Digital Color Mixing Exercise

**hickbob** · March 9th, 2009, 07:43 PM

Hi everyone!
If you're like me, one of the hardest parts of getting used to digital painting was learning how to choose RGB colors. I've written a little tutorial that I think will really help you get an intuitive sense of how mixing colors with light works.

http://www.rivermanmedia.com/art/73-...ixing-exercise

Hope you enjoy!
Jacob

**Mickey C** · March 9th, 2009, 11:18 PM

Nice one, I never really knew much about RGB vs CMY colour but now I know something

Thanks for the exercise !

**hickbob** · March 10th, 2009, 12:38 AM

You are very welcome! I'm glad you found it useful.

-Jacob

**yuhMEE** · April 12th, 2009, 10:49 PM

omg thank you! just the thing i was looking for

**Carbon Productions** · April 13th, 2009, 07:37 AM

Thanks for this, its so getting bookmarked

**rinjii** · April 13th, 2009, 09:56 AM

wow that was a really interesting read. i'm definitely going to try this out for myself. thanks so much for sharing it!

**Jon Sun** · April 13th, 2009, 10:16 PM

Wow.. I'm a little embarrassed to say that I never knew this. This was exTREMELy enlightening. I feel like I just re-learned everything I knew about color. Thank you very much for this. It all makes sense now...

**George Abraham** · April 14th, 2009, 03:28 PM

Good stuff.

**JeroKane** · May 20th, 2009, 02:53 AM

Thanks a lot for this tutorial.

I have always been struggling with colors and it's theory.

And I am also pretty new to digital painting.

But what I can derive from your tutorial (and I think I've read it elsewhere too)...

... is that if you are planning to print your artwork, you need to use CMYK color setting when starting a new canvas in your application, instead of the default RGB.

This to make sure the colors will rightly translate to the printer. Is that correct?

Jer

**xerenity** · May 20th, 2009, 10:15 PM

Very helpful, thank you ^_^

**hickbob** · May 27th, 2009, 12:56 PM

@JeroKane
I'm not sure that's totally true. While printed images use CMYK, I still think it would be ok to create an image in RGB and then convert it later. What's most important is choosing the proper color profile for the printer and inks, which is something I don't know much about. I almost never work on images for print.

Perhaps someone else can help with this topic or point to another thread?

Thanks!
Jacob

**FranciscoShreds** · May 28th, 2009, 04:56 AM

You should always work in RGB. You get a much better color profile than CMYK. You should NEVER do the cmyk color conversion yourself. Every single printer has software that does the best color conversion with the best lookup table for the colors for their printer. adobes color lookup table is very limited in this respect. Ask any professional printer and they'll tell you they'd rather have an RGB file in pdf format and maybe the file in the programs format (.ID, .psd, .ai) What you should be worried about is making sure your color management is correctly set up. Make sure your printer, monitor and software programs are calibrated correctly. Check your printer drivers to see if you can calibrate or set a specific ICC profile to it. Most people have color shifts in images when they go to print because they don't anticipate things like dot gain or slurring.