[ceenda]

If I do 2 pics to the same design, one in Painter, and one in Photoshop, the one I do in Painter always comes out as unsaturated, even though I think at the time that I'm picking the right colours.

I've heard of other people having the same problem, though people like the guys at Saffire, for instance, never seemed to come across this problem. Why does it seem that the right colours are being picked, but the image always comes out as being kinda flat and dull?

Here are 2 examples (okay, they're not identical, but you get the idea). One is done in Painter 6, the other in Photoshop. The Painter one seems really faded to me, even though I thought I was picking really saturated colours.

PAINTER 6
http://www.cee.hw.ac.uk/~ceenda/treeandrock_2.jpg

PHOTOSHOP 6 (demo version - ScreenPrint... naughty )
http://www.cee.hw.ac.uk/~ceenda/treeandrock.jpg

If anyone can offer any suggestions that would be great. I have my own theory that the brightly coloured interface may affect the perception of the colours, though, like I say, most people don't seem to come across this problem.

[ June 08, 2001: Message edited by: ceenda ]

[balistic]

My guess would be that Painter, because it tries so hard to look like traditional media, uses different blend modes than Photoshop during the painting process. Real pigments mix much differently than digital colors, and it wouldn't surprise me if Painter is trying to reproduce that.

Try either intentionally oversaturating your colors in Painter, or playing with contrast/saturation/levels while you're painting. Sometimes you don't realize how muddy your image is getting until you play with the levels a bit.

[Pat]

Your observations are correct --I've noticed the same behavior at work in my own paintings. During brush work, Photoshop _directly_ applies your selected colors in a mathmatical sense. Your only options for changing this are using the custom screen modes such as Multiply, Screen, Darken, Dissolve, etc. Although simple, these drawimg tool modes are independent to the layer's mode and the two can be combined for even MORE variety. But essentially, the math involved with altering the pixel values is linear.

Photoshop uses a relatively simple brush engine compared to Painter. Due to the variety and complexity of real media, Painter's brush engine alters far more information. We're talking about color mixing, paper grain values, smearing, etc. One looks at the custom brush menu and it's 100's of options should give you an idea of just how complex. There's a lot of processiong going on with each stroke, which is why Painter is typically slower than Photoshop. I suspect the original programmers of Painter did two things:

1) With all the additional values to manipulate, they had to construct their color mixing formula to be biased towards a non-saturated color. Otherwise, many of the tools would RAPIDLY produce out of gamut colors or undesirable results. This is far from the behavior of natural media --so a nice balance was reached. You'll noticed that out of gamut colors happen quite often in Photoshop --witness the dodge and burn tools. At one point in time, Painter used a more aggressive color model, which you could restrain by selecting the "Enforce Printable Colors", which made it akin to painting in CMYK mode (with it's severely restricted color range) in Photoshop. Unfortunately, that seems to have disappeared under the even more complex brush engine in Painter 6.

2) Aesthetically, those unsaturated colors Painter generates makes color harmony easier. The narrower the range of color you use, the easier it is to make your colors match. A quick look around the forum will reveal that color-wise, most Photoshop paintings tend to be highly saturated. This adds a lot of visual punch, but with inexperienced painters it can result in a lot of "color frustration" and visual fruit salad.

My experience with painting in Photoshop includes a lot of "subtractive" work.... that's me running some brush strokes over the color to tone it down so the saturation is only in the areas I want. My Painter work is exactly the opposite... my fundimental colors are all solid, but I have to run the brush around a lot in the areas I need the most saturation in. This seems pretty "additive" to me. The good news is both programs have excellent means for controlling the saturation and value. And, if you prefer one over the other, you can simply save as a tiff and import it into the other program.

Hope this helps...

-Pat

[ceenda]

Thanks for the replies guys!

balistic: Yeah, the blend modes in Painter 6 take a bit of getting used to. The patch helps a bit with regard to picking up underlying colour.

Pat: Some fantastic info there, cheers! I guess the whole approach to painting with Photoshop is different to Painter, as one aims to be more realistic with regard to colour mixing, etc.