[sfr]

Fancy title eh? But this is actually a serious art related question, and something I've been wondering about for a while. Maybe I'll explain the full story of why I'm asking about this:

Some time ago, me and my girlfriend were looking at this old handpixelled pic I did a few years back. At the time I painted the pic, I was experimenting with a technique of smoothly mixing several subtly different color gradients, so the reddish skintone in this picture is actually made of orange, purple and red pixels. In my eyes the purple pixels blend into the overall tone very smoothly (which of course was my intention). But in her opinion, the purple pixels stand out very clearly from the skintone and seriously disrupt the look of the image.

There are often big differences between monitors, so I wouldn't be surprised if the purple stood out like that on some other screen. But in this case, we're both looking at the image on the same monitor, yet she's obviously seeing the purples more "emphasized" than I am. And neither of us is colorblind or anything, we should both have "normal" color vision.

Here's the image btw, if someone wants to have a look: http://www.saunalahti.fi/saffron/work/miao.gif

I know that the human eye is more sensitive to certain colors than others - I guess the hue color wheel in Painter demonstrates this effect pretty well (the change from red to yellow is very apparent, but after that comes a long streak of almost uniform green). But I haven't thought that there might also be such differences between human individuals, and I've certainly never seen the topic discussed in an artistic context.

So, I'm wondering whether anyone here has? I know there are some people here who are very well delved in color usage and have taken advanced art classes. This seems like an important topic because any "scientific" information about the phenomenon might help avoid nasty cases like this purple/red combination of mine. So if someone knows something about this, please share it with the world!

Saffron / Sunflower

[Aiko Ito]

I think the purple phenomana(spelling?) has to do with complimentary colors. If you put purple and yellow beside eachother without mixing you get that jarring contrast. Thats mostly standard color wheel theory though.
Although I do see the purple as standing out, I probably wouldn't have noticed unless you said anything. Theres also different tempature, saturation, and light value differnces. But I always hated learning all that in stuff in school...
This picture here-
Self-Serene Portrait
Has lots of different colors, kinda a green/red scheme, but you don't notice that much especially because of the blue paper.
Where as this picture also has green and red but it looks more natural cause I added so much white. Autumn Portrait
The hard part is actually trying to see these colors in real life and then put it on canvas, or screen
There is no set skin tone, like brown or peach, its more natural to add lots of color.

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Aiko Ito at www.okiaoti.freeservers.com

[This message has been edited by Aiko Ito (edited February 05, 2000).]

[Affected]

Hm... I probably wouldn't have thought of it on my own, but if I had to choose a color that stood out the most in that picture, it would be the purple.I haven't really thought of that before, either, but I wouldn't be too surprised if there was some variation in how people see things, our features and traits vary so much, so why not colour vision, too...
One thing I've noticed is that if I look with my right eye the colours I see are more saturated than with the left... Well, used to be, anyhow, I don't notice any difference right now.

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Affected
http://affected.xs.mw

[LeChuck]

I see purple blobs in various locations.

[Sc00p]

Well, what I took away from color theory class was that people's eyes react differently to contrasting colors, as their retina "vibrate" more when they come upon two large contrasting colors (ie: bright red on a mid green).
It's this vibration of the retina that attract us to colors like red. Try this out, if you track your eye around the room, you're eyes are likely to stop at everything you see that's red. (In truth, the eye picks up greens and yellows better than red, but because the color in everything around us has so much green and yellow already, most people pick up red as the most noticable color).

Perhaps your girlfriend has a retina that is more sensitive to vibrating colors? (keep in mind purple is the second most noticable color to the eye next to red) And I have to say, I do greatly notice those purple spots on that image as well.

Anyway, that's just my two scents, maybe it will help.

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Rene Antunes
www.nytro.org
[email protected]

[FireWalker]

When I first opened that pic sfr, I leaned close to the monitor and immediately noticed the purple... and yeah, to me it did distract a little from the pic. Almost as if she was suffering from some type of purple malaria :P I then went to get a drink, but left you pic open, and when I was on my way back, I was seeing it again for the first time, but this time I was about 5 feet away from the screen... and it looked absolutely wonderful... the purple blended nicely and if anything, added to the picture. So, now it's time for a basic theory kiddies... IMO, it seems that with a little distance, colors appear to blend more seemlessly... just like a monet (i think) that only used blotches of paint... up close it looks like disfigured crap.. but take a step back and vwala.. a masterpiece. :P So uhh.. is that a bad thing? I mean.. i've seen girls walking towards me in a street.. and you know.. they're lookin' pretty good.. and then something happens and she transforms into a man with long blonde hair, and it just gives me the heebie jeebies. lol. Yeah, I'm rambling. Nice pics though :P

[sfr]

Aiko, nice drawings btw And it's true that uniform local colors are rare (or non-existent) in nature. So it's only natural to use varying hues and saturation values. But if there is indeed significant variation in color vision, then using a lot of juxtaposed colors might in an unhappy case ruin the effect of the image for some people.

I guess we all would want to have our work look the best possible to everyone. So the thought that a random group of people will see my image "wrong" because of a physiological thing is annoying, especially if I could have avoided it by sticking to more "eye-safe" colors.

But first I'd need some way of determining what color combinations are prone to this problem, and normal color theories (at least the ones I'm familiar with) don't address this issue. This isn't just about complimentary colors - in my eyes those red and purple in that pic are very close to each other and blend nicely even at close distance, but she (and apparently many of you, but your monitors might also be different) sees strains of bright purple pixels all over the girl's face.

