OUGD404 - Colour Theory

In a group of six, we had to think of some questions each that we have about colour.
Mine were:

1. How do you make different shades of colour?
2. Did RGB originate when TV was first invented?
3. How do you use the Pantone Macthing System?
4. Is it possible to make a new colour, or have they all been created?
5. If colour can be made from ink, light and paint, is is possible there could be another colour mode with other colours in the future?
6. How do colours make us feel different things? i.e. being in a light green room makes us calm
7. How do natural colours fade?
8. Is black a colour or lack of chromatic value?
9. What is the HSB colour mode for?
10. What do the rods and cones do?

Then we read them out to each other, and made a list of what we thought were the best. 

1. Is colour more, less or equally important than typography in graphic design?
2. Is black a colour?
3. Why do people have favourite colours?
4. How do colours make us feel different things?
5. Why do natural colours fade?
6. How/Why do colours trigger different emotions?
7. What's the best light to look at colour in?
8. Which colours look best together of them all?

Then we had to pass the questions onto the next group, and our task is to answer another groups set of questions which are:

1. What is the difference between tint/shade and hue/tone?
2. Is it possible that there are colours that exist that the human eye cannot process?
3. How crucial is it to learn colour theory?
4. Is colour theory learnt or instinct?
5. Does it affect the way you see colours when looking through a certain eye?

We shared out the questions, and I answered number 3. 


How crucial is it to learn colour theory?
It is crucial to learn colour theory, and the reason I think it is most important for is the production aspect of printing. This is a necessary part of working in print, and if you have a client which is on a budget, then you would need to consider printing costs and how to make the most of them. It would make sense to choose colours which are Pantone Formula Colours, rather than Pantone 4 Process Colours, and they are:

Pantone Formula Colour is flat colour, so you would only need one plate for printing, and when you look through the linen tester you can't see any dots which make up the colour.

Pantone 4 Process Colour is colour which is made up of little dots which can be seen through a linen tester. These are more expensive when it comes to print because they use four plates, but there is a lot more choice of colours.

So if a Magenta was C = 10 M = 100 Y = 20 K = 0, it would be a lot cheaper, and not noticeably different to choose C = 0 M = 100 Y = 0 K = 0 instead.

This would mean printing costs would be dramatically reduced, as it would be using two less plates. 

However, it would also mean that using over four Pantone Formula Colours would be more expensive than using Pantone 4 Process Colours, because you would need more than four plates. For example, if you used 9 Pantone Formula Colours in a design, then you would need 8 plates to print it.


I then started to answer my own questions:

How do you make different shades of colour?
When using paint, you can mix two different colours to make a new one, or a different shade. By adding white to any colour, you will make it lighter, and adding black to any colour will make it darker. Following Itten's colour wheel, when the primary colours mix together, they make the secondary colours for example, if you mix red and yellow, you create orange.
Watching the Pantone video, they have colour engineers and ink technicians who 'pick points within colour space' which allows them to begin a colour process, and create new colours. 
To print different shades of colour, you need plates, for example, a 4 process colour like C = 40 M = 30 Y = 20 K = 10, you would have four plates of Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black, and they would each print the amount of colour that was in the formula of the colour. 

Did RGB originate when TV was invented?
RGB is a colour model where colour is perceived through light. It has always existed, because it is how we perceive colour through our cones and rods in our eyes. However, it was only discovered how to be used in Television by John Logie Baird. In 1928 he created the first colour transmission, and in 1938 he introduced the first colour broadcast. 

How do you use the Pantone Matching System?
Pantone have a Pantone Matching System, and I know that you can look up the colour you want in the swatch books, and type in the same values onto Illustrator so you have the same colour on screen, but that's it. I found out that when you find a colour that you like and use it for your work, you then send it to the printers with the pantone chip so that they also have the colour information. Then the printer finds the colour in a formula guide, and it is then sent to the press. What I didn't realise next was that the formula on the pantone chip is for them to create the mixture using ink. So if a colour is made up of three different variations of other pantone colours, they will mix those three quantities together to create the desired colour, and it will then go to print. 

Is it possible to make a new colour, or have they all been created?
I was watching a Pantone video, and the Vice President of the manufactoring and colour technology there said that 'colour was infinite' and that the colour engineers pick 'points within colour space for us to create a new colour', therefore answering my question that more can be created. There is a formulation process where they get the points they picked and turn decipher the ink recipe, where it is then turned into ink, and then into a print. They also add other categories of colour such as metallics and pastels.

If colour can be made from ink, light and paint, is is possible there could be another colour mode with other colours in the future?
What I didn't already realise is that there are already different colour modes available, I thought there was only RGB, CMYK and mixing paint together, but when I researched more, there are other colour modes used in the Adobe products such as HSB, the CIE Lab Colour mode, and the fact that there are various alterations of the RGB colour format such as Apple RGB, Adobe RGB and sRGB.

How do colours make us feel different things? i.e. being in a green room makes us calm
Leatrice Eiseman is a colour specialist and I watched a video of her saying that colours do affect how we feel, for example, she says that because we associate blue with the sky, it is a colour which gives us reassurance, and we can depend on it, because it will always be there, so when a room is painted blue, it gives a sense of dependability and tranquility. So depending on what we associate colour with, depends on how it makes us feel. 

Is black a colour?
This is an ongoing debate, and while some people think it is, some think it isn't. I researched this further on colourmatters, where there is an article about it. As colour is made up of light, it can be argued that black is not a colour because when there is no light, that is when we see black. However, when the primary colours of print (Cyan, Magenta and Yellow) and the primary colours of paint (Red, Yellow and Blue), are mixed together in certain quantities they make black. Therefore it can be said that black is a colour in this case, because it is made out of pigment and is physically there.

What is the HSB colour mode for?
I saw this on Illustrator during the session and didn't know what it was, so I decided to look at what it means. HSB stands for Hue, Saturation and Brightness, and this is a HSB color model.

Hue is what we say when we are referring to colours, such as red, violet, yellow etc. Saturation is how pale or strong a colour is, so if a colour is pale it is called desaturated, and a strong colour has a high saturation. It is possible to change the saturation of a colour or image in Photoshop, and it still keeps the same colour, it is just a paler tint of that colour, and can appear faded.
When talking about the brightness of a colour it is the chromatic value we are talking about. If a colour is bright, like orange, then it has a higher value than something which is darker, like a deep violet, because the orange is closer to white, whereas the deep violet is closer to black. 

Why do natural colours fade?
This question was raised by somebody else in the group, and I thought it was an interesting one so used it as one of my own. I decided to look at natural dyes used in rugs to make the question more specific, and I discovered that actually, natural dyes are a lot more durable than synthetic dyes. Synthetic dyes which were first introduced in the late nineteenth century ran in water, and faded dramatically. Both synthetic and natural dye fades now, and I think that the fading is accelerated by light, as I have noticed in curtains that the part of the curtain which is always in the window fades a lot more than the curtain which always stays behind the wall. It is also supported in an article I was reading about it, as it says that they both fade from sunlight. 

What do the rods and cones do?
Although we were taught this, I forgot, so I looked over the presentation again. Cones and rods are receptors in the eye, and are what we perceive colour through. Although we can only see red, green and blue, e have three cones which allow us to perceive different hues of colour. The first cone can see red-orange light, the second green light, and the third can see blue-violet light. The rods allow us to see tones of grey. These allow us to see a range of colours through just the three colours that we can see.