Color Shades and Tints

In color theory, a tint is the mixture of a color with white, which increases lightness, and a shade is the mixture of a color with black, which reduces lightness. Mixing with any neutral color, including black and white, reduces chroma or colorfulness, while the hue remains unchanged.

When mixing colored light (additive color models), the achromatic mixture of spectrally balanced red, green and blue (RGB) is always white, not gray or black. When we mix colorants, such as the pigments in paint mixtures, a color is produced which is always darker and lower in chroma, or saturation, than the parent colors. This moves the mixed color toward a neutral color-a gray or near-black. Lights are made brighter or dimmer by adjusting their brightness, or energy level. In painting, lightness is adjusted through mixture with white, black or a color's complement.


It is common among some painters to darken a paint color by adding black paint-producing colors called shades-or lighten a color by adding white-producing colors called tints. However it is not always the best way for representational painting, as an unfortunate result is for colors to also shift in hue. For instance, darkening a color by adding black can cause colors such as yellows, reds and oranges, to shift toward the greenish or bluish part of the spectrum. Lightening a color by adding white can cause a shift towards blue when mixed with reds and oranges. Another practice when darkening a color is to use its opposite, or complementary, color (e.g. purplish-red added to yellowish-green) in order to neutralize it without a shift in hue, and darken it if the additive color is darker than the parent color. When lightening a color this hue shift can be corrected with the addition of a small amount of an adjacent color to bring the hue of the mixture back in line with the parent color (e.g. adding a small amount of orange to a mixture of red and white will correct the tendency of this mixture to shift slightly towards the blue end of the spectrum).

Color Proportions

When colors are juxtaposed, our eyes perceive a visual mix. This mix will differ depending on the proportions of allocated areas.

* The color with the largest proportional area is the dominant color (the ground)

* Smaller areas are sub dominant colors.

* Accent colors are those with a small relative area, but offer a contrast because of a variation in hue, intensity, or saturation (the figure).

* Placing small areas of light color on a dark background, or a small area of dark on a light background will create an accent.

* If large areas of a light hue are used, the whole area will appear light; conversely, if large areas of dark values are used, the whole area appears dark. Alternating color by intensity rather than proportion will also change the perceived visual mix of color.

Color Combinations

Colors chosen from different spokes on the Color Wheel will provide a variety of color combinations. Deciding upon and selecting a color combination that works for you will very much depend upon the job at hand.
Color combinations tend to evoke certain reactions either by cultural, or personal experience.

* Subordinate, or Base Color: This is a visually weak, or subordinate, color. It should contrast or compliment the dominant color.

* Dominant : The main color. It is this color which defines the communicative values of the combination.

* Accent, or Highlight Color: The Accent color can be two things: either sympathetic to the Subordinate or Dominant color, or it can be visually strong and striking, therefore appear to be competing with the dominant color.

Examples of Colour Combinations

Active / Vibrant

Active combinations are intense. They feature bright, often complimentary, colors on the color wheel and are combinations of primary, secondary and tertiary colors. To many people, color combinations such as this evoke feelings of noise, flamboyance and energy. It's a young combination, although there will be cultural differences, aimed at young adults. Many of the hues are not really ‘natural' colors, but they are more intense tones of the same colors, therefore they could be used for ‘natural' applications such as the travel industry.

Muted / Calm

Muted palettes have a lot of white in the hues. This example uses blues and introduces lavender as the dominant color. The resultant color way is balanced and calming. Hues in the blue, green and violet areas of the Color Wheel convey a visual quietness. The Accent is almost always used as sympathetic to the Dominant. Often used in the cosmetics industry, the visual softness of the colors often portrays a feminine quality


Pastel

A pastel combination is similar to the Muted combination in that is often based on colors containing a lot of white (or lack of white depending on your color model right?). Where they differ is that Pastel combinations combine warm and cool tones readily. This combination can portray youth and innocence (babies!) and has a warmth that the Muted combination fails to deliver.

Natural

Natural combinations are those color which are borrowed from the great outdoors. Rusty reds, browns, sky blues and warm pinks are the order of the day. I find the easiest way to create these combinations is to go outside, take a photograph and then choose some colors from that, you really can create some stunning combinations. When you need to communicate rustic charm or the feeling of walking through autumn leaves, then this is the type of combination you're after.

Rich

This is a good one. Hues of royalty, tradition, often religious and above all; wealth. Rich colour combinations are perhaps the combinations which are so engrained in culture. True, the actual colors used may differ, but the overall effect is seen throughout the world. Maroon is often mixed with gold and full shades of green. They can be combined with Natural combinations for a fuller palette.

Other Color combinations

Monotone Chromatic

A monotone color scheme is just one single hue and its variations in terms of tints, shades and saturation. Using saturation and tint/shade variations of a color is always good. However, in most cases I would advise against using a fully monochromatic scheme, as there is a risk of monotony. Using it with pure white or black can be efficient, though.

