Transcripts
1. Introduction: Welcome to Color Alchemy two. It's the critically acclaimed
sequel to the original, where we explored
the magic of color. Hi, I'm Chris Ruff, and I'm a professional
surface designer, and I love color. I love how it works. I
love how it surprises us, and I love how it can
transform designs. The first class was
about CMYK color. This time, we're going
to focus on RGB. We'll be covering
things like what is RGB color and how is it
different from CMYK? What happens when you translate
between the two of them, and also some really
great ways to mix RGB colors on screen
so that you're not just clicking around
and hoping for the best. Now, when you talk
about digital color, it can get kind of technical,
but I promise you, just like the first class, this one's concise, super easy to follow,
and very hands on. This class is for
surface designers, but also graphic designers, illustrators, and
other digital artists. I'll be demonstrating
in Adobe Illustrator, but the concepts that
I'm talking about apply no matter what
software you use, whether that's
Photoshop or Procreate or affinity or something else. For your project, we'll be
recoloring this floral, which you might recognize
from the previous class. It's by Nadia Grapes and it's available for download
in the class resources. This time, we're going
to create a bright, punchy version of it in
RGB and then translate it into CMYK so that we can
see how those colors shift. Then we're going to do a
dark moody version of it, so we can see how darker
colors translate as well. Now, if you haven't taken the first color alchemy class yet, you can definitely start here, but I won't be covering
all the same thing, so I do recommend that you
go back and go through some of the other things
like contrast and value and color
relationships. Those won't be included here, so that's a great way to expand
your knowledge of color. And lastly, I want to
let you know about my color conversion cheat sheet. It's a guide that
I put together for you so that you can have
a better idea which colors shift the most when
you go from RGB to CMYK. So let's go ahead
and dive in and learn about RGB colors. A.
2. Understanding RGB & CMYK: There are two main color systems for digital design and printing. They are RGB, which stands
for red, green, and blue, and CMYK, which stands for cyan, magenta, yellow and black.
So what's the difference? Well, RGB is based on light, and CMYK is based on
pigments like ink or paint. So to demonstrate the
difference between them, imagine a room with white
walls and sun streaming in. Because there's no
colors on the walls, they're able to reflect
all that light, making the room as
bright as possible. Now, if we paint the walls, no matter what color we choose, it'll make the walls darker, which limits the ability
to reflect light. And the darker the color,
the darker the room. That's why CMYK is called a subtractive color system
because it takes away light. Now imagine a pitch black room, and to add color, we can
turn on a blue light. This time, the color
made the room brighter, not darker like last time. Red, green, and blue are the primary colors of
light and combining them in different strengths creates a huge range of colors, and combining all three of them at full strength makes white, which fills the room with
intense bright light. So that's why RGB is called an additive color system
because the more color we add, the brighter it gets,
so it's adding light. CMYK colors start with
white and darken to black, while RGB colors start with
black and brighten to white. That fundamental
difference is why these two color systems don't always play
nicely together. In the next lesson,
we're going to compare the two systems in a little
bit more hands on way.
3. Primary Color Differences: Both CMYK and RGB color systems are bound by most of the
same color theory rules. Each of them has
three primary colors, and we mix neighboring colors in order to create the
secondary colors. So Magenta plus
blue equals purple. Magenta with yellow
makes orange. And in this case, I know
it's a very red orange. And cyan mixed with
yellow, makes green. Cool, huh? Now let's
do the same thing with RGB and here's where you'll start to see
some differences. So mixing red with blue this time doesn't make purple,
it makes magenta. And mixing red with
green makes yellow. That's pretty
unexpected, isn't it? Finally, green mixed
with blue makes Cyan. Now, even though we started with different primary colors and they mix differently
than before, in the end, look, our two
circles have the same colors. I think that's
really fascinating. Now let's look at the
CMYK and RGB color menus. I'll be working in
Illustrator again, but if you want to follow along in Procreate or Photoshop, let me show you how to access
the comparable color menus. In Procreate, click
on the color menu here and then look for
value at the bottom here. Now you have access to all
the different sliders. There's CMYK here,
and here's RGB, and then HSB is at the top, and we'll be using that
in the next lesson. So to find the
sliders in Photoshop, you can just go to Window color and then yours may or may
not have the sliders here. If they don't, click right here and you can
see them all in here. We've got the RGB, so
you can change them here and CMYK and also HSB. Now let's look at
the differences in the color menus,
starting with CMYK. Just like we started
with that white room and painted it with color, here we're going to
start with white circles which have no color. And adding color to them
is very straightforward. We move the yellow slider to
have full strength yellow. For the green, we move the blue and yellow
sliders and so on. Now let's look at RGB.
