I wrote myself a tutorial - what do you think?
Describing ColourHue and temperature Hue is the easiest colour scale to grasp – it tells us where we are on the rainbow:
Red - Orange - Yellow - Green - Blue - Purple
I have noticed that on a computer we tend to be given a scale that looks more like:
Red - Magenta - Purple - Blue - Cyan - Green - Yellow - Orange
This is more useful for My Little Pony because a lot of magenta (i.e. pink) and cyan (i.e. turquoise) are used. Because I don’t want to be the ‘the witch who banished pink’ I propose:
Pink - Red - Orange - Yellow - Green - Cyan - Blue - Purple
Colours pink, red, orange and yellow are considered warm colours and green, cyan, blue and purple are considered cool colours. This can be described as the temperature of the colour. Red can therefore be either a cool red (with more purple) or a warm red (with more orange). Similarly, green can be a warm or a cool green.
How the eye recognizes color temperature can change according to the source of light, so for comparison between two objects they need to be placed in the same photograph. Saturation and value can also appear differently according to the source of light…
The colour wheel and opposite coloursOpposite colours are found on each side of a colour wheel. For example, purple and yellow, red and green, orange and blue.
https://custommemoryquilt.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/color-wheel.jpg This colour wheel has 12 colours and can be divided up using the 6 colours from the original rainbow. I’ve added the extra colour-words we added too:
Red - Red-orange - Orange - Orange-yellow - Yellow - Yellow-green - Green - Cyan (Green-blue) - Blue - Blue-purple - Purple - Pink (purple-red or Magenta)
These words now divide the rainbow into in equal portions.
My only reservation for this system is that in the picture above, blue-purple looks more like a purple shade of blue than a blue shade of purple. Why that colour doesn’t quite work for me I’m not sure. Apparently we all see colour differently.
SaturationSaturation is also known as the degree of intensity or purity of a hue. Imagine mixing paints; adding grey reduces the intensity of a colour. Adding white creates tints and adding black creates shades. Saturation is also known as the chroma, which you can imagine as the proportion of colour pigment left in the mixture.
The saturation of colours can be described from vivid i.e. very strong to dull i.e. very weak. For example:
Very vivid - Vivid - Medium - Dull - Very dull
To add to this story, in the 1980s, new dyes were marketed that produce very distinctive fluorescent colours, known in the UK as ‘luminous’ or in the USA as ‘neon’. Neon is shorter!
ValueThe value is the relative lightness or darkness of a colour. Imagine a monochrome photograph in black or sepia; the amount of light reflecting off a surface creates the value in the photograph. The value of a colour is also known as the tone when describing colours.
Here are some words to make a scale for the value of colour:
Very light - Light - Medium - Dark - Very dark
Combining termsA dull, light red-orange could be what we often think of as 'coral'. What we think of as ‘hot pink’ could be described as medium, very vivid pink, or luminous pink could be medium neon pink. ‘Fuchsia’ could be described as vivid, very dark pink… I know, I know ‘fuchsia’ is much shorter and easier to remember! What can I say? Practice makes perfect.
Using the colour picker in Microsoft Office applicationsThis is a good way to understand hue, saturation and value. First, you pick the hue or rainbow colour using the sliding scale. Pink and cyan are helpfully included in this scale. Then, you can see in the box to the left there are colour options for the saturation (low or grey at left and high at the right hand side) and the value (light at the top to dark at the bottom).
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