I am a casual, amateur digital artist. I can cobble something together but I don’t really know much about art and theory. I am terrible with colors.
I have a project I want to attempt that has to do with colors and desaturation. How can I find out if a group of colors will all desaturate to the same shade of grey? Is there a similar attribute between certain colors? Is there already some kind of visual guide I can use?
Thanks!
Hi, I just do not know if this will make sense. I have read that in Illustrator CS3 you have several options to easily change and edit any artwork to grayscale. You could adjust color balance and desaturate. I hope it could help you.
[Edit: I just realized this is a necro’d thread. Oh, well… ]
Look at the HSB values of your colors. There are a couple of color models you can use, like RGB, CMYK, right? This is one of them.
HSB stands for Hue, Saturation and Brightness. In theory colors sharing the same Saturation and Brightness will desaturate to the exact same shade of gray:
That happens because you’re also trying to keep the same brightness. The only variable you’re changing there is the hue.
Depending on the software of choice, you can keep track of the saturation on the fly with adjustment layers. It can be done on Photoshop by creating a new Hue/Saturation layer on the top on everything, then turning the saturation all the way down on its properties. Turn its visibility off when working on the image, turn it back on to quickly check the saturation.