Color Theory 101, Part 2

Last week we began talking about color theory and we discussed analogous color. Let's talk about this more.

Last week, we mentioned the beginning stages of what analogous color is. I mentioned that we can have several colors that are similar to one another, but yet different. That's almost right, but not quite. What we looked at last week is really what is called "monochromatic". I didn't want to confuse you with the term monochromatic, because a lot of people that hear that think that we are talking about a single color. What we are really talking about when we say monochromatic is a single hue, but several tints or shades. This is what we looked at last week. Remember, as a scheme, this is monochromatic.

Now to truly discuss analogous color schemes we have to break out the color wheel. The color wheel is a circular pattern of colors that go from one hue to the next in a continuum. Take a look at the next image.

You see that there is an arrow going accross a series of hue values. These would be analogous to one another. As monochromatic was the use of a single hue with different shades, this is the use of two or more hues to provide a color scheme. In other words, you use two different colors next to each other on the color wheel. So this could be purple and blue or red, purple and blue etc... Take a look at the next color scheme to see what I mean.

You can see that we have a couple of actual hues here. I am being subtle, so that you can see the usefulness of the idea. I don't particularly like the combination of a fully saturated yellow coupled with a fully saturated green. But when you desaturate the two, you get a nice combination. Compare the next two images.

While the first one is sort of light and Springish (as in the season of Spring), the second one actually makes me feel a little queasy. That's just my opinion, but you may feel the same way. That doesn't mean that the second combination doesn't have its place in the world. A few colleges have chosen green and yellow for their school colors. And you all know about those Oakland Athletics right?

Just to recap, let's go over what we have talked about. We have spent the last two weeks talking about designing using analogous color. Analogy means that things are alike, or have something in common. We talked last week about Monochromatic color schemes using a single hue with several shades. See the image below.

This week we talked about using two or more colors that are next to each other on the color wheel. See the image below.

I hope you have soaked this all in. I know it can be a little confusing if you have never been exposed to this, but practice at home playing with these colors and others. You might also go out on the web a see what people are using as color schemes. Next week, we will continue with more color theory.

June 20th, 2006 | josh spivey | Correction, Tutorials | Comments (0)

Color Theory 101, Part 1

You may never think about color when you design. You may just think what looks good is what is good. Well think again, because it goes much deeper than that.

This week I want to begin talking about color theory. Before I do, I want to stress that some of this is hard and true "Color Theory" as it has been written for the past 100 years. Some of it is my own personal opinion about color. As an artist we must rely on intuition as much as we rely on theory and practice. It's like a musician; you can teach them all the music theory you want, buy you should never "train-out" their ear. That's what makes them an artist. Let's begin this week by talking about some really simple ideas about color and then move on later to more complex ideas, psychology and practice.

I am going to introduce you to a term in color theory called "analogous color". What this means is that you have a series of colors that are the same hue, but a different shade or saturation value. Look at the image below to see what I mean.

Here is a series of brown colors going from a dark shade to a light one. You should be able to feel a sense of something with this color scheme, but we will talk about that later. What we have here is a series of analogous colors. Now brown isn't the best example, so let's look at blue.

Here we have the same series, but with blues. Now, analogous colors can be any hue. If you were using a greyscale version, they would go from black to white through a series of grays. Technically, black and white are not colors per se, but you get the idea right?

So why do you care? Well, you care because the values you choose in your color scheme whether your scheme is for print, the web, or anything is vitally important. Choosing analogous color schemes is very useful for tying together elements in a layout. You can use it to evoke a sense of structure, simplicity and sophistication. It is also useful as an underlying color scheme, for which elements can compliment it. We will talk about complimentary colors later, but think about how often you see combinations of blue and orange, or blue and yellow on the web. Those colors are complimentary to one-another.

The level of saturation in color is important in making sure your color scheme works. Take a look at the image below.

This is the blue image that has been completely saturated. I used the Hue and Saturation command in Photoshop to do this. See how different it feels from this next image.

The first image is not my idea of sophistication. Typically, web sites and print material that are trying to evoke calm, structure and maturity use soft, desaturated colors. Full saturation is sometimes useful for work that is aimed at younger folks.

Just for clarity here are the brown images to look at.

The saturated one:

The desaturated one:

So that is your first taste of color theory. We will continue to talk about this and how to work with color in Photoshop in the next few columns.

June 20th, 2006 | josh spivey | Correction, Tutorials | Comments (16)

What Color Depth to use for the Web

I have always struggled with what color palette to use when working for the web. Should I use the 216 color web-safe palette? Or should I just use the colors that I want, and people can deal with it?

A few years ago, using color on the web was a real issue. Because of the differences in platform displays of colors, the measly 256 colors that monitors could display was reduced to a pitiful 216 colors that were available for "safe" web viewing. When people refer to "safe", they mean there are only 216 colors that all major platforms, monitors and video cards will display. So people will see your web page the way you intended, albeit under a restricted color choice.

