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Today on QUICK ESSENTIALS, I want to show you an odd little thing you need to know about color.
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This kinda blew my mind when I first learned about it.
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First though, there are 3 different terms we need to be familiar with.
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This area of the color picker is where you select your hue.
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Hue is just the color name: red, green, blue, etc.
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Going horizontally across the color picker is how you select saturation.
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Saturation is the amount of chroma, or intensity, of a color.
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And going vertically like this will affect value.
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Value is how light or dark a color is.
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Some color pickers look like this, which is largely the same thing,
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although there are some implications we'll look at later in this video.
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OK, so a color is always tied to a value.
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Even though these are two different hues, with two different levels of saturation,
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I think it's pretty easy to see that the top one is lighter, and the bottom one is darker.
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And stripping away the saturation, we can easily see where the values of those two colors lie.
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And because it's value - not color - that makes a picture readable,
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value is one of the most important fundamentals of painting.
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No matter what you do with hue and saturation, your decisions there always boil down to value.
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Now, it's very tempting to think that hue and saturation are independent of value.
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You know, like, value is determined by this vertical placement ...
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and then you plug in hue and saturation after.
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But that is actually quite far from the truth!
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In fact, every single aspect of your color choices cascades down and affects value.
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I'll show you an example with saturation first.
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Here's a color picker and a canvas.
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I'll use this red hue here.
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I'll start with a perfectly desaturated version of that, and paint a little swatch.
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Now, I want to increase the saturation,
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while staying at the same brightness level on the color picker.
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So here's another swatch ... change the saturation level ... here's another swatch ...
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and repeat this process until the end.
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OK, now check this out: I'm going to convert this to black and white.
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And the values are different.
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Adding saturation decreased value!
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Even though, as I sample these, Photoshop is telling me I'm at the same brightness level!
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Again, it was a straight line all the way across that color picker.
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And that's where this triangular pickers are a little bit more visually accurate.
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This is Corel Painter's color picker, by the way.
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Its shape implicitly tells us that this value is lighter than this value.
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And, remember how Photoshop's brightness was not reflecting our value change?
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On this color picker, as I slide through saturation on the same line,
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You can see the value slider is now updating.
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This is a step forward, although it's still not totally accurate.
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I'll show you why in just a second...
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but first I want to point out that not all color pickers are made equal!
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This is Photoshop's "Coolorus" plugin, which is also a triangular picker.
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(And I like this plugin, by the way!)
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But here I am doing that same color move...
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But on this one the value slider stays locked at 100.
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It's almost like different color pickers are measuring different properties.
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OK, time to move onto how hue affects value - and THIS is what really blew my mind.
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So, there's our example with red, at the top.
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And I'm re-doing the process now with this blue color.
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And I'm using the same brightness value on this blue as I did on the red.
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OK so there's our two swatch panels.
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Watch what happens now as I switch this to grayscale.
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Your eyes do not deceive you: different colors saturate to different values!
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This is a crucial piece in the puzzle of understanding color!
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It's also the source of some digital confusion.
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Back here in Painter, we've already seen how value does get reduced as I make this move ...
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However, the reason it's not entirely accurate is that Painter reduces the value of every hue equally.
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As we've just seen, that's not what actually occurs.
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In fact, check this out: using this violet color I'll pick a value at 50% on the grayscale.
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I'll paint a swatch.
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Now I'll move the color picker up to full brightness, but also full saturation.
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Paint another swatch, and, are you ready? I'm going to change this to black and white.
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That is kinda crazy.
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We traveled halfway lighter on the color picker, and got a darker value!
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Lighter = darker, dogs 'n cats living together!
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Now, this is not true for every color, of course.
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This yellow, for instance, does not get very dark when saturated.
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I've got my two swatches here, same as with the violet color...
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We switch to black and white, and this is more intuitive!
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Yup. That's the stuff that blew my mind.
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OK, so I've made a chart for you, to act as an overall reference for this.
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I've got it on two layers here.
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The first layer is simply a chart with all the hues and various degrees of saturation.
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And then layer two, of course, is those saturation levels in grayscale.
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And this is not every granular hue change, but these, to me, are where the significant changes lie.
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You can find the download link in the description.
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So, OK, some more digital confusion, I'm afraid...
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Let's say this represents a painting I want to check in grayscale.
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The absolute wrong way to do it is to use the Hue/Saturation adjustment.
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When I strip the saturation here, it just evenly levels everything out,
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which is completely inaccurate.
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This is Photoshop, but the same thing happens in Krita ...
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... in Painter ...
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... and in Clip Studio Paint.
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So, don't use the Hue/Saturation box to check values.
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One reliable way to do it is to simply switch the color space to Grayscale.
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But the drawback is, in Grayscale mode, we can't paint in color anymore...
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so, I usually don't do it that way.
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A quick and dirty way to do it is to make a new layer, fill it with white ...
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And set that layer to 'color' mode.
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This works across multiple apps, it's pretty reliable,
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though I do think the contrast is exaggerated slightly.
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My favorite way to check values - and this is exclusive to Photoshop, unfortuantely...
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Go up to View -> Proof Setup -> Custom
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Then click the dropdown here and set it to 'Dot Gain 20%'
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Now you can press CNTRL + Y to toggle between an accurate grayscale view, and color.
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And by the way, this stuff happens with real pigments too. It's not just digital!
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Here are swatches of these very bright and saturated acrylic pigments.
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When I switch this frame to grayscale, we get the same value behavior.
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All right, I want to show you how this color theory actually influences my painting.
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Here's a spooky little sketch I did in October...
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There's a lot of gray-ish colors in it,
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So I wanted this area here to have a punch of color.
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This is the particular blue that I chose for that.
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And that color choice was directly influenced by the fact that that blue gives some of the darker values when saturated.
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That way I could have what appears to be a bright, punchy color ...
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But, when converted to grayscale, it's a sufficiently dark value.
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Which I'm hoping helps pop the lighter values on the focal point next to it.
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On the opposite end of the scale...
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I wanted to have bright colors that would NOT turn into dark values.
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So my palette choice consisted largely of these colors,
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which tend to hold onto their light values when saturated.
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This color theory is always in the back of my mind when I paint.
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At this point you might ask, "Why does this happen? I mean, scientifically?"
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Well ... I don't know.
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But I suspect it might have something to do with the wavelengths of color.
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You've probably heard this acronym: ROY G BIV
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These are descending measurements of the wavelength each color occupies.
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The wavelengths roughly line up with the value chart ... but it's not perfect.
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For example, red is not the lightest value when saturated.
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So ... I don't know.
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Maybe it's a good question for Captain Disillusion.
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He's got a knack for explaining this stuff!
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...if only he knew about this channel...
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...I dunno ... is that too far fetched? *crowd gasp*
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Anyway, I hope this has been an eye opener!
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Also, I have lots of longer classes where I apply color theory, and show my process from start to finish!
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Talk about painting fundamentals, and how to apply them to your work ...
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and lots more.
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You can find all that at www.marcobucciartstore.com
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That about wraps it up! I'll see you in the next video!

why do colors behave that way on greyscale? explain scientifically the question in the video