Perception of Color
How We See Color in Print

More of this Feature • 1: Color Wheels • 2: RGB & CMYK • 3: Hues, tints, shades, saturation • 4: Perception • 5: Specifying Color     Related Resources • Color Symbolism • Color as an Element of Design

Several factors affect the way we perceive color. One of those factors can be shown by the position of colors on the color wheel in relation to other colors. These color wheels (below) take out the all or some of the transitional colors so that you can more readily see the relationship of the colors to one another.

• Adjacent colors (next to each other) harmonize with one another. They work well together (usually). For example Green and Yellow or Purple and Magenta. Generally one of the colors has a little touch of the other in it (i.e. with the Blue/Magenta pair, Magenta is made up of Red and Blue).

• Colors separated by another color are contrasting colors. You may also see these referred to as complementary. Red and Green are contrasting colors. The more transitional colors separating two colors, the greater the contrast. For example, Magenta and Orange is not as high contrast as Magenta and Yellow.

• Colors that are directly opposite from one another are said to clash. You'll note that these clashes occur between primary/complementary or ADDITIVE/SUBSTRACTIVE pairs such as Blue and Yellow or Green and Magenta.

While these terms can be useful, they can also be deceiving.

• The term harmonize sounds nice, pleasant. But some harmonizing colors may appear washed out (yellow/green) or too dark and similar (blue/purple) to work well together.

• While contrast is often needed to provide optimum readability (such as high contrast between background and text) contrasting colors on the color wheel when printed side by side can appear to vibrate and be very tiring on the eye.

• Although it sounds bad, sometimes clashing colors can work together in a design depending on the amount of color and how close they appear together on the page or screen.

Shades and Tints of Color
Some of the ambiguities of these color combinations can be alleviated with the introduction of black and white, dark and light, shades and tints. Previously we defined shades as the addition of BLACK to a hue (color) and tint as the addition of WHITE to a hue.

In using adjacent or harmonizing colors, you can achieve a greater degree of legibility by adding black or white to one of the hues.

Create Contrast with Black and White
WHITE is the ultimate light color and contrasts well with dark colors such as red, blue, or purple. BLACK is the ultimate dark color and makes lighter colors such as yellow really pop out.

Any single or multiple colors can change — or rather our perception of them changes — due to the other surrounding colors, the proximity of the colors to each other, and the amount of light.

A light color appears even lighter when it is adjacent to a dark color (including black). Two similar colors side by side may appear as two distinct colors but placed far apart they start to look like the same color.

Paper and Emotions Affects Color Perception
The amount of light we perceive in a color is also affected by the surface on which it is printed. A shiny RED corvette printed in a magazine ad on slick, glossy paper is not going to look the same as the RED corvette printed in the newspaper ad. The papers absorb and reflect light and color differently.

Additionally, our color choices are often dictated by the emotions that specific colors and color combinations evoke. But once we have the colors we want, getting them to print or display as intended is the next step.

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