I don't know about you, but 216 colors are just not enough for me to express myself fully. Especially when you consider that most of these colors are never used. Some of those muddy orange colors are just not in style these days and most of the very dark colors and very light colors are pretty much useless for day-to-day use.

In Photoshop, you can set the preferences of all of the color options to let you choose only web-safe colors. See below:

This looks like a lot of colors, but it is only 216 total. By turning off the Web only colors checkbox, do you run the risk of having people view your page is weird colors that their computer is generating to try and fake it? Yes. But the risk is growing smaller every day.

The current statistics say that the vast majority of people can view at least 65,000 colors on their monitors. In fact, it is thought that as many as 94% of people can view at least this many. 10% can view millions of colors on their monitors. I would venture to guess that 10% is a little bit low.

So what should you do? Well, I say ditch the 216 color web-safe palette and do what you want. There is not an option in Photoshop for displaying and selecting only the 65,000 colors that most people can see. But you are probably pretty safe when choosing most, if not all colors. Computers will fake the rest of the colors by dithering available colors together to make it look pretty close.

So the bottom line is to start creating for the new generation. Stop using that heinous 216 color palette and explore the greater good of at least 65,000 colors. This give you so many more options to choose from, that you are sure to enjoy yourself so much more.

Now I have to give myself a little disclaimer. I can't be responsible if you do a job for a client in millions of colors when most of the users are on older computers. You will have to do a little research for each job you do (this should be standard anyway) to find out what sort of systems people are using. If the majority of your users will only have access to 256 colors, then use the 216 color web-safe palette. You should always think about your users when creating pages and choosing colors anyway. It will make you a much better designer.

So with that, I will bid you farewell. Remember, more options for color does not mean use all of them in a single page. Pace yourself. But you can create a much more engaging site with more color options, even I your color scheme is monochromatic.

Talk to you soon.

June 20th, 2006 | josh spivey | Tutorials, Web | Comments (0)

Pixel Fonts

Pixel fonts are all the rage these days in web design. Why? Because they're cool. And they also can be very small and still legible. I'll show you some techniques to make sure your pixel fonts come out nice.

First of all, you have to make sure that you know how many pixels a pixel font should be. Usually, the font designer will tell you this. Some fonts are 7 pixels, some are 5 some are 9 etc... You have to either have them be exactly this size, or a multiple of this number. For example, a 7 pixel font will look good at 14 pixels as well. It will be pixelated looking, but many people like this look. Take a look at the following image.

I have written a few lines of text using a couple of different pixel fonts. Some are sized exactly, and others are not. You can see how difficult they are to read when they are not the correct size. Sometimes you can experiment with different sizes to see how they look. But very rarely does a pixel font allow you to deviate from the recommended size.

Also pay attention to the lines that say they have antialiasing turned on. Antialiasing is a way to make your fonts look smooth by adding pixels to the edges of themin lighter and lighter shades until they fade out to nothing. Since pixel fonts require a specific map of pixels to make them perfect, you can't do this. They will get very blurry and impossible to read. The only way to make them look perfect is to turn the antialiasing off.

Below is you upper options palette in Photoshop. There is a drop-down box that I have circled that dictates what antialising scheme you use. To turn it off, choose "none" in the options. You will have to select the Type tool in your tools palette to do this.

That's pretty much it for this week. Pixel fonts are great, and you can pick up a lot of them for free. Just do a search on the internet or visit your favorite type foundry and you are sure to find some that you like. Many times designers will design the same style font in several styles and widths. You can find all capitals fonts, or both upper and lower case fonts in a number of great styles. Have fun!

June 20th, 2006 | josh spivey | Tutorials, Web | Comments (0)

Perspective Text

Let's say you want to create some text that looks as though it is disappearing off into the distance. If you notice, you cannot transform text with perspective transform function. If you rasterize the type before you transform it, the text will look blurry. This seems like a real problem that keeps you from creating this effect. However, there is a way to do this, and we will look at it this week.

First let's create some text. I used Impact.

The we want to turn this text into a shape. This will allow us to transform its shape in any way we want. We can skew it and give it perspective. To do this go Layer -> Type -> Convert to Shape. After this is done, we will no longer have the ability to edit the text. So make sure you have your text the way you want it before you do this.

Above is what your canvas will look like when you have converted the text into a shape.

Next we are going to transform it. Go Edit -> Transform -> Perspective. Grab either the top or the bottom left corners of the transformation box. Pull the handle on the corner up or down depending on which corner you chose. This will apply a perspective transformation to the text shape.

Now that this is done, we will need to rasterize the shape in order to remove the shape path. Go Layer -> Rasterize -> Shape. This will create a truly rasterized image.

