Something strange you should know about color | QUICK ESSENTIALS 

Hey all! You can download the value/saturation chart here: rb.gy/fn7c0v

Makes me want to see a color painting that, when converted to greyscale, is just a solid grey block.

Me: Okay... cool my brain: *starts melting cuz everything I believed was a lie *

When I started learning digital art, this gave my drawings a huge improvement. Remember guys when you want to go darker change the hue towards purple and when you want to go lighter change the hue towards yellow (for white lighting source).

Even though I’m colorblind, I love watching these types of videos! They help me get a better understanding of how colors work and how other people see them

1:58 "adding saturation decreased value!" Well yeah, that's just basic supply and demand

Bro I'm colorblind and this is the sort of vids that pops up on my recommendations. Gotta love the youtube alghorythm trolls man 🙃

This is big! Will help a lot with thumbnail color composition in the future!

I actually saw this my self a few years ago. I had two water bottles that I would drink from at night, one was red and the other one was blue. All the lights were off, the only light in the room was the faint glow of the moon through the draperies. I remember being surprised that the blue bottle was a lighter gray even though the red one looked lighter during the day. :)

This both educated me and made me more confused at the same time

It's because of the cones in your eyes! =D I NEED to make a video about this, but essentially the 3 color receptors (red, green, blue) in your eyes aren't equally sensitive. Green cones are the most sensitive and blue cones are the least sensitive, so when your 2 most sensitive types of cones are both stimulated (green + red) you see yellow! =D The only color more stimulating to your eyes is white, which is ALL cones. That's also why blue is the darkest pure hue. Because its the least your eyes can be stimulated apart from NO stimulation, which is black/darkness.

Keep in mind, all of this was done in sRGB space. While it's useful for storing colors, it isn't so great for picking or modifying them. Using a perceptual space, such as Okhsl (which has been added to Photoshop since this video was made), will alleviate some of these issues. Also, the triangle-type pickers work somewhat better because they are an approximation of a perceptual color space. If you take a slice of hue in a perceptual space, you will get a roughly triangle-shaped "flag" of color, with grayscale on one side, and the most saturated point at the tip. However, the shape you get will not be a perfect triangle, and its shape changes depending on hue.

A function I learned in a CS class that might be helpful to understand this phenomenon is how to calculate luma. When converting RGB to grayscale, there are a couple ways you can do it. A naive way is to just average the R, G, and B values, but this has the same problem as removing saturation did in this video. A way that's more accurate to our eyes is to calculate the "luma" of each pixel, where luma = 0.2126*R + 0.7152*G + 0.0722*B. (The reason this is more accurate is probably something to do with our eyes being more sensitive to green light than to red and to blue). This is almost certainly what photoshop is doing under the hood when you change colors to grayscale. It also reveals why the blues end up so dark, because there's a very low coefficient on the blue values of the pixels compared to red and green. Yellow, having both red and green, ends up the brightest after the luma conversion.

I'm a traditional artist, I think something like this is more intuitive when mixing paint. Gray is made with black and white, and white will always lighten. So it makes sense that a mid gray (meaning a lot of white was added) will be lighter than a pure blue pigment out of the tube. Similarly, it's common to lighten a color with yellow and no white, making it obvious that yellow is lighter than the other colors. I think it's beneficial for people to at least play around with mixing colors even if they're a digital artist.

Color is a well researched field of study. There are explinations for this phenomenon. Things like the "Abney effect" the "Munsell color system" and "Perceptual Uniformity" is what yall are looking for.

'This is not just digital' *greyscales reality* 'See?'

GIMP has a "Convert colors to gray" option in its desaturation menu that allows you to check values without messing with saturation at all. You can see the difference between desaturation and converting to gray. The resulting images are vastly different in value.

"this kinda blue my mind"

What you're seeing is just what the conversion to grayscale is doing - it's setting the value of each pixel to the luminance (not the value) of the original color. Luminance is a perceptual quantity that is the same for two colors that appear to have the same brightness. Value is a mathematical quantity that's just max(R, G, B); it doesn't mean much in terms of human perception when compared between different hues and/or saturations.

