The Greyscale is a Guideline
Why Adding Color to a Greyscale Image is More Difficult than it Seems
It seems that, above anything else, when it comes to creating a piece of artwork the Values are the most talked-about, most critiqued, and overall (no pun intended) most valued aspect of the image. It seems that way because anyone who has asked for help, or who has given it, has made Value their top discussing point. I once read online that Values make up around 90% of an artwork and Color a mere 10%. In this article, I’m going to explain to you what is wrong with that statement.
First, let’s just get the explanation out of the way. What are Values? To explain it in the most accurate way I can think of, Values are the scale of contrast between the brightest element in your image and the darkest element. Think of it in this way; in reality, something of high Value would be a strong light source, like the sun, while something of low Value emits or reflects very little light; something that gives off no light at all would be the lowest Value, like a black hole.
Now, don’t let this article downplay the importance of Value. When it comes to depicting a scene, good value work can help express distance, express the strength and location of light sources, create interesting compositional elements, etc. Any qualities that you can pick out from a greyscale image are what Values can portray, and there is no shortage of great greyscale images. I mean, just look at the work of Doré.
Here we can see how Doré was able to capture the light, create a mood, and compose a beautiful image. The Values alone are able to define a scene because Values interpret the intensity of the light the viewer receives.
In principle, control of Values is control of what the viewer can and cannot see, and the gradation between those two is what creates Form. And forms dictate the space in a scene.
So then, why is adding color to images so difficult? You’ve described the form very well in your greyscale image, but when you try to add color with various methods, the colors muddy out, look stale and have no life to them.
The crux of the issue is that colors have their own inherent value.
Take a look at these colors here:
It’s all of the hues Photoshop has to offer. They’re the purest versions of these colors that RGB Mode in Photoshop can provide. In the Photoshop Color Picker, they can be found right in the top-right corner. But now let’s greyscale them by first going to Image>Adjustments>Hue/Saturation, and sliding the saturation slider all the way down:
As you can see, the bands vanish completely. Now let’s try a different method. This time, we’ll create a new layer above the colors, set the layer mode to “Saturation,” and fill the layer with black:
Ok then. This time, we’ll go to Image>Adjustments>Gradient Map, and make the darkest color in the gradient black and the brightest color white:
Hmm, it’s a little different. Let’s try another method. This time we’ll just go to Image>Adjustments>Black & White. That should settle it:
Huh? Alright alright….this time, we’ll go to Image>Mode>Grayscale, and we’ll discard the color information completely.
It IS all very confusing. As you can see there is no default greyscale conversion of an image, and that’s because there is no default greyscale version of an image. Every version is it’s own interpretation of the colors without their saturation.
Out of all of these, in my opinion, I’d say the Grayscale Mode is the closest to correct. Though, it is hard to say. (I can say with confidence that the Saturation Slider is completely wrong.)
So if you were to really just add color to your greyscale image, in one easy step, that would mean that you had already accounted for the colors in the image! The saturation, chroma, and colorfullness are what determine your Values. Look at this image here:
This expresses what the “color” layer can do. On the left, you see the 50% grey underlayer. To the right of that you see the effect of the Color band on a “color” layer, on top of the grey. And on the far right, you see the normal Color band gradient. As you can see, the 50% grey is not dark enough for most of the band, especially the blue, and definitely not bright enough for the yellows and greens.
If you had a perfect greyscale image with which to add color onto, then you’d certainly would have just forgone the Black & White stage completely. One of the misconceptions is that artists in fact do create perfect, or near perfect greyscale images, which is wholly untrue. I’ll touch on more of this in a minute, but first some unfinished business.
That statement I mentioned at the beginning, “Values make up 90% of an image while Color makes up 10%.” It mistakenly puts forth the idea that pure colors have no quality of Value to them, when really there is no divide between the two. “Value” is a quality of Color as much as hue or saturation. If painting were equivalent to the act of driving, saying that Value makes up 90% is like saying that the tires of a vehicle handle 90% of the work because they are the parts that rotate to carry momentum. But we all know that a car only runs when all of its necessary parts are in working order. (Even then, you are the driving force behind both a car and a painting.)
By now, we understand the intention behind that statement. What he meant to say is that Value is the most important aspect to defining a space in a scene, while the hues present in the painting, for the most part, do not (*ahem* unless we’re talking Physics here, in which the movement of an object tints it red (redshift) as it moves away from the viewer and blue (blueshift) as it moves closer, due to the Doppler effect changing the light wavelength with speed, or on a greater scale the cosmological redshift which tints an object more toward red with greater distance due to the expansion of the universe…so there’s that).
So once again, don’t take this article as a denunciation of the importance of Values. It is just important to keep in mind that Values are not behind Color, but a part of Color.
By now, you’re probably more confused than ever. You’ve been told over and over to study and practice values, you’ve seen that many artists have a process of adding color to their greyscale images, and now you’re being told that one must account for all of the colors beforehand, but that doing so is highly impractical. So what exactly are you supposed to do? How are artists adding color to their greyscale images in such a smooth process?
The answer is simple; they just know a little Color Theory. The seemingly smooth process of adding color to greyscale images is actually a lot of guess work and reworking of the values as you go. When you begin to add color you start thinking about not only the colors of the objects, which as you’ve seen will affect the values, but also the warmness or coolness of the light, the saturation imbued in the colors of the objects, the affect of the atmosphere on the colors (by atmosphere, I don’t just mean the sky but rather the density of the air, both high in the sky and between objects on the ground), etc. The greyscale images at the start act as a guideline and are not set in stone.
So here’s what you should be doing if you want to get good at adding color to your images; study Color. I know, it seems completely left-field.
Read up on some Color Theory; it’s not as difficult as it seems. And only after you’ve become comfortable doing greyscale studies, you should be doing color studies. That is, find some good color images (or better yet, do studies from life) and do studies with no greyscale pre-stage. Keep it simple. More and more you’ll start to understand how color is affected by light, and more and more you’ll come to realize how organic the color-adding process really is. And just as another tip, never commit too much to your greyscale pre-stage. Always remember that if you’re going to add color you’ll end up changing a lot of the values anyway, so start the color adding process early.
So that’s all I really have to say about adding color to greyscale images. I hope that this article was able to demystify the process for you a bit. I wish you the best of luck in all your colorizing endeavors.