Notice how clean and crisp the text is after doing this. If we were to rasterize the type before we transformed it, we would end up with a fuzzy edge. By first transforming our text into a vector shape, we prevent this from happening.

This is a great little trick that you will probably find use for at some point. I have used it several times in the past. It only takes a second to do, but it makes a much better final product if you transform the shape first rather that rasterizing and then transforming.

June 20th, 2006 | josh spivey | Text, Tutorials | Comments (5)

Creating A Blurred Background

Let's just do something really simple this week. I have had the task of taking a number of photos for work these past few weeks as we ramp up the launch of our new web site. I wanted to take photos without a ton of work, so I worked this simple little trick to make it look as though I know what I am doing.

Now I am by no means a skilled photographer. In fact, I would say I am terrible at it. However, with Photoshop, that's just fine with me. I can often make things look much better inside the computer than I ever could with a camera alone.

The trick is to shoot a subject (a person, a dog, a car etc...) with a distant background. We are going to create the effect of focusing on the subject, but having the background be blurry as though we were taking it with a real SLR camera. I have a Nikon Coolpix 995 that I am in love with, but any old camera will probably do.

Take a shot of something you like with a nice distant background. See the image below as an example.

Now you should take out your blur tool. See the image below if you don't know what that is. It is the object on the top that is shaped like a drop of water. It is in a flyout menu that is on the middle left of your tool palette.

With a decent size brush and the pressure set to about 50%, brush the blur tool in the areas around your subject.

Now I have to admit that this is not the best example I have ever done, but for simplicity's sake, it will do. Basically I just brush a bit and then if it looks bad go back in your history palette a bit and try again. It always pays to go back and do things over again. That's part of the fun of Photoshop.

Try a few. You can probably find tons of photos around the house that you can use. Hopefully you have a scanner around, but if not, stop by a Kinkos or something and have them run them for you. You probably have a friend that can help you, or maybe you have a scanner at the office. Or you can use the old digital camera to do all the work for you. That's my personal approach and I like the instant satisfaction.

Talk to you soon.

June 20th, 2006 | josh spivey | Effects, Tutorials | Comments (3)

The Power of Hue and Saturation Adjustment

I have been using the Hue and Saturation Adjustment tools that Photoshop provides for a long time. Usually I am just making overall image adjustments, but from time-to-time there is a specific area of an image that needs adjustment when the rest of the image should stay the same. Here's how to do that.

Above I have a photo. I would like to change the hue of the pill in the foreground from green to blue. But I don't want to mess with the rest of the image too much. So how do I do that? We first thing to do is to open the Hue and Saturation adjustment box. Go Image->Adjust->Hue and Saturation.

Above is the dialog box that appears when you have done the previous steps. I have already made some adjustments but let me explain what I did.

1) The first thing I did was to change the color edit drop down menu to Greens. This will allow me to make adjustments to the green pixels in the image.
2) Once I have selected green as my editing choice, I can use the ink dropper tool that Photoshop automatically provides me to select the green in the pill. I had to try a few times to get it in the right place.
3) Once I had selected the correct green hue, I just made some Hue adjustments by sliding the Hue slider to the right. I also made some slight adjustments with the other sliders. The actual adjustments are up to you, of course.

Above you can see my results. Using the Hue and Saturation tools to adjust images is a very powerful way of making subtle changes to an overall image. It can also save you a lot of time if you have a single entity like this one that needs changing. Play around with this idea and see what you can do with it. It's a lot of fun.

June 20th, 2006 | josh spivey | Effects, Tutorials | Comments (0)

Creating Motion

What happens if you can't find that perfect photograph? What if you want to make things a little bit more active than they are in the stock photo? Here is a little technique that should help you in those circumstances.
What I want to do is to take a photo that I have of a cheetah, put a background behind it and then make it look as though the cheetah is moving.

I start out with a photo of a cheetah. The background is completely blue, which will save me a lot of time.

Then I choose a nice background image. Here is a shot of the the Serengeti.

Since the background on the cheetah photo is all blue, I can use my magic wand tool to select the blue parts and then simply hit delete. I love the magic wand tool. Here's what it will look like.

Now I simply place my cheetah photo on a layer above the background photo. The background photo will now show through just perfectly.

At this point it looks pretty fake. I want to make the image look as though I took it with a camera with a shutter speed that was a little slow. This will give me a nice blurred effect. Yet the only thing that is blurred should be the cheetah. The background would not be moving, only the animal. To achieve this, we will create a controlled blur on the cheetah.

Select your circle marquee tool and draw a oval shaped selection around the cheetah's head.

Now we want to feather the selection a bit to make it more realistic. Go Modify -> Feather. I gave mine a 30 pixel feather. Now invert the selection Shift + Command + I .

Now we are going to do the blur.

