Introduction
Believe it or not, how we perceive color isn’t as objective as we might think. In fact, it can be downright subjective even despite our best efforts to pinpoint accuracy. Like do you remember that great social media debate about The Dress back in 2015? Some folks saw it as a white dress with gold banding while some saw it as a blue dress with black banding. Heck, Lady Gaga saw it as periwinkle with tan banding! And oh!…the back and forth on the color of this infamous dress! But the disparity of perception of this one image just goes to prove how people can interpret color — can interpret reality — quite differently and at no fault of their own. Like for this situation, it largely boiled down to whether someone's brain applied a yellow-tone filter (to see a blue dress) or a blue-tone filter (to see a white dress) to see their own version.
Of course then, this brings us to how we perceive both horse color and our paint colors when targeting our references and hues. Because really, we want to recreate an authentic depiction of a horse color, right? We want to nail that tone and hue, yes? We want that bingo! But how do we even know we’re doing this correctly if our perception of color could be skewed right under our noses? What if our brain is hosing up our perception of color unbeknownst to us? Indeed, some people seem to have difficulty discerning the nuances of tonal shifts and so miss their mark despite their best intentions. So let’s talk about some tricks and some ideas when it comes to pinpointing color so we have the best shot possible at hitting our targets more confidently…
Lighting
Lighting is everything when it comes to targeting color! Whether it’s the lighting in the photograph or the lighting in your studio, pay keen attention to its characteristics.
In your photos, in particular, it’s important to discern the nature of the lighting presented to the photographer at the time the image was shot. Morning light, afternoon light, evening light, night light — it all makes a huge difference. So yeah, it’s not quite as simple as “choose natural light” as it actually has many different varieties. For example, morning light can shift color into the blue spectrum whereas evening light can shift things into the red spectrum and low light will even "grey out" color all together. Afternoon light is about as neutral as you can get, however, you do have to contend with strong obscuring shadows. Then at night, a flash is often used, washing color out completely with flash glare. So when is the best time to snap pix? Around 10am-11am on a clear day is usually a best-of-all-worlds situation. Now many folks prefer an overcast day, and they would also be right. However, I find that overcast days dampen a coat’s intrinsic glow as those light rays don’t really bounce off the hair shafts so strongly, yet capturing that resultant bloom can be just as important as reproducing the correct tone for a color to read best.
Now as for our studio lighting, we have more control over that, but it’s no less complicated. For instance, the different settings on an adjustable studio light can have different effects on how color looks to us on our palettes and our models. Or if we use more than one light, if they aren’t the same type of light or the same “temperature” of light, our brain will get confused and misinterpret tones. To that end then, stick with lamps that project natural daylight but have adjustable brightness, not adjustable types of light or “temperatures” of light. In particular, I highly recommend the RedGrass studio lamp. It’s terrific and helps you really target color accurately with the neutral light it projects. It also has adjustable brightness which is very handy. It’s not cheap though at $279.99 plus shipping. But to me, it was worth every penny because it really helped me target difficult colors like grullas, silvers, and liver chestnuts much more accurately. However, for a cheaper alternative, consider an Ottlite which is almost as good at a fraction of the price.
But what do I mean by the "temperature" of the light? Well, many LED lights nowadays have a "warm," "cool," and "natural" setting with warm shifting to the reds, cool shifting to the blues, and natural being more neutral. As such, it's important to always choose the most neutral setting on your lamps and set them all to that same setting. This will help give us the most baseline, consistent, neutral setting to calibrate our colors on our palette. Now if you're still using incandescent bulbs, know that they shift to the warm spectrum, the red and yellow spectrum, and adjust accordingly.
However, the relative brightness or darkness of our image matters, too. Some images are just too bright or "blown out" which erases critical information and washes out color. On the other hand, images that are too dark erase critical information by washing it out in dark shadows while skewing color too dark or richly toned. This issue can be encountered a lot as many photographers manipulate their photos to be too light or too dark for artistic impact, and it's up to us to know the difference. More still, the use of a flash will typically blow out images so be mindful of their use as well.
