Back when they introduced colour television to these shores, the sets were so expensive that only a few people had them, retired couples or those with their own businesses and the occasionally keepy uppy family who couldn’t really afford a set. After a few years the rental market soon put a dent in the colourless numbers but for a while, colour sets remained quite rare. Thing is though, every time I encountered a colour set in those early days of the full colour experience, something was never quite right and I would leave the encounter fundamentally unimpressed by this technological breakthrough. The thing is see, those retired couples had paid out a fortune for their sets, they’d given up one of those cruises they seem to be perennially preparing for or maybe forgone the planned patio extension or conservatory. As a consequence they wanted value for their money and that meant if the television was going to be in colour there was going to be lots of it, so the colour and contrast controls would be turned up to their maximum value or close to it. I’m not kidding either, this particular preference was almost universal amongst those with early colour television sets.
After a while I cottoned on that is was the controls that were mal aligned and not a fundamental flaw in the technology as I had previously thought. So I would try and remedy the situation and point out that if the colour control was adjusted, that we would no longer need to wear sun glasses while watching the telly. This advice was universally met with aghast disbelief and derision accompanied with worlds like: ‘It’s so dull… muddy… there’s no colour’. What this tale illustrates is that colour is or the views on what colours are correct or most pleasing are subject to some—disagreement. Professionals who work with colour, spend a lot of time gauging their colour rendering and endlessly fussing over details in an effort to get it just right and yet aberrations like Man of Steel still occur. So it’s no surprise that Joe Bloggs occasionally makes the odd goof while working on colour images. I myself look at some of the images I’ve coloured and spot that I generally make the blacks too dense and the blue and reds too saturated. When it comes to electronically scanned comics these flaws in colour reproduction are quite common, sometimes they’re manifested so intrusively they completely ruin the reading experience.
Such and example would be the nex t page taken from Warren’s Eerie 55:
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Ugh.
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| Ah much better |
As you see I applied some colour shifting over the colour gamut, to moderate the colours and I think it works quite well. The next image though is also a bit too saturated, although because the tones are more even, it’s not quite so revolting.
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| See? |
When I attempt to adjust the colour though, it doesn’t seem
to work too well, it’s looking a little too pasty to my mind.
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| Too pasty |
Perhaps
if I just try to moderate the reds that would work.
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| Mm--not convinced |
