About Colours
You are visiting a web site about art -- is important that you understand how you see colour, in order that you understand the advantages and difficulties in judging the colour of art online.
If you are having difficulty differentiating between different mount or wall or floor colours on our site, and are fortunate enough to be using a flat (TFT) screen, try tilting the top of the screen gently away from you so that all the colours appear darker. You will begin to see differences in the tones of whites presented to you and can therefore make better choices.
- Coloured surfaces do not always looked the same -- it depends on the amount and colour of light that shines on them.
When you see a coloured surface, such as a painting hanging on your wall, the Colours you see are those of the light shining onto the surface and then reflected to your eyes.
The Colours of the light shining onto the surface depend also on the colour of the light reflected off all the other surfaces in that room. If you have a very red room, the light shining onto your painting will be very red, and will show you a painting that does not look the same as if you viewed it in, for example, a green room.
- Coloured light does not look the same as a coloured surface. For this reason, although it is possible to show an exceptionally lifelike photograph of a picture it is impossible to replicate on a computer screen a single colour.
- Moreover, if you take a sheet of paper of a single flat colour and hold it at different angles to the light, you will see different colours. A similar effect, but with different results, can be achieved by tilting a flat (TFT) computer screen so that your eyes are at a different angle to it. To replicate as closely as possible what we saw when we tried to give you the best view, try to ensure that your line of sight is at 90° to the screen.
- Computer screens do not show the same colours. They are made differently (for example the difference between flat TFT screens and cathode ray tube screens) and can be adjusted differently either at the factory or by changes during their life or by the user. Have you ever noticed how differently the same picture looks on all the televisions on sale in a single television shop?
- Eyesight varies. You may not see the same colour that I am seeing. And your two eyes may not see the same colour.
- Really good explanations of all this are at
- http://www.pantone.com/products/products.asp?idArticle=115&idArea=16
- http://home.att.net/~RTRUSCIO/QUESTIONS.htm
Special Notes:
our mount board: our preferred very best standard high-quality mount board is called "Minuet" it is a very slightly yellow off-white colour, very close to the colour of most of the ivory I have ever seen but without any of the flecks of black and not so yellow as the mount board that is called "Ivory" (sorry!). It has very little grey in it and is not noticeably tinted red, blue or green. This makes it ideal for mounting pictures, but not very easy to show you on a computer screen what it's going to look like! We think the best computer colour to replicate this is RGB 254,253,231 or, for those of you with computer code in mind, Hex FEFDE7.
our photographs: The photographs of our art have been taken on a Konica Minolta A200 digital camera at F11 with white balance adjusted to the multi-source lighting using a standard card. The sharp images on the resulting long exposure (¼ to ½ second) have been achieved on a tripod and using a remote-control. A flash has not been used. The photographs were taken at a resolution of 3264 x 2448 pixels (8 mega pixels), but have been straightened and cropped to show that part of the photograph that is exactly the picture. Absolutely no digital enhancement has been used to alter the colour or lighting of the picture. The same picture quality has been retained in the versions we show you, but the size has been reduced because most computer screens only show 1024 x 768 pixels or less, and reducing the picture size allows us to load much faster the picture you call for.
