ere you one of the lucky
people that were first to notice my newest artwork "The 3 Wondrous Siblings of the Grimm Family" since the first
moment I listed it on Saturday night? Did you lose your eyesight?!?
:D It was only in the shop for a couple of hours and then it
mysteriously disappeared... and when I say “mysteriously
disappeared” I mean that I pulled it out! :D You see, it looked
like the most blinding red thing... something between a traffic light
and Rudolf's nose! lol ........ So I pulled it out for the night and
got on to it in the morning again to see what was wrong. “Didn't
you intend to blind me with all that red?” you may ask..... Well,
no, not at all. The actual artwork when printed is not blinding at
all, though it certainly is red! When you see it in the shop
though.... that's a whole different story.
And with that, let's go
into a small introduction on colour! This will make more sense to
people who design using their computers but I'll keep it simple (and
interesting hopefully?) for the rest lovely people.
Take the purest red: your
computer recognises it as “Red:255, Green:0, Blue:0” in the
standard RGB system that monitors and TVs use. You can say it looks
like this:
At least that's how it
looks on your screen right now.... Increase the brightness of your
screen and that same Red changes, right? Lower the contrast and it
changes again, right? Go ahead and try it for fun. But it's not just
the monitor settings at play here! The actual materials of your
screen have a unique way to express the same Red, that is different
from every other screen. Same goes for every printer, each one
expresses the same Red differently. Even different software in your
computer express the same Red differently!
So this is the same Red in
your screen in your internet browser:
And the same Red in your screen in
Photoshop:
And the same Red when printed with your
printer:
“Oh dear, oh dear....
How can you ever make your artworks look exactly how you intend them
too when printed, since the screen and print output don't match?”,
you may ask. And rightly so.
Well, we are lucky enough
cause the smart people form the International Color Consortium have
come up with a plan years ago and they have called the solution
“International Color Consortium Profiles” or just “Colour
Profiles” if you prefer. This is for another conversation though and quite a long
one at that.
So finally my problem is
clear: my pretty artwork, so very dear to me, gets massacred when
viewed with an internet browser in my shop. The beautiful and subtle,
muted reds become blinding and overwhelming, almost hurting the eyes
through some monitors. I tweaked the snapshots in the shop so that
they look closer to the printed output but there seems to be a big
gap between my printer and computer monitors in this case. Maybe too
big a gap to bridge......
Here's a simulation of the
effect:
So what should I do? No
one can see the artwork for what it is in the shop. Only when printed
can someone truly appreciate it and understand my full creative monochromatic intent.
Sure the same holds for all the other artworks, but at least all the
other artworks look fine and close to the original on screen. So do I keep the new artwork online
as is? Do I change it so that people don't think that I'm trying to
cause them temporary blindness? Maybe a third solution? I'm entertaining the idea of releasing a multi coloured version of it. I'd love to
hear your thoughts.
Many warm bear hugs,
xxx Hidden Eloise xxx