If you want it simple warm colors have lighter values and cold colors have darker values, if you divide it that way it makes it easier to find the right value you want (though it's not alwase like that but starting with these basics is what helped me more to understand)

This explains so much about why I've always struggled with colour in my digital art vs traditional art. Thank you!

I'd love to see a painting where when converted to grayscale everything is one colour, if that's even possible.

Unsaturated color: "You simply have less value"

I can’t tell you how much this will help me! I’m a 7th grader and I love art. I’ve been doing it since 2nd grade and I’ve improved A LOT! But I do have to say I’m not good with color theory, I just recently learned about it and it still hurts my Brian but watching this video helped me understand a lot. It will help me improve my drawings in the future and help me get more comfortable with drawing in color instead of just black and white 😅. I’m mostly self taught. The only thing that I didn’t pick up by myself is anatomy. And I still suck at it. I would ask my art teacher for some guidance and help but I don’t have one. I’m an online student and the program I’m in only allows 4 classes to be worked in! While I do have to admit it is great only have to worry about 4 classes it honestly sucks because art isn’t one of those classes. Like I said, I love art. It’s been my dream to become a professional artist since I was 7! Not being able to have access to someone that knows a lot about something I’m really passionate about really does suck. But i only have half a year left of online school and I’m going to be going back to real school next year! But until then I’ll stick to watching videos like this to help me understand how certain things in art work instead of watching tutorials on HOW to do something. Videos like this really help with understanding art, instead of just copying mark by mark of some famous artist. Trust me, not something you would want to do. Biggest regret in life. It lead me nowhere in my art and left me bummed out. I soon began to realize those aren’t the kind of videos you would want to be watching if you are really passionate in your work and want to learn something new! While those videos can be useful for some, it just wasn’t right for me you know? I wanted to feel like I was actually learning something useful that I could use in drawings/ paintings. Those videos just weren’t what I was looking for. Not saying they aren’t useful. Or that you shouldn’t watch them, they just weren’t right for ME. You know? 😅 Sorry for my little ramble 😅. Again, this will help me tons!!

Hi, I am colorblind and I found this extremely interesting. Since I often have problems differentiating or identifying specific colors, I usually rely on the values (unconciously). For example, I sometimes can't tell if a color is green or brown, but I see that one is "darker" than the other (even if on the same saturation), and that helps me know which one is which. I do this very often and it is usually hard to explain to others... believe me, this video made me understand how I see and why I do what I do. This will be very helpful for my art and even my everyday! Thanks! So believe it or not, you unintentionally made the perfect video explaining how colorblind people may distinguish color.

I used this explanation for why colors are not a full 3D space in a presentation for uni and got praise for it. Thank you for not only improving my paintings but also my grades! :)

Me, an artist who doesn't paint : ah yes I understand everything and will use this in all of my art /s

Now I understand why in many drawings shadow's hue tends to Blue/Violet, they fairly are the most "black" colours 🌟

In Krita, you can open up a new view alongside the one you're currently working on, and have two different windows of the same drawing, one in grayscale and one in full color, and they both update in real time.

Johannes Itten also talked about this topic in his book. He used the word "luminosity". For example, yellow has the most luminosity of all, so it tends to be lighter in values

I'm going to wager the perceived "darker" values of red and blue hues has more to do with the sensitivity of our eyes to those color frequencies rather than their physical wavelengths directly. Since seeing "yellow" requires two of our three different receptors to be firing that excess of signal travelling along our nerves probably overloads our sense of 'value' and makes that hue appear "lighter" other hues. You'll see the same effect happen with cyan, which requires our blue and green receptors to both be sending signals at the same time as well.

