Wednesday, May 30, 2012
Colour Bar for transfer to phone
Colour - photographs unreliable
Just yesterday I had been reading an article in Artist magazine about why it is unreliable to paint from photos only. The article is right and Hockney is too - the camera lies - about depth
and colour etc - it's lenses can't do what our eyes do and it's colours
are interpretive. Though digital cameras a getting better and scanners
too - in their millions of colours - that's still less than we see and
it's heavily interpreted by lighting etc. My experiment has really made this clear for me.
I had been using the colour picker in Sketchbook app on my phone to pick colours from photos to paint them. I had also taken picture of a page in my Colour Mixing for Portraits book to pick colours from that. So, today I tried it on my desktop. I scanned in page from book this time to get better colour match than phone camera version. Then opened in Photoshop. My intention was to rearrange tiny patches of each colour down one side so I could use it on my phone - to overcome patches being painted over with my picture, therefore making it impossible to pick up the original colours. But once I started roaming over just one colour square with Photoshop's colour picker it changed between about 10 colours at least - you could see why as the squares show different colours in the picture below - eg. you can see brown and ochre in the master skin tone recipe square. I even scanned in at lower dpi but no good. So even adding picture of say John to colour pick from means I am not getting of John but of a camera's limited interpretation of it. Also, the squares of colour in the book itself have been interpreted by a camera, and in the picture below then interpreted by my scanner.
I wonder though if the digital process is really picking up the constituent colours of the square that our eyes put together in a Gestalt way to see the whole colour - just like the impressionist put yellow next to blue dots or dashes next to each other so we would see green from a distance - not sure this is the case here but I will investigate further.
Photos are useful but it's still best to see the real thing at least a few times.
I had been using the colour picker in Sketchbook app on my phone to pick colours from photos to paint them. I had also taken picture of a page in my Colour Mixing for Portraits book to pick colours from that. So, today I tried it on my desktop. I scanned in page from book this time to get better colour match than phone camera version. Then opened in Photoshop. My intention was to rearrange tiny patches of each colour down one side so I could use it on my phone - to overcome patches being painted over with my picture, therefore making it impossible to pick up the original colours. But once I started roaming over just one colour square with Photoshop's colour picker it changed between about 10 colours at least - you could see why as the squares show different colours in the picture below - eg. you can see brown and ochre in the master skin tone recipe square. I even scanned in at lower dpi but no good. So even adding picture of say John to colour pick from means I am not getting of John but of a camera's limited interpretation of it. Also, the squares of colour in the book itself have been interpreted by a camera, and in the picture below then interpreted by my scanner.
I wonder though if the digital process is really picking up the constituent colours of the square that our eyes put together in a Gestalt way to see the whole colour - just like the impressionist put yellow next to blue dots or dashes next to each other so we would see green from a distance - not sure this is the case here but I will investigate further.
Photos are useful but it's still best to see the real thing at least a few times.
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