11-23-2014, 02:20 AM
Yes values need work, but also thinking about the temperature and saturation of the colours you're using. Under most lighting circumstances, colours tend to get more saturated in the shadow side. That's before you take into account any fill lights or ambient lights. That doesn't mean massive jumps in saturation between light and shadow, but small, incremental increases in saturation as you progress from light, midtone, to shadow, as well as the value changes.
Be careful if you decide to study from movies and photographs, especially modern movies. Very, very few movies use colours "as is shot", ie the way they are in real life or the way they appear in the raw footage. There is a process of colourizing that is applied to basically all films that significantly alters the original footage's colours. Animated films tend to stay closer to true colour palettes, since they have full control straight from the beginning, but again, media does not capture the true range of colours and exposure that your eyes can see. Study colour from life if you don't already to get a strong understanding, and complement it with film and photography studies to expand it into new palettes
Also keep in mind that the grayscale on the side of the colour picker in photoshop does not equate 1:1 with the value of the colours beside it. For instance, red at 100% saturation 100% brightness in PS is ~50% gray in value, but it appears in line with white in the picker. Every colour has a different "peak chroma value" (the highest value it can possibly be at a given saturation), so Keep that in mind while working in colour, and if you have to check your values
http://www.artofscholes.com/checkingvalues/
Be careful if you decide to study from movies and photographs, especially modern movies. Very, very few movies use colours "as is shot", ie the way they are in real life or the way they appear in the raw footage. There is a process of colourizing that is applied to basically all films that significantly alters the original footage's colours. Animated films tend to stay closer to true colour palettes, since they have full control straight from the beginning, but again, media does not capture the true range of colours and exposure that your eyes can see. Study colour from life if you don't already to get a strong understanding, and complement it with film and photography studies to expand it into new palettes
Also keep in mind that the grayscale on the side of the colour picker in photoshop does not equate 1:1 with the value of the colours beside it. For instance, red at 100% saturation 100% brightness in PS is ~50% gray in value, but it appears in line with white in the picker. Every colour has a different "peak chroma value" (the highest value it can possibly be at a given saturation), so Keep that in mind while working in colour, and if you have to check your values
http://www.artofscholes.com/checkingvalues/