On Color and Saturation

The idea of thinking of values collectively in compositions as "high value" or "low value" is new to me. That is, I'm used to values being identified as such, but not images/art work being considered for the relative amounts of such values. It's fun to poke around in images that I already have to see what can be useful. Here is a black and white version and the original version of each image. I also decided to look again at some of my own mixed media projects that I'm not 100% happy with to see if lack of value contrast might be the issue.

These are largely high value images.

These are more medium values. My cat Violet is always useful for studies in gray.

More medium value, once you cut off the trash can upper right. This is a mosaic "couch" bench that rests alongside a walking trail in Healdsburg. This town is surrounded by wild fires as I type, I hope all this survives!!

Somebody else's painting of eucalyptus and lilies. Not really a lot of contrast once converted to black and white,

These are low value, even though when seen in color there is a lot of contrast. Someone else's tropical flower painting:

My heavily filtered teasel photo. Again, the orange-red and light blue look pretty contrasty in color but less so in black and white, ie, the values.

Here there is a high contrast between the low and high values. A photo of a red-orange canna with deep blue sky behind. From the motel I stayed at in Healdsburg 3 weeks ago, again, hopes and prayers offered.....The woman who owns the hotel spoke to me of her continued stress after the fires of two years ago in that area.  Where I live we suffered nothing but extreme air pollution for a couple of weeks from these fires, and I feel the tension building as the winds come up and the horizon darkens.  I can't imagine how stressful it must feel to those up north who have had to flee fires or even lost their homes.

This is the coastline to the west of where I stayed, down below Jenner. The value of the sandstone rocks contrasts strongly with the shadows in the same areas, less so with the surrounding waters.

Components of these photos are brightly saturated while sharing similar values. So the black cat and the bright red hoodie look much more contrasty when the colors are considered and not the values.

Here is a scribble I made and colored from one of the earlier lessons. Again, it looks much more contrasty in color than with only the values considered, except for the black and yellow bits.

To a lesser degree this seems true of the embroidery below. Once drained of color, most of the values are fairly dark except for the white circle and the gold reflections on patterned tulle.

I actually like this piece more in black and white than I do in color. The brown is overwhelming, but mid-gray contrasts nicely with the lighter value of the bottles and some of the stitched "steam" coming up from them.  Though it's too late to stitch further, I'm wondering if I can dilute the endless brownness a bit by adding some Pearl-ex and rubbing it in to make tints of green and blue over my fabric.

This is a collage I made which never seems quite finished. Looking at it in black and white, I think part of its problem is that it's very much too busy. There are almost no places in it that don't have some sort of pattern going on. So maybe I will figure out a way to make some solid colored parts, or add some semi-transparent paper over some of the busier parts to fade the patterns more. At least the center frame has good value contrast to the rest. The strange, shiny flower shape in the center is actually a kaleidoscope image of an egg. My digital photography teacher looked askance at it, but it looked plenty useful for collages.

Last but not least, my neighborhood pink rose. The color image has been brightened a bit comes out as a monochrome pink.

My Tool Wiz program on my cell phone has a lot of different black and white possibilities. I've been using what I think is the standard one, which would give a mid to dark toned image, but there are other options.

This version made it into a high value image, and....

This one into a low value image. Because the shape of the rose is so distinctive, I think any of these work because it still comes across as a rose.

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NOTE: This study is from an online design class I am taking with Lyric Kinard called The Artist's Toolbox, part 1. Information on the next offering of this class can be found here: https://app.ruzuku.com/courses/34574/about.