We are going to give it a motion blur with the angle at 0 degrees. This will be straight across. Look at the dialog box above for the exact numbers I used.

Once we have completed the blur, we are done. On this piece I decided to duplicate my first cheetah layer (with the blue background), set it on top of the other two layers and set the blending mode to Overlay. I also dropped down the opacity a bit. This seems to have lightened the image a bit and gave the whole thing a more consistent lighting that I think is more realistic.

That's it for this week. Have fun!

June 20th, 2006 | josh spivey | Effects, Tutorials | Comments (2)

Pixellated Blur

This week let us learn a little technique I like to call the pixellated blur. I don't really call it that, but I had to call it something for the purposes of this tutorial. Really, I don't call it anything at all. Anyway, on with the tutorial.

I want to have an image that is focus on a single point, but blurry and pixellated throughout the rest of the image. I am using a photo of the famous bridge in the famous city that we all know. You can see it below.

I want to focus on the top of the farthest tower over there. So the first thing I do is to duplicate the layer with my bridge photo on it. I do this by dragging my layer to the new layer icon at the bottom of the layers palette. It looks like a folded piece of paper. Once this is done, you should have three layers total. A background, and two of the bridge layers.

After that is done, we are going to select the upper layer. Now go Filter -> Blur -> Gaussian Blur. Give it a few pixels, until you are satisfied with the outcome. Look below for my version.

Now that looks like a blurry version of the first image right? Well, that's because it is.

So let's add some pixellation and really mess this perfectly good photo all up. Go Filter ->Pointilize ->Mosaic. Use the slider to give it some parameters on size. I used 4 here. I like the number 4. I also like most of the other numbers too. That's another story though. Play around with your own favorite numbers and come up with what you like.

Ok, so now we have an image that looks... well... like garbage. So what are we going to do with this thing? Well, the first thing we are going to do is to add a layer mask to the top layer. Do this by hitting the Add Layer Mask button at the bottom of the layers palette. When this is done, select the gradient tool in the toolbar. I used a radial gradient on mine, but you can experiment with any gradient, or you can use a soft paintbrush with black pixels over the spot you want to show focused. Or you can use any shade of grey, or gray as some folks say to give it any level of clarity. So I swipe a radial gradient on mine from black to white starting at the far tower. I can do this as many times as I want until I get it right. I am so good, that I got it right the first time. That is... the first time after I did it about a dozen practice rounds. I call them practice, you can call them screwups. Either way, I still get paid the same. That's what makes PS so cool, you can always revert back to before you screwed up the image. Try that with oil and canvas Degas!

So we learned a little sump'm sump'm today right? Repeat after me, " I am a Photoshop masterrrrr. I am a Photoshop masterrrr". Go meditate on this as your mantra. When you are done, you will be "one" with the pixel. Then try other combinations of this technique with other filters and get rich on you talents. Remember that the Zen is in living out your destiny. You ARE a Photoshop master! Talk at you in seven days.

June 20th, 2006 | josh spivey | Effects, Tutorials | Comments (2)

Photoshop 7 Natural Brushes

Along with a bunch of new features, which we will be discussing over the next few weeks, Photoshop 7 has created a more powerful brushes system.

I have given you a couple of examples to look at that are just stock brushes that Photoshop packaged with Photoshop 7. One of the things that is so cool, is that Photoshop can now "spray" brushes in different sizes, rotations and color variations creating much more realistic natural techniques. The leaves shown here, especially the first on are so realistic and amazing, it blows my mind. The detail is really great, and the fact that Photoshop will sort of randomly spit out a few with each brush stroke really is a nice, convenient feature.

To use some of these new brushes, simply select you brush tool in the tools palette. Once you have selected the tool, you can change the shape of the brush in the upper options palette. There are plenty of stock brushes that Photoshop ships with.

You can add more by downloading them from the web (there are a few really good brush makers out there), or you can use the remaining stock brushes with photoshop. In you options palette, click on the symbol for the brush shape you are currently using. This will create a dialog box with a scroll box full of different brush shapes. To add brushes, click the arrow in the upper right corner of the dialog box. Select "Load Brushes", browse until you find the brushes you want and append them to your set.

Below is a look at the brushes dialog box within Mac OS X. Play around with it and see what you come up with. The brushes palette even allows you the option of changing the size of custom brushes. This feature is really a time-saver. Simply create one brush in any size, and then resize it to fit whatever you are working on.

To find free brushes out on the net, you can do a search for "Photoshop Brushes" in your favorite search engine (Google is the best for my money). Once you download them, simply load them into your brushes palette (as in the last paragraph), and voila, instant brushes.

To learn more about making custom brushes, check out my article from a few months back. I think you'll find a few useful techniques. As I experiment with the new features of Photoshop 7 brushes, I will keep you informed.

June 20th, 2005 | josh spivey | Tools, Tutorials | Comments (2)