3-strip Technicolor
I've been reading up on film stock. And, I've been playing around in Photoshop.
Of course, palettes are fake, as are spectrums. They're construed as yardsticks that vaguely present color spaces, and everything we know about optics and perception tells us that color is a contextual phenomenon. A palette or a spectrum just gives keyframes for the color space, abstracting the virtualized space into a flat graph. I think that's precisely why looking at palettes as self-contained matrices is worthwhile.
One of the color spaces I've been thinking about a lot lately is the Technicolor color space. I've been looking around and sort of figured there would be a preset Illustrator or Photoshop swatch palette for it, but no luck so far. So, I thought to try to construct my own keyframe palette, and hopefully also a conversion method for tweaking existing images to map them to the Technicolor space.
When you decide to roll your own palette, you immediately confront the problem stated above. If a palette, as separate from a spectrum, is a collection of swatches, how do you represent a virtualized color continuum and which swatches do you pick? No good methodologies found so far. Commerical swatch books like Pantone, et al are too damn big to deal with at a glance. Default Abode swatches are too limiting and only represent high-chroma hues anyway.
In the interest of having something to play with, I'm working with the Visibone (probably TM) palette. It's no beauty, but it does give some indication of tonal and tint variants.
Based on this math, I've made and now have transportable swatches and actions for palette conversion. Yes, it's all slippery, since there are no absolute points of color reference. Ignore that for now.
Here's the regular Visibone palette.
Compare with the Technicolor construct of the same palette.
You can tell the Technicolor not only ramps up the saturation, but also alters the overall color space of the palette. Blues push out toward either violet or teal. Any subtle greens are wiped out. All yellows are lemony. and so on.
There's so much chroma going on, it's hard to see the implications for a photograph by looking at the palette above, so compare the photos of Whale Point, Eleuthra below.
This one's as shot.
This one's converted to Technicolor.
