Question 1: Research and written
«Having watched the video of Nigel French – describe, in your own words, what each of these colour systems means: RGB and CMYK. Add visuals to show the difference»
RGB and CMYK is both used for mixing colors in design, but there is some differences between them. A quick rule is that RGB is used for digital and CMYK is best for prints.
RGB stands for red, green and blue. Every color is made by mixing these colors and varying their intensity. RGB uses additive mixing where every color start as black and then red, green and blue light is added over each other to create the right pigment. If you mix red, green and blue light at equal intensity it creates white.
CMYK stands for cyan, magenta, yellow and key/black. CMYK is used by subtractive mixing which is the opposite of RGB. Subtractive mixing means that all colors starts as white and every layer of ink reduces the brightness and eventually you end up with the color you want. If you mix all the colors together they creates black.
«Make use of Adobe Colour and develop four different colour schemes. Please hand in screenshots of your schemes: monochromatic, complementary, tetrad and analogous.»
Monochromatic:
Complementary:
Tetrad:
Analogous:
Question 2: Practical
Use a colour photo of your choice and create the following colour effects, using Photoshop. You should hand in four separate works of the same photo with the following effects:
- Create a fluorescent duotone using a Gradient Map adjustment layer.
- Apply a monochrome look (choose a different colour than black/greyscale).
- Split toning of the image (note that the tool in Photoshop for ‘Split Toning’ was changed to ‘Color Gradient’).
- Freestyle: Create a colour effect of your choice.
For this one I increased the vibrance and hue and decreased the saturation.
Here is the original picture:
Question 3: Design a book cover
«Design a book cover for one of the titles below. You need to choose one of the colour schemes and explain why you chose this scheme.«
I chose to make a book cover for Charlie and the Chocolate factory, because I loved that book (and movie) as a child. I chose a tetrad color scheme after playing around in Adobe color, and after deciding I wanted to use at least green and purple in my illustration, then I found the exact nuances I wanted by using the tetrad scheme. I didn’t want to use the scheme I made in task 1 so I made a new one. This is what I ended up with:
AHV design 