A Vision of Painter‘s Colour Framework for the Digital Image

by Rolf Coulanges BVK and FilmLight (Imaging)

With my lecture I would like to attempt to relate the task of colouring in a digital image, for
example a film image, to the history of colours, as we can follow them in the history of painting,
later also photography and the reproduction of natural colours in the printing technique.

The starting point of my consideration is that the use of colour and its character can only be
classified as "realistic" or "less realistic" or "more in keeping with reality" or "not in keeping with
reality" at first glance. We all know that the sensory impression of colour is a function of our
perceptive faculty and that by "seeing colours" we only react to physical phenomena of light rays;
there is no colour "in itself". We also know that quite different physical stimuli can lead to the
same colour perception, so that no unambiguous linear relationship can be established between
physical influence and colour perception. Colour is a subjective sensation in the best sense of the
word, resulting from the synthesis of sensory perception and consciousness. Our colour
perception is thus subject to the interaction of both physical environmental factors and
psychological prerequisites.

While, for example, van Gogh's picture of the nocturnal coffee house looks flat without the warm
yellow we are familiar with in terms of mood, the terrace is given a great depth in the full colour
composition, which was already there before, but could not be experienced sensually.
 1.Vincent van Gogh: The Café Terrace at the Place du Forum 1888 (modified)

1.1 Vincent van Gogh: The Café Terrace at the Place du Forum 1888
The history of painting gives us the most intense and systematic insight into our use of colour over
the course of time, with its preferences, fashions, ground breaking discoveries and deceptions.
While science strives to gain an ever more precise insight into the physis of human colour
perception, painting follows the path of increasing abstraction of a colour that tries to orient itself
on the impression of our outer world. As long as painting was regarded as the art of depicting
nature for human perception, colour was regarded as an elementary phenomenon of the visible
world, which occupied an absolute and undoubted position in the imagination of painters. Its
value as a means of expression in painting was measured by the degree to which it corresponded
with nature's colouring, which alone was considered exemplary.

2. Vincent van Gogh: The Siesta, after Millet 1890

2.1 Vincent van Gogh: The Siesta, after Millet (excerpt)
Colour texture modified to reduce paint application structures in favour of the colour

2.2 Vincent van Gogh: The Siesta, after Millet (excerpt)

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Textboard on The Siesta, after Millet:

§ Alienation of the real colours by reduction to a few basic colours

§ Vibration in the colours by hatching the colour areas

- with parallel, differently saturated colour applications
- and by variations from the respective basic colour
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2.3 Vincent van Gogh: The Siesta, after Millet 1890

3. Vincent van Gogh: Mademoiselle Gachet in her garden in Auvers-sur-Oise 1890

As diverse as the prerequisites for a certain colour impression are, the work with colour can be as
independent and free in its turn for the creation and attainment of a certain artistic expression.
Modern painting of the 19th and 20th centuries is marked by the development towards the
complete liberation of colour; the extraction of substance from the visual material and the
abstraction from the overabundance of details has also proved in painting to be the way to
refocus on the work and its artistic idea. The concentration on a few colours or colour harmonies
sets in motion the imagination of us, the observers, to discover the essence of the moment from
our own resources and to unfold the fullness of sensual experience through the memory of our
own colour sensations.
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Textboard on Mademoiselle Gachet ... :

§ Dissipation of the image space and reduction of the colour to a few basic elements

§ Specified texture of the image surface through a relief-like colour application

§ Emphasizing the painting material as a surface for playing with light –

creating a visual abstraction from the real scene

§ Enhancing the colour contrasts by using adjacent colours from colour harmonies:
Blue grey - Green tones - Yellow tones up to White

§ To what extent does the texture of this image change in digital projection?
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3.1 Vincent van Gogh: Mademoiselle Gachet in her garden at Auvers-sur-Oise 1890

But this is only an intensified expression of what generally characterizes the use of colour in
painting and photography: namely, that the physically predetermined, in a sense empirical colour
fundamentally differs from the painted colour of the picture, from its aesthetic effectiveness. The
colour of nature, understood as an elementary phenomenon of the visible world, has lost its
meaning to the extent that the idea of an abstract art such as painting and photography has
become concrete in terms of an option.