I'll change this up here. This time, I'll start
with black circles, just like the black room
example because in RGB, black is the absence
of all color, and the sliders reflect that. Instead of starting with
white, they start with black. As we move the
sliders to the right, we're turning up the lights
so there's more color. For green, we turn
up the green light. For blue, we turn
up the blue light, of course, red is the same way. Then for yellow, you
look at the neighbors and so we turn up red and green. Cyan's neighbors
are green and blue. And magenta is red and blue. Now, I don't think working
this way is very intuitive. One thing that I'll
sometimes do is, let me take one of our circles, and I'll move all the sliders to the middle and that makes
the circle a neutral gray. Now when I look at the sliders, I have some more clues. I know if I want purple, I can slide this one to the right and if I
want a blue green, I can slide this one here. So as I go, I'm
seeing how moving the sliders changes
the colors and it helps direct me to the
color that I want. Remember, if you want
a lighter color, move the sliders to the right. In other words, turning
them on more and going to the left makes them darker or starts to
turn off the light. Now, if this still
feels confusing, I don't blame you, I'll show you a different option
in the next lesson.
4. Exploring Hue Saturation & Brightness: So let's explore
another way that we can control and
mix colors in RGB, and that's using hue, saturation, and
brightness or HSB. So right now, our color
menu is set to RGB, but if I go up here, I
can switch it to HSB. So what do these
terms actually mean? Hue refers to color itself, whether that's red or
orange or yellow or green, turquoise, all of
those are hues. If we look at the top
of our color menu, the first slider is for hue
and it goes 0-360 degrees. If we look at our color
wheel and start at the top, we can make that zero degrees, and then yellow would
be at 60 degrees, green at 1:20, Cyan
at 180, and so on. So if I go into the menu
and type in 60 degrees, the color changes to yellow. Enter 180 and we get Cyan. So essentially, this slider is a flattened out version
of the color wheel. So then let's look
at saturation. This measure controls
how pure the color is. So at full saturation, the color is at
its most vibrant. As we lower, the color gets more pale and eventually
turns to white. You can think about saturation like a punch bowl
filled with red liquid. As we add water to it, the color gets diluted and
becomes more and more pale. In other words, it
becomes desaturated. Next, we have brightness, and brightness controls how light or dark the color appears. At full brightness, the
color is at its strongest. As we turn down the brightness, the color darkens,
eventually turning to black. You can think about brightness
like a dimmer switch. As we turn it up, it gets brighter, and when
we turn it down, it gets darker until it's completely off and
everything is black. Changing saturation
and brightness is what allows us to get a full
range of color values. And, in effect, reducing the saturation is
like adding white, which creates tints, and lowering the brightness
is like adding black, which is how you create shades. We can also create tones by lowering both the saturation
and the brightness, so we get a more muddy tone
down version of the color. So it's just like
adding gray when you're creating tones in paint or ink. So let's put it all together. Let's start with this
bright magenta square. To make a tint, I'll just
lower the saturation level, creating a light pastel version. And to make a shade, I'll
reduce the brightness, making the color darker. And then we can create a tone by lowering the saturation
and the brightness, too. Here's a light tone. And then
we can make a darker one. Remember, we haven't
changed the hue at all. We're just changing the saturation and the
brightness to make a huge range of different
colors. Let's do a couple more. In this one, again, I lower the saturation
to make it lighter. I lower the
brightness to make it darker and I use mixes of those two saturation
and brightness in order to get a muddied tone down
version of the colors, either a light one
or a dark one. Here again, turn down the
saturation for a light color, turn down the brightness
for a dark color, and play with the two of them
in order to create tones. In this exercise,
we're going to try and change these gray squares to match the ones above
them by just using the hue saturation and
brightness sliders. So to do so, we'll start here. And obviously, there's
no color here. It's all the way at
gray. So the first thing to do is give it some color. Then we can go over to the
hue slider and move it until we find something that's similar to the hue above it. We can't go any farther
to the left here, so it must be on the other end where red kind of
changes to purple. So maybe in there. Now, this obviously is brighter than this, so we can take out some of the saturation and add take out a little bit
of the brightness, too, and there we match it. For this one, again,
add some saturation, and I can tell that we need to turn down the
brightness right away, so I'll make it a
little bit darker. And then once we have
about the same value, we'll go into hue and
change the color, see if we can come close. So it's kind of in here, but we need to go a lot darker. So we'll change the brightness and move it down
until it matches. For this one, we'll turn it up, move the hue and turn
down the brightness, and that's pretty
close right there. Let's try this one.