White Balance
The white balance in a photo is incredibly important for us to consider when we’re deciphering our reference images. Indeed, that whole dress debate on social media all boiled down to an incorrect white balance used to take the photo in the first place.
Now if you’re taking the photos yourself, you can tweak your camera settings to achieve a more truthful white balance before you even snap that photo. So read up on your manual to know how to adjust your white balance settings. You can also use a white or grey card to calibrate your camera for an even more accurate setting.
But more times than not, we have to deal with photos we didn’t take, don’t we? So how do we know if the white balance is correct in a reference we didn’t shoot? Well, if those whites or light greys in the image aren't pure, we have a white balance problem. So how do we fix it? Luckily, we can do that when post-processing the photo, preparing it to be used as a reference. Indeed, it’s not enough to just take any old reference and use it! You need to adjust it, to prepare it for use as a reference, or that’s to say, you need to make sure its white balance is on point first. So to do that, you use the white balance eye dropper tool many photo editor programs have. What you do is click on a white or grey area of your image and the program will do the rest to adjust everything else back to neutral. There's also often an "auto color" option to click that adjusts the whites in your image. However, if you don’t have such tools, you can always adjust the “temperature” of the image manually in the color balance setting. The “temperature” refers to how cool (bluish, cyanish, or greenish) or warm (reddish, yellowish, or magenta-ish) an image leans. Alternately, you can make further adjustments in the selective saturation tool by desaturating reds or blues, greens or yellows to neutralize an image. Any which way, what you’re trying to do is have your whites look more purely white rather than have a skewed cast to them. So aim for whiter whites, and you’ll come closer to correcting the color balance of your reference.
Meanwhile, check out this very useful YouTube video on adjusting the white balance in your photos: This Simple Editing Trick Helps Correct White Balance in ANY Photo
Take the Test
We fundamentally need to know if our eyes are even processing color correctly, right? There are many forms of color blindness so we have to confirm if we have one so take a colorblind test just to make sure.
Also consider taking something like a Farnsworth Munsell 100 Hue Test to make sure your brain is calibrating color correctly. We need to know if our brain can detect the subtle shifts of color so intrinsic to reproducing horse coats accurately. And don't worry if it's a bit off...many people's calibration is slightly off. Plus our computer monitors work against us, too, right? So it's okay, no worries! Like my score for that Farnswoth Munsell based test was 2 (0 is a perfect score) because I have a blindspot in the peachy ranges. So now I know I need to work a little harder with peachy colors like apricot duns, pearls, isabellas, and wild bays to compensate.
And here's a whole discussion on color and how the brain processes it! It's fascinating!
Calibration
Many artists work directly from tablets nowadays because of the crisp and expandable image, but just be sure to calibrate your monitors so that the colors they portray as as truthful as possible. Here's how to calibrate your monitor for that. Also set the colorspace to sRGB which is the most common colorspace setting for digital displays. And don't forget to adjust the brightness and contrast settings to help display true colors in your image.
Print Outs
Working from printouts is tricky due to low quality inks or incorrect color balances or the inkjet process muting color or even pixelating details. If you must work from a print out though, it's best to print the image on quality photo paper to max out the color saturation and to help keep the image as crisp as possible. In other words, don't use regular printer paper as your image will be washed out and lack crispness.