4. Marc Chagall: Equestrienne / The Circus Rider 1931 (texture modified)

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Textboard to Equestrienne / The Circus Rider:

§ Another form of abstraction by reducing the colour palette, but using the strong
complementary contrast Red/Magenta – Green

§ Pigments in the painting material create a very special colour texture

§ Total concentration on colour as the dominant element of representation

§ The light seems completely dissolved in the immaterial structure of the picture
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The same picture in the detailed structure of pigment colours: the result is a unique texture.
4.1 Marc Chagall: Equestrienne / The Circus Rider 1931

Colour research has repeatedly referred to the common theory of colour as well as to the
teachings of physical and physiological optics. She forgets the decisive fact that the given,
empirical colour of the world differs not only materially but also essentially from the applied
colour of the picture. The painted colour develops an artistic quality, an expressiveness that is
developed by abstraction from the empirical colour and not by imitating the colour impressions of
the world around us.

But the tendency of digital images || to want to be as natural as possible images of the reality ||
seem counteracts this. Each new camera advertises itself with the attributes to further enhance
the world's exact reproduction: with more sharpness, more details, more sensitivity and millions
of more colours, to name just a few criteria. Every new technology focuses on growth, also in
images. But we can already learn today from painting that only abstraction from the wealth of
direct experience and its empirical material leads to an image that can bring out dreams and touch
the imagination.

Abstraction as an artistic principle, however, is not based on the peculiarity of the medium, but on
the search for simplicity and clarity of an expression and its form. This applies to both painting and
photography, and we need a digital colour technology that physically and visually supports the
cinematographer in developing his expression. The criterion will not be the abundance of available
possibilities, but the physical wealth of each individual colour and its presence in the human
perceptive faculty.

Something else is absolutely crucial: that the mechanisms that enable the colouring of the digital
image, i.e. the algorithms and the computing processes that execute them, allow the possibility of
unstructured, unknown, irregular structures in the image and do not analyse and eliminate
certain colours as supposed error factors. And here a new question arises: to what extent the
sensitive calculation processes of the digital image are shaped by predetermined paradigms of
probability and awareness of certain pictorial elements and the associated colours?
The method of abstraction in art, however, aims precisely to enable or use the unknown, the
irregular and the raw to create a single creative and unmistakable moment.
5. A window in the Cathedral of Chartres: Christ as Good Samaritan, as Redeemer. c. 1210

We ask questions about colour, but when you talk about colour, you have to start with light. The
function of light for the perception of colour has fundamentally changed in the history of painting
- according to our own attitude towards the world around us and its perception. Whereas the light
of medieval painting is still its own light - a light that comes to us from the picture itself and has no
source other than the picture surface itself, | with Leonardo da Vinci (around 1490) the light
illuminating from the outside begins to become the decisive stylistic element of painting. The light
of the medieval pictorial world was still immanent in the pictures themselves and met us viewers
as a source of light enclosed in these pictures; without this light the world of these paintings itself
would not exist. In the world of inherent light, the light source and the depicted image world
coincide; light cannot be depicted according to the criteria of light and dark alone, but is
absolutely bound to the means of colour.
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Textboard to: A window in the Cathedral of Chartres:

§ The transparent inherent light of sacred painting does not need any relation to the space
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6. Johannes Vermeer: The Glass of Wine 1658-59 (equivalent to the original painting at the museum of arts Berlin)

The relationship between light and colour changes fundamentally with the use of the incident
light and reaches a climax in the pictures of the Delft School, which I take here as an example.
Finely tuned colour modulations now replace the extensive and vibrant colours and the
juxtaposition of compact colour surfaces. White and black are no longer used over the entire
surface as "colours", but are increasingly developing into elements of light and shadow and serve
the new light-dark dramaturgy, the Chiaroscuro. The relationship to light now shapes the mood
and the overall structure of the pictures; the brightness and darkness of the scenery for the first
time can be represented independently of the colour. The painter uses the effect of light and
shadow to model bodies and forms and to emphasize their spatiality. The nuances in the gradation
of the brightness values range from powerful white to highlights painted with special techniques
and deep drop shadows.
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Textboard to The Glass of Wine:

§ Logical lighting guided by external daylight with precise reproduction of all soft and hard
shadows

§ To increase the effect of space and contrast Vermeer uses colours of complementary
contrast for the main colours Red - Blue

§ The overall contrast is rounded off by careful variations in the whites

§ A special silver white is used to set light peaks beyond the main white to extend the
contrast range of the painting
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6.1 Excerpt Johannes Vermeer: The Glass of Wine.

