A.  LIGHTING THEORY                                    Remy du Bois

For the next 2 weeks these are optional readings and assignments:

1.   Vittorio Storaro – “Writing with Light”

         While most photographers and cinematographers speak of “painting with light” I think Vittorio Storaro’s description of “writing with light” is more appealing as it links light and images more directly with language. Following Sven Nykvist’s death recently, Storaro is arguably the best-known cinematographer today. He has worked on classic films such as ‘Reds’, ‘The Last Emperor’, ‘Apocalypse Now’ and ‘Last Tango in Paris’. Storaro started out as a photographer and his cinematic work and writing is philosophy is influenced by Goethe’s “Theory of Colors” (“Farbenlehre”)

         Though cinema is very different from still photography (the latter being a very individual art rather that the interweaving of skills from different arts), movies are made up of individual still images, and lighting is crucial in creating an emotional and psychological impact. It is thus useful to see Storaro’s films to understanding how lighting works. I recommend you see his films and pay particular attention to lighting in his images. Please also see, for additional reading the following links:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vittorio_Storaro

 http://www.depadova.it/en/People/Interviews/0148/000240/articolo_c.html

 http://www.abc.net.au/rn/arts/atoday/stories/s414352.htm

 http://www.cameraguild.com/index.html?magazine/stoo101.htm~top.main_hp

IMAGES:

 Students are strongly encouraged to see this movie for understanding lighting:

‘Girl With A Pearl Earring’ – Movie (Peter Webber, 2003)

        This movie with Colin Firth and Scarlettt Johansson is a classic for its use of lighting. The cinematographer is Eduardo Serra. The story is based on a book by Tracey Chevalier, and American living in London, and relates to the painting by the same name by the great portrait artist Vermeer. I recommend of all the films that you see this one, as it is largely set indoors and shot from different angles as in the assignments we have done in class.

B. Goethe's Theory of Color - See attached Essay below

GOETHE’S “FARBENLEHRE” – THE THEORY OF COLOURS (1810) 

(Reprint Published by MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass.)

Remy du Bois                                                                 August 29, 2007

Newton (1643-1727) first announced his "New Theory about Light and Colours" in a famous letter to the Royal Society of London.4 In it, he described several experiments, including the classic one--illustrated in figure 1a--in which a beam of sunlight refracted by a prism casts an oblong colored spectrum on a wall. In contrast to Goethe, Newton was not primarily concerned with color as such, which he regarded as an indicator of more abstract and mathematizable properties of light rays. Among the few propositions in Opticks that deal with color per se is one (book one, part 2, proposition 6) proposing a geometrical procedure for determining the compound color that results from mixing simple spectral colors.The first color wheel was invented by Sir Isaac Newton. He split white sunlight into red, orange, yellow, green, cyan, and blue beams; then he joined the two ends of the color spectrum together to show the natural progression of colors. Newton associated each color with a note of a musical scale.

A century after Newton, Johann Wolfgang Goethe (1749-1832) began studying psychological effect of colors. He noticed that blue gives a feeling of coolness and yellow has a warming effect. Goethe created a color wheel showing the psychological effect of each color. He divided all the colors into two groups – the plus side (from red through orange to yellow) and the minus side (from green through violet to blue). Colors of the plus side produce excitement and cheerfulness. Colors of the minus side are associated with weakness and unsettled feelings.

The current form of color theory was developed by Johannes Itten, a Swiss color and art theorist who was teaching at the School of Applied Arts in Weimar, Germany. This school is also known as 'Bauhaus'. Johannes Itten developed 'color chords' and modified the color wheel. Itten's color wheel is based on red, yellow, and blue colors as the primary triad and includes twelve hues.

 Goethe's Theory of Colors1 has continued to fascinate physicists for almost two centuries since its publication in 1810. Hermann von Helmholtz, Werner Heisenberg, Walter Heitler, and Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker are among those who have written substantial essays on Goethe.2 More recently, chaos theorist Mitchell Feigenbaum consulted Goethe's work and was surprised to find that "Goethe had actually performed an extraordinary set of experiments in his investigation of colors."

