Tuesday, April 1, 2014

"Color Scheme Analysis"

In order to improve my art. I can not rely only on my intuition and practice. Research and theorizing is also very important. To achieve a good color design, I do "Color Scheme Analysis (CSA)". The image above is an example. With a painting image, I pick up a few representing color samples, evaluate their HSV (hue, chroma, and value), and map them on the color wheel.  The distribution of those colors on the color map informs me if this painting has a good color design.  Other way around, if I see a painting appealing to me, I run CSA on it. Its color map will show a specific distribution. Understanding this distribution helps my color designs for my future paintings.

I started doing CSA a year ago on GIMP. The process is tedious and time consuming. But I don't know other software that does this and I have no time to develop this tool. These a couple of days, I have figured out a way to plot the color map with NUMBERS on my Mac, but I still need GIMP to obtain HSV values. Eventually I will have an app for everybody to use. If you know similar tools exist, please let me know.

6 comments:

Unknown said...

Try this software free for 15 days. You can upload a photo and it analyzes the colors.
http://www.colorschemer.com/online.html

Diego DAndrea said...

Adobe has an app and a website that does the trick, and it's free and quick!
It's called Kuler.
You can download the app for iPhone here
And the web version is here
To upload an image, just click the camera icon on the upper right.

Hope it helps :)

micyhał said...

or maybe this tool:
http://www.colorschemedesigner.com/

Shirley Peters said...

Photoshop - The king of apps.

D. MEYER said...

Oh my gosh Qiang, you are something in breaking a painting down more and more. I love your work, but will this be helpful? What about just painting, watching value and color. Guess i am not there yet in my study! Maybe I will give it a try... Always ,thank you! :~>

rghirardi said...

Downloaded GIMP but didn't find function to do CSA. Would you help?