Vermeer uses a special silver-white to create white peaks which exceeds the general white surfaces
(compare the wine jug in the upper image)
For us, this development is also becoming the basis of photography, with which, starting from the
nature of the light of the day, we want to achieve a substantive artistic form and texture of the
digital image.

6.2 Johannes Vermeer: The Glass of Wine

7. Johannes Vermeer: The Milkmaid 1657-58

The colour, for its part, appears to be bound to its colour matter in a completely new way: it
reveals itself as a texture of colour consisting of matter painted with a brush, an effect that
remains closely connected to it in the painting and cannot be removed. The physical application of
colour, its texture, its luminosity as well as its decolourisation exists exclusively in connection with
the illuminating light. Light is no longer, as in sacred painting, a function of colour, but,
conversely, colour has now become a function of light. For us as cinematographers, every
conception for an image begins, a scene with a decision for the character of light and only then for
colour.
Explanation:
Vermeer increases the plasticity of the objects in his lighting by adding small white dots to the
colours of the surfaces striped by direct light.
In this way, the milk jug and the milk jet also become strong elements of the image contrast and
are emphasized in a special way in the overall image.

7.3 Johannes Vermeer: The Milkmaid (Excerpt, texture modified)

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Textboard to The Milkmaid:

The details show:

§ Vermeer paints the variations of skin tones in the light of the day as a composition
of specific colours painted multi-layered on the surface

§ He gives a physical structure to different colour tones from one colour harmony by a strong
paint application

§ It prevents the picture to come close to a naturalistic depiction

§ It creates an extraordinary aura when contemplating an everyday process

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7.4 Johannes Vermeer: The Milkmaid (Excerpt, modified)

7.5 Johannes Vermeer: The Milkmaid (Excerpt, original)
7.6 Johannes Vermeer: The Milkmaid 1657-58
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Textboard:
The painter, architect and mathematician Leonardo da Vinci describe the elements of painting
with natural light in 5 categories:

1. The sharply focused light of a source outside the image, starting from the sun, the moon
and artificial light sources
Darkness becomes as much a part of the representation of light as its luminosity

2. The broadly focused light of a source outside the image passing through a door, a window
or an opening into the room

3. The diffuse daylight present on all sides

 4. The reflected light
Reflected light becomes an interesting theme in painting, since it turns the light source,
which is usually located out of the frame, into a light source inside the image
This idea opens up completely new possibilities for painters in terms of light guidance

5. The light that falls through a transparent material directly into the eye of the observer
This light does not create any own space and physicality; in this it differs from all the other
lights outlined above
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But isn't it exactly this last light (> 5.) that catches our eye from the screens and LED screens?
Where remains its physical presence in the texture of the images and the interactions | that the
light enters into in the mixture with other colours at the same place?

What perspective does the practice of digital colouring have for these questions?
8. Johannes Vermeer: The Art of Painting 1666-68
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Textboard to The Art of Painting (to read):

In “The Art of Painting" Vermeer deals with a complex lighting using incident and reflected light

§ With closely adjacent colour variations in a space between deep Green and dark Brown,
he creates a strong colour contrast to the intense Blue of the dress and the Blue on the
easel

§ A tiny amount of intense Red (in the painter's stockings and in the details of the mural)
increases the contrast in the sensation of light despite the dark overall atmosphere

§ Vermeer achieves another striking effect of the light energy against the otherwise soft
light transitions by the reflections on the candlestick hanging from the ceiling

§ The desaturation shows Vermeer's method of setting ultra-white dots and tight lines in
order to give the incident light a concise expression
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8.1 Johannes Vermeer: The Art of Painting (Excerpt)

8.2 Johannes Vermeer: The Art of Painting 1666-68
8.3 Johannes Vermeer: The Art of Painting (Excerpt, modified colour separation).
The use of the complementary contrast Red-Blue increases the dynamic range in the sensation of
light.
8.4 Johannes Vermeer: The Art of Painting 1666-68

Of course, neither in painting nor in photography we are dealing only with individual colours; each
picture represents a complex mixture of luminous and subdued, brighter and darker colours,
which are assembled into a composition and perceived by us in their unity. Light is decisive for the
effect of the colours, especially the angle from which it enters and illuminates the scene.
The spatiality created by this light also depends on the material structure of the paint, its
pigmentation and materiality. In this way, the plasticity of the visual impression emerges from an
intensive combination of light and colour matter.
Couldn't this physical nature of light and colour also determine the digital image in the future?