Now, obviously, this one's quite
diluted in color, so we'll kind of leave it in this range and then
go find the hue, which is kind of
towards the purples and maybe make it a little bit darker and a little
less saturated. For this one, again, we'll turn up the saturation. Go find the hue that
closely matches it. Let's try in there, make
it a little darker. And it looks to me needs to
be a little bit more diluted. So there we go.
And for this one, turn up the saturation. Go find the hue and it needs
to be a little bit darker, so I'll turn down
the brightness. And it looks to me like it needs to be a little bit more pure. So we'll go in there and turn up the brightness
a little bit. So this is a fantastic
exercise to help train your eyes how to
see differences in color. A little later in
the class, I'll show you a color quiz sheet that's available in the class resources and has a sampling of
colors just like this, and I encourage you to practice matching colors in
RGB or in CMYK, for that matter,
like I did here.
5. Color Gamuts & Conversion Issues: You've probably had this happen where you design
something on screen, and the colors look amazing. And then you print it
out and everything looks kind of dull. So why
does this happen? Well, it all comes
down to gamut, or the range of colors a particular color system
can display or reproduce. RGB, since it's based on light, has a much wider
gamut than CMYK. Remember our black room, where the more light or the more color we added to the room, the brighter the room got. So that's why RGB can have those bright intense
colors because the more color that's added,
the brighter it gets. But CMYK and Pantone are
ink or pigment based. So remember the white wall
or even a sheet of paper. If we're going to
add color to it, there's just no way around it. The wall is going to get darker. So if pigments are involved, there's just no way
to reproduce some of those bright glowing colors
that you can get from light. So that means CMYK is going to have a
smaller gamut than RGB. And those different size
gamuts are what causes problems when you go from colors on your screen to ink on paper. It's like if you have a
giant box of crayons and you make a drawing using
every color in the box, and then somebody
comes along and asks you to make that same
drawing with a smaller box. Since some of the colors
you used are now missing, you have to find replacements in your smaller box of crayons. And that's exactly what
happens when you convert from RGB with its extra big
box of crayons to CMYK, which is much more limited. So that begs the question, Which color mode
should you design in? If your work is meant
for screens like websites or video, then
it's a no brainer. You should definitely use RGB. But if you're
designing for print, the answer isn't
quite as simple. There's pros and cons
to each of them. Working in CMYK has
the advantage that what you see on your screen is what you're going
to get in print. Since you're already working
within that smaller gamut, you won't be surprised when
the colors are printed. The other advantage is
mixing and adjusting colors in CMYK can
feel more intuitive, especially if you're used to working with traditional
paints or inks. On the other hand,
I know a lot of designers prefer to work in RGB because they like having access to the full
color range upfront, and they can adjust them later when they're
ready to print. And this might be a good way to go if you're going to be using Pantone colors because they
have a slightly larger gamut, though still not
as large as RGB. And for print on demand
companies like spoon flower, some now use an
expanded set of inks, which means they can produce brighter colors than
standard CMYK printing. So like even some
inkjet printers, they'll have a Cyan
magenta, yellow, black, plus a light cyan, a light
gray, and a light magenta. When you put all those
colors together, you get a bigger range of colors than you can with just CMYK. So maybe working in RGB might
give you more flexibility. So really, like I said, there are pros and
cons to each of them. I personally like to design and CMYK because I don't
like surprises later, and I don't want to have
to do the work to kind of redo the art when
it's time to print. But if you want to design
an RGB, that's okay, too. Just make sure you check
how your colors are going to convert before
you send a file to print. And that's something
we'll go into more detail in the next lesson.
6. Project: RGB & CMYK Florals: Now we've gotten to
the really fun part and that's actually
working with some artwork. This lesson has two goals. First, to introduce your
class project and second, to show you what
happens when we design an RGB and then convert to CMYK. We're going to be working
with this floral pattern, and it's available in
the class resources as both an Illustrator
file and as a JPEG. Of course, if it's easier, you're welcome to use
your own pattern too. The first part of the
project is to create a bright summary color way as bright as possible
along the lines of these. So make sure to check
your file settings. This one is set to RGB. But if you want to
start a new file, go up to File New, and go down to Color
Mode and pick RGB. And you'll find similar settings
to that in Photoshopper, Procreate or Affinity, as well. I'm going to work in HSB. So in the color panel,
I'll select that here. And remember, that's hue
saturation and brightness. I'm going to begin
with this blue flower. Now, if you've taken my
color alchemy class, you know that I have
a custom shortcut to select all the objects
of the same color. So I'm going to use that now.