Goethe's scientific interest in color was inspired by the natural optical phenomena and the coloristic traditions of Renaissance painting that he encountered during his first journey to Italy (1786-88). Goethe's first publication on color theory, Contributions to Optics followed a few years later.1 The Contributions centered around a series of experiments in which Goethe viewed various painted images on paper through a prism. Like Newton before him, he observed colored fringes along boundaries. Unlike Newton, however, Goethe systematically varied the experimental conditions--the shape, size, color, and orientation of the images viewed; the refracting angle of the prism; and the distance of the prism from the figure--to determine how they influenced what he saw.

Two colors, side by side, interact with one another and change our perception accordingly. The effect of this interaction is called simultaneous contrast. Since we rarely see colors in isolation, simultaneous contrast affects our sense of the color that we see. For example, red and blue flowerbeds in a garden are modified where they border each other: the blue appears green and the red, orange. (This is explained below.) The real colors are not altered; only our perception of them changes.

Turner was a master colorist and was captivated by light and color. When, towards the end of his spectacular and prolific career, Turner was asked to explain the pair of paintings (at right) he was exhibiting at the Royal Academy in 1843, he tersely replied, “red, blue and yellow.” This triad comprised the painter’s traditional primaries. Beginning in 1907, Turner gives lectures at the Royal Academy on color and perspective. Having been named “Professor Perspective,” he remains a loyal supporter of the Academy throughout his life. He is intrigued by the anti-Newtonian doctrines expounded in Goethe’s Farbenlehre in 1810 that proposed that there are three core colors, not seven as Newton found. However, Turner feels that even Goethe had underappreciated the constructive role of darkness in the generation of color.

Turner seeks to capture on canvas the luminosity of the most complex scenes — light as reflected from water, or seen through rain, steam or fog. How does he do it? Among other techniques, he utilizes the difference between the additive and subtractive mixing of colors. In many paintings, Turner strategically places small dots of colors so the additive mixture would gain brilliance — 50 years before the Pointillists.

Meanwhile, in France, Eugène Delacroix is making imaginative use of color and color contrast, as in the picture shown at left. Delacroix is influenced by Goethe. Goethe correctly identified simultaneous contrast as a perceptual phenomenon:

“Every decided color does a certain violence to the eye and forces it to opposition.”

Delacroix is influenced strongly by Turner’s paintings and even travels to England to visit him, although Turner was away on a trip. It was through Delacroix that the Impressionists were introduced to ideas of color contrast, including simultaneous contrast.

Hermann Ludwig von Helmholtz (1821-1894)  began to study the human eye, a task that was all the more difficult for the lack of precise medical equipment. In order to better understand the function of the eye he invented the ophthalmoscope, a device used to observe the retina. Invented in 1851, the ophthalmoscope--in a slightly modified form--is still used by modern eye specialists. Using these devices he advanced the theory of three-color vision first proposed by Thomas Young. This theory, now called the Young-Helmholtz theory, helps ophthalmologists to understand the nature of color blindness and other afflictions.

In line with Thomas Young, Helmholtz also advocated a three-colour system, and demonstrated that each colour could be composed as a mixture of three basic colours — for example red, green and blue-violet as the so-called "simple colours". In his manual, the great physiologist then submits several proposals for the arrangement of these simple, or pure, colours — thus covering the entire spectrum. He also attempted to intervene — rather casually, but nevertheless vividly formulated — between Newton and Maxwell. For Helmholtz, Maxwell's triangle is too small to accommodate the saturated spectral colours and Newton's circle does not explicitly refer to the trichromatic theory, which contains a deep insight.

Helmholtz first of all arranges the spectral colours on a curved line in order to achieve a better understanding of their mixtures. He imagines a kind of force field of colours — the colour field — with white in the middle, corresponding to Newton's gravitational centre. Helmholtz noticed that in order to obtain white, he did not require equal quantities of violet-blue and yellow, for example. He thus arranged his colours in such a way that those complementary colours which were required in greater amounts were given greater "leverage".

