Understanding Values

It was years after I started painting that an instructor introduced me to the concept of values. I wasted a lot of time and I don't want that to happen to you. Values are the basis for composition in photography and in painting. Along with perspective, they allow us make objects three-dimensional and recede into the distance. Before we learn how to use color, we have to understand values.

What are values? If you take a color photo and make it black and white, the values are the shades of gray. In painting we use a scale of 1 to 10 to describe value, a high value is light and low value is dark, so in black and white, 1 is black and 10 is white. Colors also have value, it’s one of the components that make up the color, along with hue (the name of the color), intensity (brightness), and transparency.

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