Coloring in Lab and RGB

Jan 27, 20144 min read

Deviation Actions

Published: Jan 27, 2014

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Time and time again, I have seen people asking why do so many artists start with a black and white painting and add the color later. Of course this is a preference but it has its own advantages which I think has lead almost all artists to try it out once in their career.

The problem starts with human vision, colors and values (a term which indicates how light or dark the object of interest is), is not as straight forward for human eys as they would be for a device such as a camera. Different colors of the same saturation (how pure the hue is) have different perceived brightness even if they are in fact of the same local value. A pure red at its brightest value is darker than a yellow of similar property to our eyes and so on are red, blue, purple of darker colors where as yellow, cyan, orange and green are of the lighter ones. Hence an artists needs to train his eyes to see the real value of an object when painting it and that takes a lot of practice and also mental effort.

Here comes the good thing about painting in grayscale you don't have to worry about any of them. And it’s not just the color value which is off your mind, you don't have to worry about color relation and composition either meaning you can focus purely on other parts such as value shapes' composition and relation and...

The second advantage which the method provides is, it helps the artists to see the values easier and hence establish a more realistic presentation of the subject matter. There are other advantages to the method as well, for example if you don’t use black for your grayscale but a monochromatic sets of values such as blue, you can also use that as an under paint, which would blend with other colors you add later on and produce more varied and exciting color scheme.

But here comes the main disadvantages of working in grayscale, there is no easy way to add color to it later. Both in digital and tradition art, people have used creative ways to establish a bulletproof method for adding color to a grayscale. The common method in Photoshop involves using the color, multiply and overlay blending layer modes to add variety of colors and paint over it at the end using the painting as a base. Other methods involve adjustment layers such as color balance, hue and saturation, photo filters and ... Which along with masking and lasso tools provide a method to achieve better looks and less need of painting over it at the end.

Personally I tend to start the painting off in color, not because it provides better paintings but because it's more enjoyable to paint that way, and I find the action off adding color later and painting over the same thing boring. But when I have to really plan things ahead -for client work let’s say - I tend to combine the methods mentioned above with the use of RGB and Lab color space. The RGB color space provides an easy method to add color to middle and darker values whereas Lab works really well for bright areas, and also naturally its massive advantage in having the lightness of a color as a separated component which allows us to change any value without changing its color and adding color to an area without changing values.

You can give coloring from black and white a try, my suggestion would be if you are painting don’t add to much detail because you have to paint over them any way but establish the general composition and the rendering of the forms. Or you can do what I do, paint in color but always keep a layer at the very top of your layers which is filled with black and it’s to saturation, that way every time you turn the layer on you will see the grayscale of the image.

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