Color Temperature
Many colors embody a “temperature,” or how “warm” or “cool” they are. Specifically, how bluish a color skews is referred to as a “cool” shift whereas how red a color skews is referred to as a “warm” shift. As such, blues, greens, and teals are “cool” in their shift while reds, yellows, and oranges are “warm” in their shift, in very simple terms. Burgundies, purples, browns, golds, tans, and muds can also be either cool or warm, depending on which way they lean. For instance, Burnt Umber is a “warm” brown whereas Raw Umber is a “cool” brown. Mix them together and you get a more neutral brown, which is super handy for mixes. Now it does get more complicated, as even yellows, oranges, and reds can be cool or warm, so for more discussion on color temperature, refer to these past blog posts:
Fire And Ice: The Power Of A Warm And Cool Palette
A Cacophony of Color: The Magic of Unlikely Pigments
Pop n’ Glow: Waking Up Your Paintwork With Color
Black Magic: A Versatile Powerhouse
Suffice to say, being able to target the temperature of the colors you’re using not only helps you match colors more accurately, but also helps you avoid creating mud unintentionally. Like if you mix a warm color with a cool color, you’re going to get mud. So, for example, if you mix a cool red with a warm yellow, you aren’t going to get a vibrant orange, but a muddier orange as the temperatures clash. So to keep your colors vibrant and "clean," lean into mixing cool with cool and warm with warm.
That said, however, sometimes you’ll want to mix up mud as many horse colors are exactly that: Specialized mud. Indeed, silvers, champanges, mushroom, liver chestnuts, grullas, some dilutes, and many hoof colors can be thought of as a special kind of mud. So knowing how to purposefully mix accurate mud is a valuable skillset, but one also dependent on the temperature of the colors you use to target them accurately.
Color Bias
It’s important to know that as an art form, you have to work against some inherent color biases out there, and maybe you have them yourself, too. Chances are pretty good you do. You see, horses don’t really veer towards the blue spectrum, do they? No. They veer towards the red spectrum. That being so, our art form has a strong skew towards the reds, yellows and oranges and a latent bias against blues and greens, teals and purples. In other words, most people are going to interpret cool Raw Umber as “greenish” when it really isn’t per se. It’s just not red, unlike Burnt Umber which is very red-based. Said another way, colors that read as “not red” tend to be misinterpreted as green or blue when all they are is simply not a warm temperature.
But the truth is we need cool colors just as much as the warm colors if we ever hope to target horse color accurately. For example, many grullas, liver chestnuts, mushrooms, sooties, silvers, champagnes, and other dilutes have a cool cast to them, or rather, a not-red component. Likewise, many dark hoof colors and palmar foot colors are decidedly cooler than convention would have us paint them. In short, we need to actively counteract any inherent not-red color bias in order to take advantage of all the accurate possibilities those not-reds offer. To that end then, reconsider those cool colors! Think about incorporating blues, greens, teals, purples, and Raw Umber into your palette more enthusiastically. Why? Because once you understand the use of complementary colors and color theory, they become indispensable for pinpointing horse color. Absolutely, they can be the MVPs on your palette!
Color Sampling
Speaking of color biases skewing our sense of color, one of the best ways to retrain your eye is to regularly use the color sampling tool in a photo editor to get a better handle on the actual color families present in your reference. It’s often surprising! Like many skin charcoal tones are actually violet based, many dark hoof tones are more green based, and some sooty areas are actually blue based. It just goes on and on, the raised eyebrows when you really get to sampling! Very exciting! And making color sampling a regular habit to plot out your palette can really help you bingo those reference colors a lot more effectively.
So, for example, take your reference photo and pop it into your photo editor. Adjust the white balance so it's correct. Then take that color sampler tool and sample lots of areas of the subject to get a better idea of what colors you’re going to need on your palette. Indeed, this first step can be incredibly enlightening and super instructive! And if anything, it tends to knock you out of your habits, formulas, preconceptions, and conventions, which are always a good cage to rattle. Nature is all about curveballs, all about the anomalies and the unexpected, the spectrum of possibility. If you don’t have that quality in your body of work then, your portfolio will homogenize and become predictable, and that can become a problem in your long game. Besides, it’s a lot more fun to play with color, right? To keep your body of work fresh and unpredictable? It’s quite a blast to tell the truth! So why not? It won’t only help you target your colors more authentically, but it’s a hoot that lends depth to your portfolio, too!
