Art tutorials - Color management profiles
[It's a long one, but I think how this was worked out is more important than the solution.]
HI! Are the colors on your digital art randomly turning out strange from time to time?
I've just slammed headfirst into this, it's something that's been bugging me for ages. The colors on my secondary monitor have been super different to the screen I draw on. It's made trying to eyeball colors off the monitor down right impossible since they looked different.
I remember noticing my colors looking very weird in May but had no idea why. I just recall when I looked at it between my screens the image looked vastly different. It was very noticeable because I was using a medium saturation dark black, but on the other screen it looked almost green.
Essentially what I've been doing since then is learning color relationships and translating it when painting. Or copying images directly onto the canvas to eyeball on the 'working' monitor.
This is a very specific issue, by default you might not even come across it. But this topic is very very very important for workflows that deal with colors.
I was painting this cube of jelly.
It was bugging me that I was painting with browns, it didn't make sense, the original photo was so bright, I could've sworn at the very least the hues would've been red. Why was I looking at this weird brown cube.
I chalked it up to the monitor issue.
But logically, I was expecting to be painting a red cube, why would it be brown. After painting a pile of colorful gummy bears, I learned to trust my eyes, this was something else.
When copying the image, it was brown - this is what I've been doing
If I screenshotted, it was red
If I downloaded as a jpeg, it was red
It was consistent.
Something wasn't right and it took some hunting around, I couldn't find any large posts about it.
What I found out was there's a thing called color profiles.
They're split between sRGB and CMYK, you might've seen these in context of printing, I'll summarise it as a standard practice to keep colors consistent between displays.
It gets super involved, but principally, all of the settings here essentially act as a map that tells the monitor what do to with specific colors (there's a whole thing about gamut mapping that I touched on a while ago, but the specifics are above my ability to explain let alone comprehend).
If you use different profiles, you will end up with things looking different between screens. You can imagine if you're sending files to a client how this is an issue. You try to take something to print and it looks different to what you drew. Or looking at it from your phone compared to tablet, things look off.
(Take the specifics with a grain of salt)
From what I understood, when you COPY an image, it takes the raw pixel data, but not the color profile information. Whatever combination of settings caused a mismatch and pasting it, that's essentially what we're looking at, an unmapped block of data. Hence the weird brown tone.
How do we fix it?
Step 1 is going to these settings (Windows)
Step 2 is acquiring one of the profiles from: https://www.color.org/srgbprofiles.xalter
(I think adobe also has some on their website)
(Which profile you use DOES matter, and each has specific use cases, I went with this v4 since it seems like a modern standard, but if you're working with an older tool v2 is on there too for compability)
Step 3, back on windows settings, click the ADD PROFILE with the ICC file that was downloaded. You can see it pop up in the list below.
(May need a restart to active, but mine worked immediately)
That's it for setting it up on the work environment end.
I don't know if this is the same for Apple, but theoretically there is an equivalent.
Next is to apply it in our working environment, this next one is specifically FireAlpaca since that's what I use, but there should be a similar setting regardless of what you're working in.
Functionally, you're looking for anything that mentions colors settings. Profiles, printing or management.
Photoshop: Edit -> Color settings
CSP: View menu -> Color profile -> Preview settings
Krita: Settings -> Configure Krita -> Color Management
Procreate: Actions -> Canvas -> Canvas Information -> Color profile
Sai: File -> Print -> Color Management
Functionally they are all referencing this.
What this means it, no matter what you're working in, you can expect that things will look as close to what you intended on the other side.
I've circled some extra settings, the Black Point Compression is how the most dark parts are handled - Simply, keep this turned on.
Rending Intent affects how colors are mapped within a gamut, the most common are
Relative Isomatric (rounds to nearest neighbour)
and Perceptual (squeezes, doesn't clip)
There's also Absolute colormetric - used in proofing
And Saturation - used in business graphics
I'll be real, I don't fully comprehend what I just typed, I think if you're drawing, primary settings will be Perceptual, Blank Point Compression (BPC) ENABLED, with an sRGB profile.
All of that sounds involved. You don't really need to worry about the specifics of what they're all doing until it's relevant, just know that it exists as a concept.
If you don't set a color profile it'll use your machine's default afaik.
Since I didn't have one installed, the monitors were essentially, doing whatever. Looking wildly different between them.
Incidentally, you can apply different profiles in the same method for your purposes. For example if you're big on games, there's profiles intended for pushing the colors even further, though you'd probably also want to find a way to switch the profile back and forth.
Anyway, long winded. Conceptually, it's one of these things that you might not even know exists, and isn't really a problem until it is.
I'm just doing stuff at the moment where the differences are standing out a lot. It's been a real issue where I couldn't trust what was coming out the end of my pen, what I thought I was drawing wasn't being translated to the screen - endlessly frustrating.
This is obviously a unique issue to working digitally, it's a lot of numbers and stuff under the hood, even what we see with color wheels and bars is technically not the whole story.
Pfff good luck out there, so much to consider, at least with this one largely, you can set it up and just forget about it.
You can essentially get weird stuff happening if you miss settings like these, it's usually not a problem, but you never know.
Good luck out there, happy arting.
Let's meet again at the top!
So, long story short, this month we had to stay inside for like 3 weeks basically because of the toxic smoke in the air from the Camp Fire, and during that time apparently we used so much internet that we actually nearly capped our data plan, hahaha. And like, we’ll be OK so long as we don’t watch netflix or videos until the end of the month (and I’ll still be streaming on Friday, that should be fine) but, I decided with this oodles of extra time this weekend of not watching stuff to read up on color theory, and picked up “Color and Light” by James Gurney, who goes over this color choosing method called Gamut Mapping.
Sounds more complicated than it is, but I decided to try it out on everyone’s favorite professional moleman Marik here. Skin tone is a little tricky because I can only mix with the four colors that are the points of the map I made for myself on this Yurmby color wheel (and it must be a Yurmby one, which I didn’t know was a thing until I read this book), but it came out pretty convincing, actually. Especially since I cheated and put most of it in shadow.
kinda neat whenever you get a crossover from a traditional art technique that slides into digital like this. I’ll have to continue with this method some more to get a hang of it, but I like how easy it is to make something cohesive, so if you have not tried Gamut Mapping--it’s a good time.
I bought a limited "personal palette" of gouache paints. Here's how it went!
Grackle nest with three eggs: Gouache on Paper
A couple of months ago, I finally took the plunge and bought myself some gouache paints. Although in general I love the delicacy and glazing properties of transparent watercolour, there are some subjects where the opacity and flatter finish of gouache (opaque watercolour) are preferable. I decided to use this opportunity of starting in a new…
