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| The dangers of gamma (and radiation, too) | May 30, 2014 5:10 AM PDT | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:Hm! Hey maybe this going lighter on the watercolors thing is getting me somewhere after all—light washes, man, light washes. Then you just lower the gamma a tad in Photoshop (to 0.34 in this case—although if yesterday's is any indication then tomorrow I will come back and re-adjust that about four times : PPP, eventually ending up back where I started... (UPDATE: Yep, decided it was too murky—gotta get over trying to make watercolors oil-paint-dark :p—and went with lighter 39/0.5 setting)), and voila! Swirly dark colors for the webcomic, but the pencil lines haven't been lost. A reader pointed out that I could use ink but in the tests I've done with ink, it is so much darker than even the darkest watercolors that it just kills the sort of light field they generate, and everything just turns into fill-in-the-lines—whereas the pencil (this is a Japanese 4B) occupies just about the same tonal range as the watercolors, and also reacts to their washes and to the texture of the paper in ways similar to the paint.
Another thing I did that has seemed to help me before is painting the big dark thing first—the cloak, in this case (it was the dress in 21:19 and the burglar's shaded side in 21:55). That seems to sort of anchor the colors of the scene in my head—and also on the palette—and then you can go lighter from there by just adding water, basically. And in this case I next did the lightest non-white things—the red lights—so I had that other bookend reference set, too, and between the two I could just have fun with mixing and sloshing things around to fill in the rest. More or less.
I guess we'll see if this falls apart with the next change in lighting, as is usually the case. ; )
And since I'm going relatively light on the colors this isn't all the revealing, but in case you were for some reason wondering what the pencils looked like before the paint got on them, here's a photo I posted earlier in the day (to my Instagram, which cross-posts it to my tumblr and my Twitter) (it was a while back because I spent hours agonizing over gamma—like, my monitor *seems* to be calibrated to gamma 2.2 according to the all the little visual tests I know of, so why do my images look darker on all my mobile devices? Are those calibrated to a different gamma scheme? ... Hm, according to the gamma test in this app, not really... And I don't think the Photoscientia banding tests I just linked work correctly on them, because they test as very low gamma numbers (like 1.4) which would mean they were very *bright*. Harumph. So did Google disable the gamma adjustment capability from Android OS versions 4.2.2 and up (as one gamma app developer claims) to hide a devious gamma plot??!? (Speaking of gamma and Android apps, searching revealed an app that claims to be able to detect gamma radiation using your mobile device's camera (the comments are interesting : P)):
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