of color relativity in art.

The Impact of Color Temperature on Perception

Color temperature differences can affect how we perceive colors, with our eyes constantly adjusting to find a neutral white balance.

A red wall's reflection can cause overcompensation in color perception, as experienced by a filmmaker.

Disney's lighting design varies colors to maintain vibrancy and magic, while a shift in environment can change our perception of color temperature.

Leaving white on the canvas can confuse color perception, so it's better to flood the area with one tone.

Using a light touch on the tablet allows for subtle color additions.

Instead of directly shifting to a saturated color, desaturating and slightly shifting on the color wheel can help find the right tones more effectively.

The Power of Subtle Color Tones in Painting

The process of discovering the right color tones involves desaturating and leaning towards different hues, such as green and orange.

Following color temperature and making subtle adjustments can create a powerful impact in paintings.

Gray is highlighted as an essential color for desaturation and achieving a range of tones, ultimately creating the illusion of different colors through subtle shifts.

Color blocking is a crucial initial step in the painting process, helping to quickly identify and refine color tones.

The artist emphasizes the iterative nature of finding the right tones, highlighting the importance of color relativity and temperature in creating depth and dimension.

The initial loose drawing serves as a foundation for adding shapes, proportions, and fine details in the final painting.

The color wheel shows the relationship between hue, saturation, and lightness.

As you drag through the wheel, colors shift from desaturated to saturated and from yellow to orange, with purples leaning towards red and greens being a more yellow-green.

The artwork by Alexandra Jacob demonstrates color relativity, with all hues merging beautifully and challenging the perception of color.