Daub

I teach 3D modelling and rendering and also drawing and oil painting.

Many time in my traditional media classes I will use the term ambient occlusion (AO) and describe it in exactly the same way as I would to my 3D class. Specifically, I ask them to imagine being surrounded by a sphere of even light. In such a case, where would the shadows be? I follow this by discussing contact shadow (e.g. the dark line between your hands as they are placed together) and core shadow (e.g. the darkness of your nostrils). In 3D rendering, both these classes of shadows are served by the AO pass.

Certainly, I would say that AO is a natural phenomenon, but it is also an effect that can be used to sweeten the naturally flat effect of a raster engine like Eevee.

old school comic artists used gouache for the fact that it was easy to photo reproduce (no reflection) and easy to correct. The comic artist Glen Fabrey still uses gouache. digital artists miss out on a lot of nuance unless they really know what they are doing.

One paper I am always citing to my students when discussing composition in painting is: ‘Cultural differences in lateral biases on aesthetic judgments: The effect of native reading direction’

The title speaks for itself.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40167-018-0062-6

Whoops. Sorry. That last sentence should have been deleted.

My experience was a year spent working as a forester. One of our duties was to keep the wood burning stoves supplied. I remember learning that ash got its name from the fact that it burned so well, and willow left perfect charcoal.

As for the axe handle… I was told off by my boss for mashing up the handle by my constant missing. Even now, I am the same with hammers and nails - not nearly as sure with my aim as I should be. On the plus side That was also the time I learned how to replace an axe handle. also the time that

Experienced wood splitter here. All your points are valid. I had to ruin one perfectly good axe handle before I learned how to swing. However, the sim is still a lot of fun.

> if you're fascinated by things that burn and explode, this book is not for you.

Translation… ‘read me now!’

Been there. Im gonna guess that 90% of HN folk have similar stories to tell.

> I’s great technology for long-term archiving.

Dam right. It’s a medium that a reasonably intelligent individual from any time in future/past history could intuitively understand. Let’s not forget that NASA chose a record to store the digital images it sent with Voyager on precisely that assumption.

https://science.nasa.gov/mission/voyager/voyager-golden-reco...

Unfortunately, we are unlikely ever to see any of Delecroix’s paintings as they were intended to be seen. Fading pigments and other factors make this true for every painting, but doubly true for Delecroix as he used a lot of new pigments that were very unstable.

There is the story of Degas standing weeping with sadness in front of The death of sardenopolis at the way its colors had faded over time.

> You seem to be very focused on color.

Guilty as charged. However,... from a certain point of view image editing is all about color. I guess the exception would be Adobes new generation of object selection tools, which are hard to best. DaVinci has such tools but they are more suited to editing movies.

Yes, it would work like that. Moreover, the adjustments concatenate. In other word if a node darkens an image to the point of blackness, the following node can restore the original brightness.

That being said, the new photo editing functionality of DaVinci is not the smoothest. The DaVinci app is a bit of a Frankenstein. The editor is a development laid on top of the original DaVinci color app. The audio page (Fairlight) and the VFX module (Fusion) were purchases which were acquired and 'glued on'. Moving from one to the other can be clunky - though not as bad an experience as Adobe's dynamic links.

Are you referring to Lightroom's masking capability? Indeed, even in Photoshop it is possible to select a color and perform a masked adjustment. Lightroom's selection/masking tools are pretty good and for basic tasks it is fine, but the masking workflow is (IMHO) fundamentally limited. DaVinci's nodes can be stacked on top of each other and the per-hue adjustments are live. Also... I gotta say that the visualization the DV's tools offer is far superior. At a glance I can see the range of hue that have been selected as well as the degree of change they are being subject to.

FYI, In DV it is possible to edit hue to hue, hue to saturation, hue to luminesce, luminesce to saturation, saturation to saturation and saturation to luminesce. There is also the amazing chroma warp, using which near arbitrary color adjustments can be made. Nothing out there comes even close to that capability. No wonder most Hollywood movies are color graded in DV.

Thanks for pointing that out. You are indeed correct. However, from what I can see DaVinci's tools still have the edge. With Capture One the feedback on what hues have been selected is far vaguer than I would like. Moreover, the node-based workflow is far more suitable for complex adjustments.

Repeating a point I made in another comment: in DV it is possible to edit hue to hue, hue to saturation, hue to luminesce, luminesce to saturation, saturation to saturation and saturation to luminesce. There is also the amazing chroma warp, using which near arbitrary color adjustments can be made. Nothing out there comes even close to that capability. No wonder most Hollywood movies are color graded in DV.

I believe that DaVinci’s edge is the excellent masking and node based editing it offers (via the color page) and the insanely powerful hue tools. Neither Lightroom nor Potatoshop has effective hue tools - e.g. selectively change the hue or the saturation of a color except in the most primitive way.

Agreed that the photo editing features are killer. AFAIK no other photo editing app allows the user to selectively desaturate a hue and its ability to adjust scoring to restricted lightness range is world class.

I teach digital art and am also a painter. When I was a student I loved filling sketchbooks with drawings - like a collection of ideas. To a large degree my web bookmarks and screen grab library have taken over this function. That being said, if I want to quickly communicate visual ideas to students or craftsmen I much prefer a paper and pencil. It feels so much more nuanced, comfortable and expressive.

If Mari (texture painting app) and Nuke (vfx compositor) had a baby together it would be the perfect node based photoshop alternative. The brushes of Mari are insanely good and color editing on nuke is a dream.

> Ternary is probably way better at modeling the real world, but the complexity could make code hard to understand. Maybe that can be solved.

Is it not true that the brain process in ternary?

From the point of view of perception, I believe that we process the world in terms of pairwise comparisons. For example, the atomic indivisible of visual processing is figure/ground separation.

it is a little known fact that there was a version of Photoshop made for SGI's Irix.

I feel your pain, and my students are design students

There are two copyrights at work: that of the artwork itself, and that of the photo thereof.

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.

> 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:

https://rmit.instructure.com/courses/87565/pages/colour-ligh...

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.

https://rmit.instructure.com/courses/87565/pages/colour-hue-...

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.

Hope this helps.

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.

BTW... do you know this website?: https://www.webexhibits.org/pigments/intro/history.html

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.

in Japan apple maps is commonly used.

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.