Well, maybe I'll figure this out some day

Saffron / Sunflower

[Danny]

Saffron,

the reason why the human eye is more sensitive to some colours than others has to do with the make up of the retina part of the eye. The retina is basically the backlayer of the eye and is made up of lightsensitive nerve tissue. The retina is made up of so called rods and cones. The rods are sensitive to shapes, subtle light and movement whereas the cones are sensitive to the actual colour. Each eye consists of about 7 million cones. There are 3 types of cones. Each sensitive to diffirent areas of the visible spectrum. However the cones that are sensitive to the blue part of the spectrum are outnumbered about 10-1. Which basically means that the human eye has more difficulty interpreting shades of blue.

I guess those colourtheory classes were good for something afterall..

Danny

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[email protected]

[sfr]

So, if a person has even just a bit more (or less) of blue-sensitive cones compared to the normal amount, it would already make a significant difference. Which could explain why my girlfriend is better at distinguishing purple from red than I am, apparently. Interesting! Thanks Danny

Saffron / Sunflower

[Giant Hamster]

AHHH!! purple blobs bright! whoa. its a cool pic, but that kids got something purple crawling on his face. i guess my eyes are blue sensitive?

all this color differences between individuals is probally the reason i really only work in b&w or solid colors.



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-JameZ the Giant Hamster-
the Hamster Alliance
www.mp3.com/jamezthegh
ICQ: 43691064
Musician,2d/3d artist, programmer,overall guru :)

[alive]

have I got my monitor's colour calibration totally wrong or something? I mean, i see no defined "purple blobs".

all i see - and have to look hard for - are extremely subtle areas of purple which add to the image positively (and subconsciously more than anything).

the only problem i can see in using this historical technique is with the differences in each viewer's monitor settings. in the same way viewing a regular painting in different light alters pigment.

I doubt very much if genetic differences between individuals would have that great an impact on the perception of colour. Although maybe very slightly. Unless, of course, they had an exceptional condition - such as being colour blind.

As always, a great image by you Saffron!

[Muzman]

While all that's been said is probably true, it's worth remembering colour context as well. I'll explain.
Maybe it's just me, but as I looked at that pic the purple didn't stand out until I was looking across and down the neck; there the purple stays the same and the red dithers between two or three shades. It was at that point that the solid value of the purple became obvious where ever it appeared in the pic.
It could be that my cones like blue better but there was also the conscious phenomena of seeking it out after recognising it.
You can find that sort of thing with hearing too; after listening to the same recording over and over sometimes you pick out one thing, one part of the music, as if you never noticed it before and after that it sticks out like a sore thumb. That thing you notice becomes really annoying too, it distracts you from the overall experience.

I'm not sure how common this is, but I think it becomes more pronounced with 'training'; eg a person looking at computer screens a lot is more likely to see colours as individual values (even more so if you're drawing with them)and a person dong audio engineering is training themselves to pick out individual sounds and frequencies all day long so there's a better than average chance they'll start doing it by habit as well.

In short, I don't think a graphics forum would be a good place to test this out, if anyone was going to. We spend hours training ourselves to notice things like that. (particularly we children of RGB)
While saffron's inability to see a dramatic contrast or girlfriend's inability not to see it could have a physical basis, it's hard to say that's the reason everyone sees a given picture the way they do.

[This message has been edited by Muzman (edited February 05, 2000).]

[Frost]

Greetings,

In my humble oppinion, I do think that certain people perceive certain tints and hues differently. However, unless you're really trying to experiment with these color blending techniques at the pixel level (or are working on a huge 'murale' composed of little colored tiles on some cathedral ceiling), I don't think anyone doing photoshop art needs to worry about running into that problem, although some nice lessons can be learned from this...

Many painters for instance will add some cyan-ish hue to the specular/highlights of red objects in their paintings to further contrast and detach the lighting, etc. General photoshop artists need not worry about this problem occurring if they blend their colors by neighbouring ones. Contrasting hues (and values I should say) always add movement and therefore come forth towards the viewer, calling the attention.

I'd be interested indeed to see what people think of certain pictures created by some famous scene artists like RA or Niko, where they often times made pictures by mixing tints of green, purle and orange... (personally think these were made to be agressive to the eye, and therefore, come out and grab the audience more so than other [competing] pictures -- although a nice way to detach foreground from background scenery if you ask me...)

Please send your comments...

RA - Nooon logo
RA - Multidoodle
RA - Arrgh
Niko - Nine
RA - Maradona

Just my two cents.
frost.

[sfr]

I'd remind that in those days, pixelling was done on the Amiga with a TV or a crappy 15 kHz monitor as the screen. So the screen actually added a lot of blending between the juxtaposed colors, and the images were generally designed to take advantage of that. Just something to keep in mind when watching old pixelled pics on a supersharp 80 kHz 17" monitor like we nowadays have...
(Personally I love watching 320*256 images on a 17" monitor with those crispy giant pixels. But that's only because I learned pixelling on the PC )

[Blind]

I'm seeing the blotches too, and I'm somewhat red/green colorblind. But, the blotches aren't really detracting from the picture. In fact, it's a very nice pic... I like it.

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- Blind
[email protected]
Clan Shred Company