So I oddly learnt about this in one of my computer science modules (possibly computer vision). Its got to do with the way we perceive colours. We have 3 receptors to see, red green and blue. Green is the most sensitive, red sort of in the middle and blue the least sensitive. The way we convert from RGB to greyscale is based on the way we see the different colours and if you looks up the formula used to convert to greyscale its Gray = 0.299R + 0.587G + 0.114B. Im just looking at the formula for converting RGB to HSV and it doesn't really make sense to me... Id have guessed that it would be the same as the conversion but turns out that would be the lightness value and there are different conversion standards... the above is SDTV standard (aka recommendation 601). Adobe used Rec. 240 and it is Y = 0.212R + 0.701G + 0.086B. HDTV used Rec. 709 which is Y = 0.2126R + 0.7152G + 0.0722B. UHD and HDR used Rec.2020 which is Y = 0.2627R + 0.678G + 0.0593B. Interesting! To get the value of HSV it its the intensity of the colour thats has the highest intensity so which is bizarre to me because that implies that if as long as you only change the values of colour channels that aren't the highest intensity the value won't change? (255, 0, 0) will have the same value as (255, 200, 200)? Back to to the brightness if you have pure blue (0, 0, 255) and pure green at 20% (0,51,0) they would have the same lightness which according to my quick test pinta (I don't have photoshop) yes they do as they grayscale for both are (29,29,29). For what its worth to get red to the same value would be red at 38% so (97,0,0) All very interesting stuff and my mind is officially blown. I wonder if there are any paintings where there are secret messages hidden that can be revealed merely by putting it into greyscale. I know that there is a way of adding secret message to images by altering the RGB value by 1 and then when the intended receiver uses a program to compare the original to the one they were sent they can get the binary from it and decode the message, pretty genius actually. Called steganography and technically hiding a message within a picture that can be seen by making grey scale would also be a form of steganography

The colors are so mysterious. I always thought that. I don't think physics or science in general can give a clear explanation of how they work. There is more to colors that need to be explored. Thank you for making this video

Ok here's a bit of explanation on a few things you seem to be confused of. The color picker: Your color picker is set to HSB/HSV (same thing), not to HSL (technically there is a difference between HSV and HSL - the L stands for luminance). If you pick two colors with different Value they should in theory stay different in Value when you desaturate them, and that's exactly what happens when you use the HSL-saturation slider shown at 4:50. The HSL-saturation slider does exactly that. It decreases the saturation while keeping the hue and value staying the same. Interestingly enough photoshop now calls it HSL (Lightness), but it's actually HSV as seen in Coral Painter. Oh it gets worse.. in Clip Studio Paint they call it luminocity (but with a V in brackets.. wth). Anyway. Let's say you're using a different way to desaturate the image. How does the desaturation work? One way would be to extract only one channel from the RGB channels and apply it to all the other channels. Cheap digital cameras use this method when applying a build in black and white filter. They overwrite the red and blue channel with the green channel, to get a greyscale image. But that's actually a bad idea. Why? because areas with strong colors like magenta that doesnt have any green in it at all will come out as black or really dark. Moving on what else could you do? You could convert the colors to HSL (luminance) where bright colors like yellow and cyan actually stay bright and visually darker colors like blue and violett stay darker and then strip away the saturation. That way you would at least get an accurate representation of the brightness of the colors in the greyscale image. Actually a good way would be to convert to LAB - wich stands for Luminance, A and B (but wth is A and B???? they are color channels. look it up, it's quite interesting) and decrease the contrast in the A and B channel, that way you only keep the luminance channel. But... you need to convert between RGB and LAB and stuff and that sucks and yeah.... Where am I getting with this? Color theory, especially digital, especially color science, especially with all the f*ing weird lingo is weird and it's complcated and the more you dive into it the more confused and frustrated you get... Let's maybe just... accept that it is what it is and move on before we loose all fun at doing what we're doing? Because I mean that's why you do it right?

Oh my God, I had a problem with "Hue" blending mode a few weeks ago, and it had me pull my hair out. But this explains a lot. The description of the Hue mode says: It keeps the brightness and saturation, but replaces the hue. So I was wondering, why the brightness and saturation changes after I use this mode? I asked so many people and nobody had any idea why it happens. But now I realize, there is nothing wrong with the blending mode. It was our fundamentals that was wrong. Great video! Thank you so much.

You don’t know how long I have been looking for information like this. Thank you so much for sharing your knowledge.

This helps a lot when choosing what color to use when shading and lighting your piece.