It's option five for me. Selects all the flowers
that have the same blue. Now, one thing I haven't mentioned is there's
this color bar here, and we can stretch it out, and now the lightest
tints are at the top, the darkest shades
are at the bottom, and the most saturated colors will run right through
the middle of it. So I'm going to click
on a magenta hue, and then I'm going to
adjust it up here, set the numbers to 100%, so it's as bright as it can be. And now I'm going to
take these white areas and replace them
with a deep blue. For the leaves,
again, I'll select Command five to
choose all of them. And I want to make them
a bright lime green. The reds are already
pretty bold, so let's just bump up the
saturation a little bit. And then I'd like to
add a background color. So I'll draw a
rectangle and right click and go to a
range, send two back. And I'm going to
make it a bright turquoise blue for a
fresh summery feel. So I'll just keep
changing the colors and work with it until I
have something that I like. And here's the final result. Now let's see what happens
when we convert this to CMYK. I'll copy the entire
pattern, Command C, and open a new document and make sure that the file is
set to CMYK down here. Now I'll paste the artwork, Command V, and it still
looks pretty good. But let's do a side
by side comparison. Now right away, you can
see the duratic shifts. This bright magenta is just
out of the CMYK gamut, it's turned it into
a darker purple. The reds are pretty
much the same, but the lime greens
definitely look muddier compared to
the RGB version. And this electric blue sort
of shifted to a muted navy. And the background's
not too bad. It's pretty similar.
So what do we do now? We kind of wanted it
to look like this, but we got this instead. Well, the first thing is to just let go of the RGB version. It just can't be
printed that way unless maybe you're using
some special neon inks, but that's not really
always an option. So we're just going to put it away, put it out of our mind, and we're going to
go back and just do some tweaks to our CMYK version. And remember what the goal was. The goal was to make a
bright summary color way. But this time, we're
just going to use a smaller box of
colors to do it. So let's start with this purple, and I'll just
select all of them, and I'm going to make it
lighter and maybe more pink. I'm going to tweak the leaves and then just fine tune
all of the other colors. And so here is the
final CMYK version. It's not the same as the
original RGB version, but I do think that
it fulfills the goal of creating a bright
summary color way. So now we're going to
try something different. For the next part
of your project, I want you to create a deep, rich, moody version
of the floral design. And here is the one
that I created. So what do you think
will happen when we convert this one to CMYK? So this time, instead of copying and pasting it into
a new document, let's just convert it
directly in this file. But be sure to make a copy first because once
you convert to CMYK, there's no way to
bring it back to the original RGB colors. So to convert this
file will go to file, document color mode,
and choose CMYK. Now, this time, not
much has changed. Why? Because this color palette was already mostly within
the CMYK gamut. So I wanted you to
do this part of the project because I
wanted to show you that sometimes it's just no big deal when you go from RGB to CMYK. It really just
depends on whether you're using some of
those bright neon colors. And I also want to mention that while you're
working in RGB, you can check what
colors are going to be out of gamut right as
you're creating the work. In Illustrator, if a colors
out of the CMYK range, this little warning icon
will appear up here. And if you click on
that, then it will convert to the
nearest CMYK match. And, of course, you can
tweak that if you want, but just be aware that if you move it too far into
the saturated area, then that warning light
will come up again. So if you want to work in RGB, but you know it's going
to be printed out, you can use that
as a way to kind of check you as you go along. So now you know, firsthand how designing an RGB versus CMYK affects color and how to make some adjustments to make
the best of both worlds. So now it's your turn
to finish your project. Experiment with some
different color ways, test out the conversions, and see what works best for you. Now, can't wait to
see what you create. So I would love it
if you would share your project in
the class gallery. You can do so by going to the Project and resources
tab in the class window, and following the prompts. It just takes a second. So can't wait to
see what you do.
7. Homework! Test Your RGB Knowledge: Okay, guess what?
It's homework time. So this isn't your project, but I just wanted to
give you some way to sort of test what you've
learned in this class. So here's a color quiz, and it's similar to the
one that I put together for Color Alchemy one
except this time, it refers to RGB color.