Monotone Achromatic

A monotone achromatic color scheme is a special instance of the monotone scheme which consists of only neutral colors ranging from black to white. A scheme like this can be efficient, but it can very easily look boring. Using an achromatic scheme with just one bright color for highlight can be very effect full.

Analogous Colors

Analogous colors are colors that are adjacent to each other on the color wheel.

Some examples are

* Green

* Yellow green

* Yellow or Red

* Orange and Yellow

Analogous color schemes are often found in nature and are pleasing to the eye. The combination of these colors give a bright and cheery effect in the area, and are able to accommodate many changing moods. When using the analogous color scheme, one should make sure there is one hue as the main color.

Complementary Colors

Complementary Colors are pairs of colors that are of "opposite" hue in some color model. The exact hue "complementary" to a given hue depends on the model in question, and perceptually uniform, additive, and subtractive color models, for example, have differing complements for any given color.

In color theory, two colors are called complementary if, when mixed in the proper proportion, they produce a neutral color (grey, white, or black).

In roughly-perceptual color models, neutrals (white, greys, and black) lie along a central axis. For example, in the HSV color space, complementary colors (as defined in HSV) lie opposite each other on any horizontal cross-section.


In most discussions of complementary color, only fully saturated, bright colors are considered. However, under the formal definition, brightness and saturation are also factors. Thus, in the CIE 1931 color space, a color of a particular "dominant" wavelength can be mixed with a particular amount of the "complementary" wavelength to produce a neutral color (grey or white).

In the RGB color model (and derived models such as HSV), primary colors and secondary colors are paired in this way:

* Red and Cyan

* Green and Magenta

* Blue and Yellow

Tertiary Colors

A Tertiary Color is a color made by mixing one primary color with one secondary color, in a given color space such as RGB or RYB.

Unlike primary and secondary colors, these are not represented by one firmly established name each, but the following examples include some typical names. Brown and grey are sometimes known as Tertiary colors and are usually made by the complementary color


RGB or CMY Primaries

Cyan + Blue = Azure

Blue + Magenta = Violet

Magenta + Red = Rose

Red + Yellow = Orange

Yellow + Green = Chartreuse

Green + Cyan = Spring green

Traditional Painting (RYB)

Red + Orange = Red orange

Orange + Yellow = Orange yellow

Yellow + Green = Chartreuse

Green + Blue = Aquamarine

Blue + Violet = Indigo

Violet + Red = Violet red

Secondary Colors

A Secondary Color is a color made by mixing two primary colors in a given color space. Examples include the following:

Additive Secondaries

Light (RGB)

Red + Green = Yellow

Green + Blue = Cyan

Blue + Red = Magenta

Light (RYB)

Red + Yellow = Orange

Yellow + Blue = Green

Blue + Red = Violet


Subtractive Secondaries

Pigment (CMY)

Cyan + Magenta = Blue

Magenta + Yellow = Red

Yellow + Cyan = Green

Traditional Painting Prescripts (RYB)

Red + Yellow = Orange

Yellow + Blue = Green

Blue + Red = Violet

In the RGB color space the colors are added, thus you start with levels of dark colors which are added to produce lighter colors. RYB uses pigments, which are not added, and thus combining colors using the RYB color system will result in a darker color.

Pigment (GVO)

Green + Violet = Blue

Violet + Orange = Red

Orange + Green = Yellow

Primary Colors

Primary colors are sets of colors that can be combined to make a useful range of colors. For human applications, three are often used; for additive combination of colors, as in overlapping projected lights or in CRT displays, the primary colors normally used are red, green, and blue. For subtractive combination of colors, as in mixing of pigments or dyes, such as in printing, the primaries normally used are cyan, magenta, and yellow

Any choice of primary colors is essentially arbitrary; for example, an early color photographic process, autochrome, typically used orange, green, and violet primaries.
Biological Basis

Primary colors are not a fundamental property of light but are often related to the physiological response of the eye to light. Fundamentally, light is a continuous spectrum of the wavelengths that can be detected by the human eye, an infinite-dimensional stimulus space. However, the human eye normally contains only three types of color receptors, called cone cells. Each color receptor responds to different ranges of the color spectrum. Humans and other species with three such types of color receptors are known as trichromats. These species respond to the light stimulus via a three-dimensional sensation, which generally can be modeled as a mixture of three primary colors.


Additive Primaries

Media that combine emitted lights to create the sensation of a range of colors are using the additive color system. Typically, the primary colors used are red, green, and blue.
Television and other computer and video displays are a common example of the use of additive primaries and the RGB color model. The exact colors chosen for the primaries are a technological compromise between the available phosphors (including considerations such as cost and power usage) and the need for large color triangle to allow a large gamut of colors. The ITU-R BT.709-5/sRGB primaries are typical.

Additive mixing of red and green light produces shades of yellow, orange, or brown. Mixing green and blue produces shades of cyan, and mixing red and blue produces shades of purple, including magenta. Mixing nominally equal proportions of the additive primaries results in shades of grey or white; the color space that is generated is called an RGB color space.
The CIE 1931 color space defines monochromatic primary colors with wavelengths of 435.8 nm (violet), 546.1 nm (green) and 700 nm (red). The corners of the color triangle are therefore on the spectral locus, and the triangle is about as big as it can be. No real display device uses such primaries, as the extreme wavelengths used for violet and red result in a very low luminous efficiency.

