Project 6: Measuring Colour

My Colour Chart

For this section, I was required to measure the exact RGB and HSB values for each square on my colour chart. They are as follows:

I then chose three of my own photographs – one containing neutral tones (midday clouds), one with skin tones and one with vegetation. I sampled ‘important’ colours in the pictures, my findings were as follows:

Grey parts of clouds – close to neutral, but with a slight blue tint: R218, G228, B234. H202, S7, B92. Blue sky – high brightness and saturation: R65, G169, B234. H203, S72, B92. Grass – had more of a yellow tinge than I thought: R101, G125, B24. H74, S81, B49. Part of the foreground was close to one of the colours on my colour chart.

Some areas of the background close to neutral – e.g. the path: R192, G192, B184. H60, S4, B75. Skin tone, right shoulder – R180, G155, B148. H13, S18, B71. Skin tone rosy cheek – R127, G67, B56. H9, S56, B50. Skin tone varies a lot more than I had realised. There were many areas of colour close to some of those on my chart.

No real neutral areas that I could find. The closest was part of the caterpillar’s body, which measured R187, G199, B197. H170, S6, B78. Leaf – as with the grass in the photo above, more yellow than I’d thought: R36, G76, B5. H94, S93, B30. Other parts of the leaf were quite close to the greens on my colour chart.

Fine-Tuning Colour

The next exercise involved learning to recognise neutral areas, so that the ‘neutral picker’ colour tool could be used to adjust colour casts. I found this quite straightforward, as I am used to working with the ‘gray point’ tool in Nikon’s ViewNX software. This enables the White Balance of the photograph to be changed – dramatic colour shifts can be introduced by clicking on different parts of the image.