Chroma
Chroma refers to the inherent brightness of a color, its vibrance, how vivid it is. For instance, chartreuse is a high chroma yellow-green whereas sage green is a low chroma yellow-green. Or orange is a high chroma red-yellow whereas rust is a low chroma red-yellow. In other words, simply changing the chroma of your paint colors can be enough to pinpoint that tricky area on your reference. Like if you simply tone down your bright colors with their complements, if you tone down their chroma, you can get to your target color perfectly. Indeed, this little trick is very handy for many bays and chestnuts, and even some palominos and buckskins.
Generally speaking though, mixing colors together tends to lower their chroma, and will mute their chroma altogether if mixed as complements. Adding it black or white will also lower chroma.
The point is, pay attention to how vibrant any given color is on your reference to best duplicate that effect in your paintwork. It can be quite surprising, and add a lot of "pop" to your paintjob!
Tint
Tint entails the amount of white in a color, or how “pastelized” the color has been made with the addition of white. Now while this doesn’t seem like such a big deal with horse color, it actually is. Why? Because many colors cannot be achieved without the addition of a little bit of white into the mix like creamy chestnuts, liver chestnuts, mushrooms, palominos, grullas, isabellas, champagnes, buckskins, silvers, duns, foal coats, even some bays.
There’s this, too: Often transparent colors such as the Umbers, Siennas, and some blacks can be made into more opaque powerhouses with just a wee touch of white in them. Really, mix the Umbers together in the right ratio to create a neutral brown then add in a snidge of white, and now you have yourself an incredibly versatile brown for any number of horse colors. Or add in a bit of white to Raw Sienna and you can create a host of golds and “sunshine” colors for palominos, duns, buckskins, or blonde chestnuts. What’s more, white is necessary to mix with a bit of brown and then into black to create a muted charcoal that’s more convincing than straight black paint for dark skin. White is also integral to painting pangaré effects, too. Point being, don’t be so quick to discount the infusion of white into your mixes. Look for it in your references and don’t hesitate to include it when necessary.
Saturation
Opposite to a tint is saturation which entails the intensity of the paint or how powerful the pigment actually is in its pure form. For instance, Mars Black is a far more saturated black than Ivory Black, which is more transparent and “washy.”
But saturation can also refer to how intense a horse’s colors actually are as some areas may appear more tinted while others are more saturated in their hue. A good example of this is pangaré with its washy, desaturated tinted pale areas or also wild bay with its areas of less saturated bay color. An opposite example can be the pale areas of a black bay or sooty bay which can actually be a saturated orange, rust, or gold, making them really stand out from the rest of the dark brown or black body.
The point is, pay attention to the saturation levels of your reference on the different areas of the body and try to mimic them in your paintwork, too. However, also pay attention to the saturation levels in your reference photo as some photographers ramp it up to make the depicted color pop more. Like if that green grass is really way too green? Or that red pipe fence is really too red? Or that blue sky is really way too blue? Yep...the photographer increased the photos saturation levels. So in your photo editor, desaturate such an image with the saturation levels to prepare it for use as a reference.
Value
Value entails the relative lightness or darkness of a color, often as mixed with grey or black. For instance, blacks, browns, dark blues, dark greens, and dark purples have a dark or low value whereas yellows, oranges, bright blues, bright greens, bright golds and pale tans have a light or high value. So look for areas of relative high or low value on your reference to mimic that in your paintwork. For instance, maybe the facial highlighting on a grey has a high value whereas the facial shading on that grey has a low value. Or on a sooty bay, the areas of soot have a low value whereas the areas of bloom have a higher value. Or on a dark hoof, the pale “chalky” line has a high value while the rest of the hoof has a low value.
The gist is this: Be sensitive to which areas of the body are darker and which are lighter, discounting the shadows and light play. Like we often seen a lot of variation with this effect in those coats with a lot of "bloom" or sooty factor, for instance, so look for these qualities in your references.
