VALUE SCALE DIVISION CHART |
VALUE
Value is the lightness and darkness of a color. Dark and light are more appropriate terms for value than black and white. Black and white are a type of color we'll talk about later.
Value is a continuum with thousands—even millions of incremental differences as you move from dark to light. Percentages are commonly used to standardize values in photography and digital editing software applications. Other scales are perhaps more useful when trying to mix values from pigments. The 9 scale is helpful in dividing values into smaller and smaller increments. You begin by mixing a 1 value (light) with a 9 (dark) to get a 5 (medium), then you can mix the 5 with the 9 to get a 7 (medium light). You can mix the 5 with the 7 to get a 6, and the 6 with the 5 to get a 5.5, and so on. It all depends how precise you want to get... Value can be thought of as an adjective to color. For instance: in the world of blue, there are many different shades: light blue, dark blue, medium blue, medium light blue, and many more... |
RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN COLOR AND VALUE
Values are more important to our vision than color, this is why black and white photography works quite well. Colors can be removed from an image and our eyes can still understand the subject. If we reverse the idea and take the values out of the colors, what we see becomes heavily abstracted and much more difficult to visually understand.
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The Mona Lisa, Leonardo Da Vinci |
VALUES & SHADINGShade is a word commonly used to describe value. Shading is when an artist adds shadows to a drawing to create implied forms and 3-dimensional space.
The highlight is where the light source first makes contact with the object. The highlight only occurs on surfaces perpendicular to the light source. Midtones occur on the areas of the object where the light makes contact at non-perpendicular angles. On a sphere the midtones gradually transition to where light ceases to make contact with the object at the shadow edge. The shadow core is where zero light makes contact with the object. The shadow core will often collect reflected light from nearby surfaces, making it lighter in certain places. The cast shadow represents light that has been blocked by the object from hitting nearby surfaces. The shape and darkness of the cast shadow is determined by the light source. A brighter light source created a darker shadow. when the light source is more broad, the edges of the cast shadow are softer, when the light source is small, the edges are more hard. |
VALUE KEYSAn image that is mostly comprised of dark values is called low key. High key is when most of the values are light.
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Haystacks, Claude Monet |