9. Farbstern von Rudolph Adams 1862

The harmony of colours and the search for a system of colour harmonies plays a central role in the
history of both, perception and art. The term refers to the interaction of simultaneously seen
colours that is perceived as aesthetic; it is always to be understood as a contradictory unity of
similarity and contrast. For the painters, colour harmonies are the starting point and reflection of
the choice of colour; the antinomy of colours gives rise to expressivity and the transgression of
existing aesthetic boundaries.

In 1862 the painter Rudolph Adams was apparently the first to develop a logical two-dimensional
system of pure chromatic varieties in connection with their stages of progression to White and
Black. You can see it in this lithograph that Adams made in 1862.
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Textboard:
Rudolph Adams wrote:

The general law of harmony is already given by the name, by the word itself: Harmony,
consonance, temperament presumes a diversity of parts which unite to form a whole.

Out of this, as the first law of harmony develops by itself the first law of all beauties - diversity in
unity.

Without multiplicity, without variety there is no life; without unity there is no whole, no totality.
Multiplicity without unity is a confusion, a chaos. On the other hand, unity without diversity is a
whole, but a whole without life. 1
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10. Marc Chagall: La Mariée à l'éventail / The Wedding with the fan 1911
Seeing colours is subject to a qualifying process: there is no fixed relationship between the eye-
catching colour stimulus and the colour sensation perceived by the viewer. Ambient colours can
change the visual appearance of a particular colour, as can the brightness and spectral
composition of the illuminating light. The consequence is that the "actual colour" is always only
the colour sensation that is produced by the viewer in a certain situation, determined by the
reciprocal influence of the colours among each other and the light of the day. Talking about the
harmony of colours also means including various external colour factors in the system.

11. Marc Chagall: Le magician / The Magician

In order to be able to use the variety of colours and textures for the image design, we need a
versatile and flexible high quality imaging for our images. This results in the following concrete
requirements:
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Textboard (to read):

The imaging of digital images in cinematography ...

§ ... must allow the possibility of unstructured, unknown and irregular textures in the image

§ ... must not analyse and eliminate certain colour structures as supposed error factors

§ To what extent the Digital Imaging builds on paradigms of probability and anticipation of
pictorial elements and their associated colours?
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12. Johannes Vermeer: Girl with Red Hat 1665 (modified)

The many models in which painters and colour researchers have presented their ideas of
harmonizing colours and developed applications, which unfortunately have no place here, still do
not correspond to any system in the digital design of colours on which one could build in the sense
of creating colour harmonies. One of the reasons is that it currently does not seem possible to
abandon the existing trichromatic system with its equally spaced red-green-blue definitions.
However, the composition of the colours in these pictures already clearly shows that an image
recording process that consistently corresponds to the far more differentiated colour sensitivity of
our eyes in the green - yellow - orange range would advance the access to our own colour
perception. Together with the physical quality of digital colouring, this would open up a new
chapter in the colouring of digital images and make access to the rich history of colour even more
exciting.

12.1 Johannes Vermeer: Girl With Red Hat 1665 [mit Farbe]

Vincent van Gogh said: 2

"A man's head or a woman's head, seen at rest, is something divinely beautiful, isn't it? Well, this
general well-tuning of the tones in nature is lost through awkward precise reproduction; it is
preserved by recreating a parallel colour scale which, if necessary, does not correspond exactly or
very little to the natural scale.
12.1 Johannes Vermeer: Girl with red hat 1665
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1
Rudolph Adams, quoted after: Harald Küppers: Harmonielehre der Farben. Theoretische Grundlagen der
Farbgestaltung Köln: DuMont, 3 1989, S.172 (Übers. d. Vf.)
2
Vincent van Gogh, quoted after: Lothar Gericke, Klaus Schöne: Das Phänomen Farbe. Zur Geschichte und Theorie ihrer
Anwendung. Berlin: Henschel, 2 1973, S.88 (Übers. d. Vf.)

© 2018 Rolf Coulanges