In a nutshell, human eye perceives some colors as darker than others because of how cone cells are arranged in it

The more experienced I get in drawing, the more I prefer to start a piece in grayscale then apply color only after values are established. My brain just processes wavelengths so unreliably.

That 'Proof Setup -> Custom -> Dot Gain 20%' (CTRL+Y to toggle) method is awesome. Thank you for everything!

If you create a spectrum starts from blue ends with turquoise you will find that it is gradually getting lighter. This is why a lot of artists change their hues a little towards blue/purple to get a more dynamic feel in their piece.

Tip: actually in Procreate on iPad, the “Hue Saturation Brightness” slider box is effective in showing the value change in hues, it doesn’t even them all out like other programs :) (but the white fill on “color” mode is effective too)

People: Value, Lightness, Brightness, Luminosity. This guy: Value, Value, Value, Value.

I appreciate how you demonstrated these on more than just Photoshop

There is another way to check Value. I used Color filter Accessibility from windows 10 to check it. You just need to do is toggle on or off. It affects the entire screen :'DD

Just when I thought I was starting to get the hang of colors T_T

The fact that hue also affects how light or dark a portion of the painting will appear is probably why we tend to gravitate towards using cooler colors for shading and shadows and warmer colors for anything that will be bright or vibrant

oh, thank you!! I went through many videos and only yours talked about this interaction, which I always felt as intuitively obvious;

life changing marco bucci .. i watched thi svideo 15 times and toke notes. now im seeing values everywhere.. so awesome.. thank god

this can be fixed almost entirely by switching to the LCH colour space. It's essentially the same, but hue and saturation are properly decoupled from value. This is because it's mapped to human perception of colours, not the RGB gamut. I don't know if you can do that in Photoshop, but I tend to design on the web using chroma-js which supports this colourspace. AFAIK the reason this happens is due to the cones in your eyes having different sensitivities to wavelengths of light.

I discovered this just last year but i didn't know that i could've make the same tests on all colors and connect it to value to make more accurate color choices. Now this is a 7 mins to better painting haha

Thanks for making this, so many people whine and wail about how hard it is to understand colour theory when all you need to do is turn on a Marco Bucci video..

You simply explained the difference between hue, saturation and value and I'm so grateful for that! Thank you!

FINALLY someone talked about it, i've noticed this stuff as well and it confused the hell out me whenever i sat down to paint

Fantastic vid, as always dude!

To sum it up, this is a good explanation of how bright/warm and dark/cold colors work in greyscale

Yes your video is an eye opener. Thank you for sharing your knowledge.

5:35 Krita users can also use a soft-proofing. It's also under (ctrl+y) shortcut, but the grayscale colorspace has to be picked in the settings under color management tab (the default space is CMYK). And great video by the way :)

HOLY GUACAMOLE, you blew the lid off this color conspiracy. The part at 6:10 just unlocked a whole world for me. Thanks Marco

The book "Color and Light" by James Gurney talks about this phenomenon called "peak chroma value". So essentially whenever you have a hue, that hue's strongest chroma will be located on a spot in a value range from light to dark. Yellow's strongest chroma is always a light value, red's strongest chroma is a mid, and blue's strongest is a dark. If you paint many gradations of chroma and value of each of those colors you'll create a graph that visually shows where the chromas concentrate on the value scale.

Your tutorials are literally the best ever

I noticed something related while doing speedpaints/studies: in real life, darker tones tends to be more saturated and vice versa.

6:49 I love it when science and art overlap! If I remember correctly, I think eyes with normal color vision tend to be more sensitive to green light (more “green” cones than “red” and “blue”). Since red and green cones overlap in the wavelengths they pick up, yellow light appears even brighter.

thank you so much! you helped me finally understand the digital color wheele, my mind is blown! I'm so so happy. Thank you so much 💓

Brilliant video, you’ve summarized, in such great detail, that which has been the bane of my existence in all my years of digital art XD I’ll be saving this video as a valuable resource, many thanks and good job!