Newton's circle forms the basis of a second construction by Helmholtz in which two triangles are plotted after omitting the part which intersects the line between red (R) and violet (V). This truncation is only possible without detriment because the two colours concerned mark both ends of the spectrum. (at the CIE-system we will encounter this line once again as purple.) In the figure, we are left with two triangles whose corners have been determined in each case by the two possible combinations of three basic colours, between which Thomas Young had wavered at the beginning of the 19th century. The triangle with the violet, red and green (VRG) corners thus contains all colours which are formed from mixing violet, red and green, and the same applies for the red, yellow and cyan cornered triangle (RYC). It is apparent from the figure, and also from Maxwell's triangle, that not all colours can be recorded in this way, and that a large portion of the colour-circle remains remote.

There was, of course, no doubt about the trichromatic theory in Helmholtz's time, and this encouraged the belief that there really must be an ideal triangle with a place for all the mixed colours of the spectrum. With his remaining construction, Helmholtz returned to that first curve of simple colours which he had drawn on the assumption that quantities of light of varying colour can be regarded as being the same when, at set intensities, they appear to the eye as equally bright. Based on the pure basic colours of red and violet, without further explanation Helmholtz moves the point representing our perception of pure green to A, to form a triangle AVR which now contains all sensations of colour.

Subsequently, Helmholtz draws the conclusion that, in his view, the pure red and the pure violet of the spectrum do not occur as a simple sensation of a fundamental colour, and for this reason the lower line must be displaced to the values V1 and R1. The colours which can be directly attained by means of light entering a normally sighted eye will then lie on the closed curve V1ICGrGR1 (the abbreviations refer to indigo, cyan, green and yellow). The triangle otherwise contains colours which are located at a greater distance from white, and are therefore more saturated than all customary colours.

Helmholtz and Maxwell concentrated on selecting the most suitable diagram to explain the observed facts with regard to colour mixtures. Because the trichromatic theory was both available and accepted, their attention was turned towards the geometry of the triangle, without any consideration of the phenomenological aspects. The question concerning the position of the spectral colours in each triangle was only finally resolved at the end of the 19th century when A. König and C. Dieterici examined "the basic sensations in normal and anomalous colour systems and the distribution of their intensity in the spectrum" and specified the course of the line which we have plotted in Maxwells triangle. This will only be scientifically correct if we imagine an ideal triangle whose colours possess greater saturation than the spectral colours (E marks the point of equal energy, and this can be also interpreted as white). The results of the spectral mixtures illustrate how Newton had simplified matters when he assumed that the saturation of mixed colours will be less if, within the sequence of colours, their components are located further apart.

The work of König and Dieterici appeared in the Zeitschrift für Psychologie in 1892, and it was evident that the pre-eminence of colours had become lost to contemporary physicists. But the power of perception will in the end prevail; without it, the technical game with colours would remain all too trapped within geometrical constructions, even when practiced by a genius like Helmholtz or Maxwell.

 DEFINITIONS

Color wheels:

Mixing (red-yellow-blue) color wheel:  Traditionally, artists used a color wheel composed of the primary colors red, yellow, and blue. Currently, the mixing color wheel is commonly accepted as a visual representation of color theory. This color wheel was invented by Johannes Itten, a Swiss color and art theorist. According to Itten, the primary use of his color wheel is for mixing pigments. However, many artists use this color wheel to create visually harmonious color combinations.

Spectral (red-green-blue) color wheel: As opposed to the mixing version of the color wheel, the visual color wheel is based on the primary colors red, green, and blue. The RGB primaries are used for computer monitors, cameras, scanners, etc. The secondary (subtractive) triad of the RGB wheel is CMY (cyan, magenta, yellow), which is a standard in printing. Also, the human eye contains RGB receptors. Because of this fact, many artists believe that the visual RGB color wheel should be used instead of the traditional RYB wheel to create visual complements.