A few points on how a painter's intentions do not always align with how we see their work many years later:
Generally, a painting is best viewed and photographed in as close a lighting environment as it was painted. I have seen many paintings 'blasted' by unnaturally bright gallery lights. There is a reason why a gallery lighting designer is a real job. However, in my experience effective gallery lighting designers are as rare as rocking horse shit.
It is true that the paint the artists applied many years ago will often bear little resemblance to that which we now see. This is less true of earth browns and very true of paintings done at the beginning of the pigment revolution, when wonderful colors were produced which were later discovered to be very 'fugitive'. However, the relative relationship between these paints remains more or less intact, and IMHO this is the most important factor in aesthetic evaluation.
Another factor is how a photo flattens such differences as rough vs smooth (and their consequent light reflection properties). In a Titian painting, huge areas are untouched rough red oxide primer on rough canvas, vs the slight gloss of oil paint. Importantly, old masters would often apply their lights as (smooth) thick paint and their dark as thin glazes (or scumbles) above a thin primer (red or green or yellow ochre or whatever). The frisson between these layers gave the darks their depth that they would otherwise have lacked. This is mastery of dynamic range at its finest. Googles art project photos comes close to capturing this. For an example, check out any portrait by Durer in Google art project.
I have a history of research in computational aesthetics with an emphasis on old master paintings. A few notes:
1. You have used the RGB hue wheel not the RYB hue wheel. The later defines the complementary pairs red/green, blue/orange, yellow/purple which are more useful for an artist when evaluating hue. To those who would say that the difference between RTGB and RYB complementaries is subjective, I would point out that the red/green, blue/orange, yellow/purple pairs have been known by artists since before Newton first expressed hue on a wheel.
2. I think it is fair to assume an artist has a consistent color pallet, but I'm not sure that a genre would.
3. User S0und has implied that paintings have changed too much from their point of creation for your work to be valid. For sure it is true that paintings have oxidized, accumulated multiple layers of dust-attracting varnish and been damaged by UV exposure. However, the relative difference between the colors they have used remains almost the same, and this is where the value of your work lays.
4. The key problem of visualizing the color of a painting is its dimensionality. A standard histogram does a super fine job at expressing the lightness value of an image. A radial hue histogram does the same for the hue/saturation. But there is no 2D graphical visualization that does both. Personally, I would go further and visualize separately the hue, saturation and lightness signatures of the artists. For most pre-modern painters, the lightness values closely mirrored their saturation values. Artists like Gericault and most of the Impressionists learned to separate them.
Great points!
1. I'll try to add RYB option for color harmony wheel
2. You are absolutely correct, there are no consistent palettes across genres, but I thought it will be interesting to see multitude of palettes artists use for the same genre
3. User S0und's observation about oxidized or decayed colors is very interesting, but even with muted, brownish colors these artworks still look amazing.
4. Any suggestion how can I add such color visualization across body of work of a given artist or a style?
> Any suggestion how can I add such color visualization across body of work of a given artist or a style?
I think that the best visualization of the colors of a painting is by using the painting itself.
In class I demonstrate lightness by first desaturating the work (or copy pasting the L in Lab). I then do a controlled posterize on the image - basically a stepped curve in Photoshop. I try to isolate the dark, middle and light. These are relative values that can often manifest as lumps in the histogram. Painters tend to be very deliberate in the way they organize them. This page explains what I am getting at:
In my experience such posterizing is best done manually but AI might be able to do it.
Hue at saturation are more difficult for the simple reason that they are difficult to disengage from lightness.
Like lightness, saturation is generally organized according to low, middle and high. For most of art history, the saturation of a painting would closely follow its lightness. It was Gericault who separated them. Check out the saturation vs lightness of his Lobster painting for an example of this.
Hue is a beast. Sure, most paintings done before the impressionists are pretty unsaturated. But even Rembrandt would be careful to use a red brown against a green brown. Check out the Rembrandt image on this page to see this in action.
I think that a radial histogram is the best way to visualize hue. This would show not only the hues but there relationship to each other on the RYB wheel and also there quantity. There should be a cut-off point for hue that is visible. In our work we established a cut off - all hues with very low saturation were ignored.
I love the website about color pigment history - it explains a lot about some of the color choices artists made in different time periods. Thank you for sharing the link.
Some nice graphics in this article. I explain the maths of blend modes and compositing to my students using Photoshop. Using nothing more than add and multiply I composite a foot ball over a background. No masks. No eraser. Just simple high school maths.
The source was my experience living with Japanese friends in Japan for around a month. This was, however, quite a few years ago. I believe that the complexity of the Japanese street naming system may have had something to do with it.
I live in Vietnam, and it is jokingly said that the smell of fish sauce is used by some Vietnamese to get rid of unwanted foreigners, to be used when the smell of durian doesn’t work.
This is a very interesting project. As a design teacher, I recommend to my students that they do not employ color swatches for anything other than flat color designs. Certainly for an animation, a photo or a movie such simplified visualizations have little value as they do not convey the kind of ranges information this project is addressing.
That being said, I am certain that there is no 2D method of visualizing such fundamentally 3D information as color.
One of the things that made seeing this painting a valuable experience for me was the plentiful background material it was shown next to… drawings, paintings, sketches etc. it showed the depth of creative process that Picasso employed.
One thing I have not seen discussed here is the fact that this painting was commissioned by the (Spanish) Republican government. Effectively, there is a degree of propaganda to the painting. No shade on the guy… my other favorite war crime painting is the executions of the third of may by Goya, and it was also a political commission.
In Madrid’s military museum there is a little known painting done as a right wing responce to Guernica - The Paracuellos Massacres" (Las matanzas de Paracuellos) by José Gutiérrez Solana. The subject is the massacre of Spanish civilians by the Republican forces. It is almost as large as Guernica and done in a realistic style. As an obscure counterpoint to Guernica it has a curiosity value. It borrows heavily from the magnificent Executions of the Fifth May by Goya. Btw… All three paintings were commissioned as political statements. I remember seeing all three in one day when I was a young art student. A decidedly odd experience.
Good point - our understanding of this time period has been clouded by knee-jerk hatred, with few willing to admit that there was violence on all sides. It takes bravery to admit that a proportionate and measured response was warranted (within the bounds of international rule of law and order), given the pressures and incentives that communists were putting on Franco.
I teach design and art and routinely supervise photo projects. The low level of expectation that even the best students have of color editing amazes me. Few can think further than brightness/contrast adjustments. Lightroom is seen as the pinnacle yet its hue tools are beyond dreadful. The hue curves in DaVinci are pretty much the only act in town for sophisticated hue adjustments.
> it's rare for photographers to use scopes for color
True, but that is there loss. A scope is a visualization of the color properties of a photo and any problem-solving individual should value visualization highly. I am certain that Rembrandt would have murdered to get his hands of a histogram.
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