Subtractive Primaries

Media that use reflected light and colorants to produce colors are using the subtractive color method of color mixing
RYB (red, yellow, and blue) is a historical set of subtractive primary colors. It is primarily used in art and art education, particularly painting. It predates modern scientific color theory.

RYB make up the primary color triad in a standard color wheel; the secondary colors VOG (violet, orange, and green) make up another triad. Triads are formed by 3 equidistant colors on a particular color wheel; neither RYB nor VOG is equidistant on a perceptually uniform color wheel, but rather have been defined to be equidistant in the RYB wheel.

Painters have long used more than three "primary" colors in their palettes-and at one point considered red, yellow, blue, and green to be the four primaries. Red, yellow, blue, and green are still widely considered the four psychological primary colors, though red, yellow, and blue are sometimes listed as the three psychological primaries, with black and white occasionally added as a fourth and fifth.

During the 18th century, as theorists became aware of Isaac Newton's scientific experiments with light and prisms, red, yellow, and blue became the canonical primary colors-supposedly the fundamental sensory qualities that are blended in the perception of all physical colors and equally in the physical mixture of pigments or dyes. This theory became dogma, despite abundant evidence that red, yellow, and blue primaries cannot mix all other colors, and has survived in color theory to the present day

Using red, yellow, and blue as primaries yields a relatively small gamut, in which, among other problems, colorful greens, cyans, and magentas are impossible to mix, because red, yellow, and blue are not well-spaced around a perceptually uniform color wheel. For this reason, modern three- or four-color printing processes, as well as color photography, use cyan, yellow, and magenta as primaries instead. Most painters include colors in their palettes which cannot be mixed from yellow, red, and blue paints, and thus do not fit within the RYB color model. Some who do use a three-color palette opt for the more evenly spaced cyan, yellow, and magenta used by printers, and others paint with 6 or more colors to widen their gamuts The cyan, magenta, and yellow used in printing are sometimes known as "process blue," "process red," "process yellow."

Colors of the Color Wheel

A typical artists' paint or pigment color wheel includes the blue, red, and yellow primary colors. The corresponding secondary colors are green, orange & violet. The tertiary colors are red-orange, red-violet, yellow-orange, yellow-green, blue-violet and blue-green.

A Color Wheel based on RGB (red, green, blue) or RGV (red, green, violet) additive primaries has cyan, magenta, and yellow secondaries (cyan was previously known as cyan blue). Alternatively, the same arrangement of colors around a circle can be described as based on cyan, magenta, and yellow subtractive primaries, with red, green, and blue (or violet) being secondaries.


Most Color Wheels are based on three primary colors, three secondary colors, and the six intermediates formed by mixing a primary with a secondary, known as tertiary colors, for a total of 12 main divisions; some add more intermediates, for 24 named colors. Other color wheels, however, are based on the four opponent colors, and may have four or eight main colors.

Goethe's Theory of Colors provided the first systematic study of the physiological effects of color (1810). His observations on the effect of opposed colors led him to a symmetric arrangement of his color wheel.

Color Wheel

A Color Wheel (also referred to as a Color Circle) is a visual representation of colors arranged according to their chromatic relationship. Begin a color wheel by positioning primary hues equidistant from one another, then create a bridge between primaries using secondary and tertiary colors

The color wheel can be divided into ranges that are visually active or passive. Active colors will appear to advance when placed against passive hues. Passive colors appear to recede when positioned against active hues.


* Advancing hues are most often thought to have less visual weight than the receding hues.

* Most often warm, saturated, light value hues are "active" and visually advance.

* Cool, low saturated, dark value hues are "passive" and visually recede.

* Tints or hues with a low saturation appear lighter than shades or highly saturated colors.

* Some colors remain visually neutral or indifferent.

Color relationships may be displayed as a color wheel or a color triangle.

Color Basics

Color is the perceptual characteristic of light described by a color name. Specifically, color is light, and light is composed of many colors-those we see are the colors of the visual spectrum: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and violet. Objects absorb certain wavelengths and reflect others back to the viewer. We perceive these wavelengths as color.

A color is described in three ways: by its name, how pure or desaturated it is, and its value or lightness. Although pink, crimson, and brick are all variations of the color red, each hue is distinct and differentiated by its chroma, saturation, intensity, and value.

Chroma, intensity, saturation and luminance/value are inter-related terms and have to do with the description of a color.

Chroma: How pure a hue is in relation to gray Saturation: The degree of purity of a hue.


Intensity: The brightness or dullness of a hue. One may lower the intensity by adding white or black.

Luminance / Value: A measure of the amount of light reflected from a hue. Those hues with a high content of white have a higher luminance or value.

Shade and tint are terms that refer to a variation of a hue.

Shade: A hue produced by the addition of black.

Tint: A hue produced by the addition of white