Muting Whites
There's a few bonuses that come with muting your whites, particularly when it comes to markings and patterns. For starters, it allows you to shade and highlight areas by giving your highlighting hues "a place to go" rather than have to compete against stark white. For example, if you paint a stark white mane, how will you highlight some strands? Muting whites also lends more realism and a sense of mass to the piece and so punches up its believability. What's more, it offers a softer feel to the piece, one that's more "touchable" and immediate and impactful. And lastly, muting your whites also makes a piece look more organic rather than so painted, more hide-like than plastic-y, if that makes any sense.
And here's the thing, whites look white in part due to the contrast with the body color, so we don't really need a stark white to even get the point across. That's also to say that those whites in sunlight may sure seem blinding and pristine, but that's an effect of lightplay and contrast, not necessarily because they're actually stark white. So think about adding a snidge of a brown, gold, umber, greige, or taupe to your whites to soften them a bit and you'll probably find that the convincing nature of your paintwork ramps up a notch or two.
Paper Trick
A nifty way to train your Eye to identify color more accurately is to compare your reference to a sheet of clean white paper. Go over the body in the reference comparing against that pure white paper to really tease out any specific color qualities those different areas have. The neutral white color of the paper can really help those eccentricities pop and soon you'll be able to See them better even without the white paper as a comparison.
Conclusion
So who was right about that dress color? Well, the dress was actually blue with black banding. Wild! However, those who saw a white dress with gold banding, their brains pinged the frontal and parietal regions of the brain, areas thought to be critical in higher cognition activities. So go figure. Quite literally though, that dress photo represents a “color superposition” as it was literally both colors at once, at least in the collective mind of the viewers. Either way, it provides a powerful lesson we should keep close in mind as we work: Not to take any color for granted. That’s to say that every color we decipher from our reference, every color we mix up on our palette, and every color we lay down on our piece needs careful thought, vigilance, and a fresh eye to truly duplicate it authentically. And that just takes an open mind and some diligent training to really teach ourselves how to pinpoint accurate colors more effectively.
Above all, we should remember that our brain processes color, it doesn’t just see color as it is. It has to go through lots of systems and translations to be registered as “blue,” “red,” “yellow,” or what have you. And there’s a lot that can hose all that processing up! Indeed, did you know that the color purple is a brain-fabricated color? That the purple wavelength doesn’t actually exist in physics? Wild, huh? In order to see purple then, our brains interpret it as a combination of red and blue. So what’s the solution? Take those eye color tests, really dig into understanding color theory, retrain your Eye with lots of color sampling exercises, and use the white paper trick to further refine your Eye. It’ll all help to expose your color biases and blindspots while also expanding the possibilities on your palette.
The gist is this: Stay fresh with your color interpretations in order to stay as flexible and adaptable as possible when it comes to translating your references. Really, only those with the most adaptable palettes, the most accurate references, and a firmer grasp of color theory will hit their color targets most convincingly. What’s more, your habits, conventions, and formulas may be handy and safe, they’re tried and true, sure, but they’re also limiting over time, aren’t they? Indeed, they can choke hold and stunt how you decipher color all together if you aren’t careful, so beware. Rattle your own cage and challenge your own conventions from time to time.
So do some color exercises and sampling, learn about color theory, expand the colors you use on your palette to adapt, and come to color interpretation with an open mind, and you’ll have a much better time authentically duplicating color and having a lot more fun doing it. Matching true color doesn’t have to give you conniptions! Instead, it can be a fascinating color journey that deepens your portfolio in the most enticing ways. Learn these principles and these tricks, and you’ll soon be matching colors with far more confidence and purpose and that spells one thing: A body of work that reflects life’s variety with more authenticity. And then watch as people have their own happy conniptions over your paintwork in the best, most affirming ways!
“The colors live a remarkable life of their own after they have been applied to the canvas.”
— Edvard Munch
