I have this thing that goes through my mind for some time now, so welcome to my saturday brain session.

Ok, while reading or studying color, you may have encounter this magic formulae: use complementary colors because complementary colors is good. I've stumbled upon this formulae so many times that I experience some difficulties to discuss this, apparently, set in stone rule.

To each his own, right ?
I could tell you that I often find this one color color not eye pleasing but tastes are not really my point. My point is why, why complementary colors were defined as "good usage" in the first place ? Is it because associating certain parts of the visible spectrum create an emotional response ?

Happy gimping brainstorming (:

What I remember from reading on color usage in design - if you want a color to pop or to make it seem brighter - use its complementary counterpart, if you want to tone in down - use close colors or neutral. To answer your question - I don't see why using complementary colors is always the good case of usage.

I read somewhere where the two complementary colors, blue and orange, make people want what they are advertising to some degree. Tide detergent is one example.



http://www.slashfilm.com/orangeblue-con ... e-posters/

Complementary colours are not a "magic formula" for making colours look good. What they are useful for is creating contrast.

Contrast is an essential element of any picture. You'll want to direct the viewer's focus to the main, primary element of your work, and the less important elements should be less prominent - ie. you'll want to clearly define a foreground and a background. To this end, you can use complementary colours, as they create a very powerful contrast - blue/yellow is a good example: think of a dark night scene, with a house with lit windows, and an open door with someone standing in the doorway - you could have the windows, doorway and the character standing there in yellow against the blue environment, and this would create an excellent and dramatic contrast, focusing the image on your character.

However, there are plenty of other ways of achieving contrast, and complementary colours are not the be-all-end-all of it, you don't have to use them (otherwise it'd be impossible to create contrast on black&white images). It all depends on what kind of effect you're going for. Other colour-based contrasts are, for example: warm/cold contrast, saturated/non-saturated, bright/dark... and then there's other effects, like making the foreground more focused and the background more blurry.

i don't think anyone who knows anything about colours would teach that the use of complementary colours is always good - i've certainly never heard anyone teach it. it's just like dd said, using complementary colours for foreground/background is a good way of creating a contrast that will concentrate the viewers mind on the foreground object, but there are other ways of achieving this and complementary colours isn't always the best. and if you for example use a green logo with its exact complementary red shade as a background, the logo will most likely drown in the red background (though there are lots of factors at play, colour isn't a simple thing. it's perfectly possible to get a great result using green on red, it's just not usually the case.), so the complementary colours strategy wouldn't serve you very well there. but the fact remains, humans tend to like complementary colours - it's just that normally we're not really aware that's what we like about a painting or a logo or an outfit or whatever it is - we get distracted by the presence of other colours or by patterns, lines and shapes and we don't really notice the obvious. also, the more "dirty" two complementary shades are (the more white or black there is in the shade), the less we will think of the contrast between the complementary colours. it may still be efficient as a contrast, but it won't be glaring, like those afterimage examples.

...which lead us to contrast.


...that perfectly makes sense to me, as I understand (because I feel it) that contrast leads the eye (guessing: is it pleasing because it plays with the flaws of our vision, this conical perspective of ours ?).


I don't know if we tend to like them, what I understand is that complementary colors is one of many ways to structure the viewing, saying that we like them because we like structured images could be an arguable shortcut...

i shouldn't have used the word "like", i suppose. what i meant was complementary colours tend to work on us humans, it tends to be efficient. but of course you can use it in the wrong place or in the right place, in an efficient or an unefficient way. and it's too simple to say we like them because we like structured images. when we study colours we usually learn that complementaries have to do with contrast, so we associate them with contrasts. but one of my teachers took an example from an impressionist painting that definitely didn't make anyone think "aha, contrasts!". it was a very subdued and soft painting of an evening scene with a sort of purplish blue haze in it. but my teacher got us to analyze the colours in that haze and to our surprize we saw that the painter (i think it was renoir) had mixed all these yellow and orange dots in it - he had used the complementary tones to neutralize the blue and purple a bit and not make it too overpowering. very efficient and a good example of how complementaries will work on human viewers, quite apart from tastes and preferences.

I'm a sucker for colour and love playing with colour wheels to create palettes for designs, heres a link to one of my favourite sites Colour scheme designer but this uses the traditional artist colour wheel of red,yellow & blue and therefore Reds complimentary colour would be Green. But you also have the light colour wheel of red,green & blue and then the Complimentary colour of red would be a light blue, I've often wondered whether the rules applied to colours wheels works with both just as effectively or if one is more favoured than the other.

So it's an early use of coloured dithering, I thought this technique was born with pixels, very interesting.
If you remember the painting's title, I'd like to see it.

Here is what I had in mind for this neutralizing dithering, on a monitor:

Well, our eyes work on the RGB principle, because there are red, green and blue cone cells in our eyes. The whole Red, yellow, blue system is antiquated and based on a misunderstanding of how our vision works.

However, there's also a (relatively) newer colour theory, which I find quite interesting: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opponent_process

Anyway, to answer your question, you can use either cyan or green as an opposite of red. Both work, but cyan may give an even stronger contrast due to warm-cold contrast also being in play. Orange/blue doesn't really work that well IMO (unless it's a cobalt blue or sky blue). Yellow/purple does for some reason, but then so does yellow/blue. So I guess there's no absolute rule to follow, you just have to go with your guts most of the time.

Within opponent process page, there's also this quite disturbing link
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impossible_colors