Intro to Value Part 2

Hi friends! In last week's post I started to talk a little bit about the value scale and one way you can think about it to understand it a little bit better. Today I'm going to get a little bit deeper into how our eyes perceive the value scale, and how you can use that to your advantage as a visual element.

Our eyes have been trained to understand saturation in almost everything we see. A good way to think about saturation is in terms of a scale, or how much of something is in a specific area. In the image I created above for this demo, the darkest area in the bottom is the most saturated with lines, and the lightest areas in the top corners are the least saturated.

Note that because we are using only black and white for this example, the level of saturation will match the level of value. If we were to use a color (especially when talking about printing), the level of saturation will not always reflect the same level of value.

In Part 1 I used the example of coming out of a dark room and into the light of day. When our eyes have adjusted to the level of light in a dark room, our pupils have dilated to allow more light to be seen by the retina in the back of our eye. It's sort of like our eye trying to balance the value levels of the light we are seeing. Because our eyes adjust this way, it's hard to understand relative value levels. The relative values in my example image go from pure black to white with few lines. The density shift allows more white space to show through. our eyes assume that those are the brightest and darkest areas in this "space" and everything else within it is based off of these values.

Let's pretend I was using a middle gray instead of a black

Now that the image is a real black, how do our eyes perceive it differently? There is the same amount of shift between light and dark areas because the density which is reflecting value is the same, except this time the darkest black is darker in comparison to the first image. The value shift of the lines in comparison to the white space is different, and this is what causes the distinction.

Thursday's post will have a final image to complete this series, and will explain in more detail why the black in the second image seems darker than the first image.


You can check out part 3 by clicking here!

Or you can go back to read part 1 again by clicking here.