So let's walk through it. In this first section, I've got the three primary
colors for RGB, and I want you to make the secondary colors
using the RGB slider. So that's this one up here. And so for yellow, we would
need its two neighbors, which are red and
green but not blue. So that's how we
create that one. So do those with the other two, and then with this one, now I'm wondering
if you could make the secondary colors using the HSB sliders and this
color wheel over here. Now I can change this
to HSB for yellow, that's 60 degrees, so I can type in 60 and there's our yellow. Do that with the other
ones. Then in this section, try making shades by reducing
the brightness in HSB. I could take this one and lower the brightness and we
get a shade of that hue. Here we reduce the saturation
to make a tint of. And over here, we're going
to make a tone by reducing both the saturation
and the brightness. So play around with those. And then this section is just like I did a couple lessons ago, where we've got a
color and we're going to make variations
on it first with a tint, so that we lower the saturation, shade, we lower the brightness. And we can make a light
tone by moving both of the sliders and a
dark tone the same way. In this one, see if you
can try to match each of these colors by using
just the HSB sliders. As I mentioned earlier,
this is a great exercise to help your eyes develop
great color acuity. So good luck and have fun
with these exercises.
8. Quick Guide to Hex Codes: I think it would be a
disservice if I didn't mention hex codes in this class about RGB because
they are related. So what's a hex code?
It's this right here. And in Photoshop, you'll find it here in
the color picker. So if you watch that number, you can see as I change the
sliders, that number changes. So it's there if I'm in
HSB or in RGB or in CMYK. So what does this code mean? A hex code always has six digits and they are a combination
of letters and numbers. And in fact, they are
three pairs of numbers. The first two are the red value, the second two are
the green value, and the third two
are the blue value. So why the letters and numbers? Well, the full name of hex
codes is hexadecimal code, and to get all math nerdy
on you for just a minute, you know that our
regular number system is based on ten digits,
zero through nine. But a hexadecimal
system has 16 digits. So after it runs out in numbers, letters are used for
the other digits. So it goes from zero to F, and the scale goes
from dark to light, just like the RGB sliders did. So hex code made up
of all zeros would be black and all Fs equals white. So if anybody ever asks you to use a hex code
in their design, you can just type it in here, and then whatever comes up, you can drag that into your swatches panel and you
have that ready to use. So that's the basics
for hex codes, and they're great for
when you want to pinpoint a specific color or communicate that color to somebody else.
9. Final Thoughts & What's Next: I'm so glad you stuck with it all the way to
the very end here. Thanks for taking this class, and I hope now you have a
better understanding of RGB color and ways to
use it in your artwork. I have a favor to ask. I'm wondering if
you would just take a minute and write a
review of the class. That helps me know what
resonates with people and helps other students know what the class
is going to be about. To do so, just go to
the class page and look for the reviews tab and
then follow the links. It really only takes a minute, and I really appreciate that. At the beginning of
the class, I mentioned my color conversion
cheeter sheet. It's just a quick
guide I put together so you can see really
at a glance which colors tend to
shift the most when you're converting
from RGB to CMYK. It's available for free when you sign up
for my email list, and there's a link in
the class description as well as on my profile page. And while you're on
my profile page, don't forget to
follow me so that you'll know when I
launch upcoming classes. Speaking of which,
the next step is my class color recipes,
which will be coming soon, and it's sort of taking all the information
we've gotten from these two color alchemy classes and putting them all together, sort of cooking up
great color palettes for your surface designs. Look for that. And until
then, happy designing.
10. One More Thing...: Hello. Hi again. I'm popping back in to
let you know that I'm now available for one on
one coaching sessions. So if you like this class and would like to work
with me individually, you can now do so by
booking a session right from my skill
share profile page. I offer two kinds of sessions. The first one is a 1
hour portfolio review where we'll look at
your surface designs. I'll let you know some strengths
and areas to focus on, and you'll get the opportunity
to ask any questions you'd like about art licensing or
the surface design industry. Now I know it can
feel intimidating to show your work to somebody, but it's so smart to get
professional feedback. All the artists that I've
worked with have felt energized and ready to move
forward after our sessions. I also offer a 30 minute Adobe Illustrator or Photoshop
instruction session. If you're struggling
with any aspect of the software, I can help. We can walk through tools, I can demonstrate techniques and workflows that are going
to help solve your issues. So whether you're looking
for a one time session or an ongoing opportunity
for feedback on your work, coaching is such a great
investment in your career. Unlike some of the expensive online courses that
are available, coaching doesn't have
a fixed curriculum, so I can give you
exactly the information and guidance that you need
exactly when you need it. I hope you consider coaching. I would love to work with
you and I can't wait to meet you and support you and guide you on your creative journey. You can learn more about
my coaching sessions at chrisrug.com slash CoachE.
Kris Ruff, Surface Pattern Designer & Coach
