Colour Theory - Systematic Colour!

The introductory lecture on colour theory was extremely helpful, but also just made my morning because the aesthetic of it was great and I was engaged for the whole duration.

We went over the basics, such as primary colours, or in other words, what we were 'taught' to be primary colours. Red, blue and yellow are predominantly what teachers coach children, at least that what my art teacher taught me. However sometimes the real answer is 'red, green and yellow' or, 'cyan, magenta and yellow', alternatively more recognisable as RGB and CMYK.

More interestingly this lecture brought back memories from Physics lessons in high school. What is fascinating is that 'Light' is the only wavelength the human eye can detect. Other wavelengths include, radio, infrared and ultraviolet, but however, we cannot see those. Light is energy waves that have been grouped together to make a spectrum, and at one end are short waves which form the colour blue and at the other are the longer waves which form the colour red, then the rest fall in between.

Since we know that light can be absorbed, reflected or transmitted, this then makes sense as to how we see colour. For example I always knew that black absorbs light, but it didn't click that by it absorbing all the light, means that that would be the reason for it having no colour... I thought that black was just black. But then that also made me think that an apple being red means that red light is reflected and the apple absorbs all the other colours on the spectrum. An apple is not actually red. There is no colour on anything without light. 

We also went over colour for production. Printing something on a CMYK printer that was made with an RGB mode on Photoshop will end up with a significantly lower quality. The more you mix colours with A CMYK colour mode, the darker and more murky the colour will get (subtractive mixing), however mixing on a RGB colour mode will only make the colour closer to white (additive mixing). Hence the difference in quality. Therefore those who are making something directly for print should use the CMYK mode and those who are working digitally should use the RGB mode. 

Then lastly we leant about the true meaning of hue, saturation and brightness which are more commonly seen on editing programmes for pictures. Hue is the different shades of a colour, for example when you want to paint your wall a new colour and there are several different names such as "Royal Fuchsia" and "Electric Pink". The saturation then, is the intensity/purity of that colour. The stronger a colour looks, the more saturated it is. And then finally, the brightness/luminance of a colour is the tint, for example pale yellows, pale greens. These colours get closer to white. 

I really loved this lecture and I can't wait for the next part, colour is something that really interests me because I feel like colour is the one thing that can add excitement and bring emotion to our work, so I feel like it is a really important topic!