Half an hour before the deadline. It was a bit of a struggle, but the colours of your latest production are spot-on! After a quick coffee break during rendering, you return to your screen. Just a random check before the upload starts and then… What? Those skin tones suddenly look awful! How is this possible? Do you really have to ask the client for an extension and start all over again? You don't expect it, but the paint on your wall is going to help you!

The color suite from Great Things

Working with color

It can be such a beautiful profession, but sometimes working with color can also drive you crazy. Because how is it possible that every time you look back at your project, the colors are different? The critical image maker, photo editor, video editor, color grader and designer learns in this blog to gain more control over what they see, in order to prevent stressful situations like the one described above. How can you perceive color and contrast consistently, accurately and correctly?

First, let's try to understand what's happening. How do your eyes, or rather your brain, fool you?

The inner cubes are the same color. Really! Color pick it.

Our optical system is amazingly adaptive. Your brain compensates for color to a white balance. If there is a lot of blue in your field of vision, your brain balances this by adding the opposite color. This makes the block in the blue area appear grayer than it actually is. Imagine that dot is your calibrated screen. That's why those skin tones look so unhealthy! So it's pretty important to have a neutral ambient color.

Law of simultaneous color contrast

The hue of two areas of color appears more different when viewed side by side than when viewed separately against a common neutral background. The chemist Michel-Eugène Chevreul discovered this as early as 1839 and called it the law of simultaneous color contrast . If the areas differ in brightness , juxtaposition increases the perception of the difference in brightness; if the areas differ in hue , the hue difference is magnified. Both effects can occur simultaneously.

These illusions are also experienced when viewing a specific color or range of colors on a monitor in a room with mixed lighting, excessive contrast, colored walls, and other visual distractions that obstruct and distort the viewer's perception of the screen.

6 Steps

The key to reproducing accurate and repeatable color and contrast is a properly configured calibrated viewing environment. In 6 steps we explain how to achieve this.

We can help you with the right ambient color on your walls, as described in the last step. But let's start with the most important:

1. The right viewing monitor

Get a good monitor. Regular monitors are not designed for accurate color work. Consumer monitors are made to make something look 'nice', even if the source is not so nice. Therefore, an average screen does all kinds of corrections. But even if you turn these corrections off, they are not consistent in their display. One monitor is warmer than the other, has more contrast, too much saturation, or way too much backlight.

But which reference monitor should you have? There are a number of choices to be made here. We work with a Flanders Scientific DM170, a 17 inch, 1920 x 1080 10bit LCD display.

The range of colourfast screens is developing rapidly, so we recommend scouring the internet for the latest products and reviews. This blog is recommended: Jonny Elwyn searches here every now and then to the bottom what the best deals are for colourfast screens in different price categories.

2. Display calibration

To ensure that your monitor actually displays the colors it is supposed to display, a monitor must be calibrated regularly. After calibration, you know for sure that a red pixel is really red, and not a little orange.

Calibration can be done by the manufacturer in some cases, but you can also do it yourself by purchasing a screen calibrator. Well-known tools are the Datacolor Spyder X2 Elite or Ultra and the Calibrite ColorChecker Display . You hang this in front of your (warmed up) display and the software then analyzes and corrects the display of colors.

3. Keep daylight out

Every ray of light affects your color perception. This is not only because it is harder to see your monitor in bright light, but also because most light is inconsistent. Daylight is no exception. Cloud cover and the time of day affect the intensity and temperature of the light.

Simple: hang up blackout (roller) blinds. But darkening your workplace is not without its disadvantages. A lack of daylight can lead to psychological and physical complaints. So go outside enough to get your share of daylight (and exercise).

Colour degrees in the dark is also not recommended. Because you have no reference for the light intensity, you run the risk of delivering your material too dark. In addition, your eyes get tired faster in the dark. As soon as the suite is darkened, you have to relight the room. It is important to light consistently and evenly.

4. The right ambient light

When choosing the right lamps, two values ​​are important: the number of Kelvin, and the CRI value. Kelvin is used to indicate the color temperature of light. For example, the orange-red glow of candlelight has a temperature of 1000 Kelvin and a clear blue sky is 10,000 Kelvin.

The interesting thing is that it is difficult to determine what 'neutral' light is without a reference. Your brain corrects deviations in colour temperature, which means that you do not quickly notice that the number of Kelvin changes. You notice this, for example, when you wear yellow sunglasses and then take them off. For a few seconds, the whole world seems very blue, after which this effect is corrected again.

When working with color, you want to eliminate these kinds of distortions. It is therefore important that the light is neutral and consistent. Choose lamps with a color temperature of 6500 Kelvin. 6500 Kelvin is the closest approximation of daylight, and therefore the most neutral.

The CRI value, also known as colour rendering, stands for Colour Rendering Index . This indicates how true a light source renders the colours of an object. Most consumer lamps have a CRI of 70 to 85 Ra. For a colour suite, you need a light source with a CRI of over 90 Ra. We recommend that you choose all lamps from one brand. This way, you can be sure that they do not differ in Kelvin and CRI.

5. Light placement

After choosing your lighting, it is time to place your lamps. Make sure that no direct light falls on your screen or on your eyes. So always point the lamps away from the screen. In addition, bias or backlight, an even light source behind your monitors, is highly recommended. There are several reasons why backlight is important. The main one is that you perceive more contrast with backlight. The second optical illusion at the beginning of this blog shows this principle. In our color suite, all lighting is fromMedialight . All these sources are 6500 Kelvin and have a CRI of 98-99 Ra.

Match the intensity of your ambient light to the brightness of your calibrated displays.

6. The right ambient color

An often overlooked factor in the correct perception of color is the color of the walls. When a room is a specific color, your eyes compensate for that color. For example, a red object on a blue background will appear orange. In addition, you want the lighting that you have carefully placed in your space to be reflected neutrally, without being contaminated with color .

But what is the right color for your paint? A common choice is white or black. Both colors are not neutral. They are never completely free of color. In addition, white reflects too much light, and black absorbs too much light. The sweet spot is not a simple black and white mix, but rather an even mix of all spectrum colors: the neutral color mid gray, also called 18% gray.

Actually, it is the only color without color. And 18% might be confusing. It indicates that the wall reflects 18% of the light that falls on it. However, if you draw a gradient from white to black, 18% gray is exactly in the middle between white and black. So 18% gray is actually 50% black. Do you still get it? But why don't we call it 50% reflection? This is because of the logarithmic scale of light intensity. You can find out more in this video. Spoiler: it starts off a bit weak.

Why not just go to the hardware store?

You can't just have medium gray paint mixed at the hardware store. You'll find a sample of gray that comes close, but getting that color on the wall exactly the same is a different story. The mixing methods are not accurate enough, the margin of error of the mixing machine is too large and no account is taken of deviations in the base paint. This is never completely white and can differ in color per production batch, per pallet and even per bucket. Hardware stores do not adjust the recipe to different types of base paint.

The base paint we use for Grey Paint is the whitest and most consistent paint available, and therefore suffers little to no deviation. Each batch is also retested for accuracy. The deviation from mid-grey is measured in L*a*b* , where L* stands for lightness a* for red to green and b* for yellow to blue.

Grey Paint deviates less than 1 point on each value, is imperceptible to the human eye and performs better in the color test than most known gray cards.

Finally

Do you have any questions or comments about this blog, or do you think we are incredibly wrong somewhere? Please let me know! I see this blog as a constant work in progress and am always curious about other people's experiences.

It is also worth emphasizing that the color suite will not do the color corrections and grading for you. Ultimately, it is your trained eye and your knowledge and skills that create the perfect picture.