In RGB, on digital screens, it is vital to understand that there's a huge difference between the objective brightness between RGB and CMY the reason is simple: for red we have one light active, just the R in RGB, yet for yellow we also add green G, so digital yellow, magenta and cyan are about twice as bright as red, green and blue respecticely. add to that the specifics of how human cones perceive color and it becomes a bit messy, but that inherent distinction between the hues on digital screens is important

This is so helpful!! Specially the part about not using the hue/saturation tool, I've been playing around with that one to learn more about values and I was a bit confused by the results but your video explains it really well!

incredibly well-done video! Wow. As a fellow video-maker and editor, I winced at how much time must have gone into chopping up such a snappy, to-the-point, visually CLEAR video. Excellent.

This explains why i was never satisfied with the contrast in my paintings. Thank you so much!

Are you reading my mind???? Just thought of this recently!!! When I go darker and slightly more saturated the colors end up muddy, so afterwards I go slightly lighter and more saturated, much better results! Oh just saw the thumbnail didn't even watch yet lol

OMG I'M SO MINDBLOWN THIS EXPLAINS A LOT THANK YOU SO MUCH

Not only value, is brightness.

I remember reading about how each hue has its own inherent value, yellow being the brightest and purple being the darkest. Johannes Itten actually made a brightness scale of each primary and secondary color

i just see it as the “darker” colors absorb more light, the “brighter” colors reflect more light, so the darker colors will have a darker hue. kinda like color changing light bulbs. you can have the brightness set to 100%, but the white light will light up more of the room than the yellow light, yellow will light more than the green, green more than the blue, blue more than red, etc.

Great stuff, Marco! Thank you!

I cannot believe I found this video. I was having these same issues and I was racking my brain wondering what I was doing wrong. And why my values when desaturating the image on my phone and computer where so wildly different! Thank you so much for doing the deep dive on this. I’ll definitely be telling my artist friends about this video.

in traditional oil painting atelier classes we learn that a "neutral" green has the most "neutral" local value. while a bright "warm" yellow has the lightest local value.

Manga artists: What is color? All we know are black and white

This explains so much! Thank you 💜

it's one the only video about colour value that made me understand it, it actually blew my mind too ! incredible

The "bright" blue being dark in value was a revelation. It clicked something inside. Thank you!

You’re gonna be the first person to make a fully accurate color picker, aren’t you?

This is genuinely such a great, top-quality art video. Glad I watched it.

Thank you for this explanation. i was told not to just turn down saturation before but when i asked why, they couldnt explain. this makes the reasoning easy to explain and follow.

One of those things fine arts teachers can never teach us. I never knew this...I assumed it because for some reason all my pics turn out super dark and I can't control my lighting. Makes sense! Thank you!

6:35 whoa that's smart way to deal with colour value, that can be an example to us

This is a great explanation! Value / color is my biggest struggle, especially value. Awesome video thanks!

Thank you for the practical application examples

Please make a painting with many different hues off colour, that all use the same value! :D That will be mind blowing

The different algorithms for convert to grayscale by either “convert to bw” or “decrease saturation” is not explained, yet everything centers on it. Also I miss the obvious gamma discussion when comparing how we perceive the linear color space when it’s modified.

the moment you learn about frequences it all makes sense (but still a very good video)

Thank you for explaining it. You are the first who has made it make sense. At least enough for me. This is a start. I may not be able to apply this knowledge yet, but that's for the push!

4:49 that absolutely blew my mind. I’ve been always using reduced saturation to make images grayscale. Oh my god, thank you so much for this vid

Wow and i was thinking it’s just in rgb images When converting rgb image to greyscale , the color channels contribution will be like this 30% red 59% green and 11% blue and averaging the the value by 3 Thanks for the art and science lesson 🙏

Thank you very much! Amazing tutorial

This was pretty calming as well as easy to watch 👌nice colors, nice voice.

1:14 "you know like value is determined by this vertical placement and then you plug in hue and saturation after" nah bro I just randomly click on points of the square until the color that comes out look cool

"it's not just digital" 5 seconds later "when i switch this frame to greyscale" aight that's it i'm heading out

thank you man this helped me greatly as I was always frustrated by my color choice...this explained a lot

I have needed this for so long. Thank you im glad I found this.