Color Adjust

Color Adjust

Each layer has separate storage for lines, lighting, and color. When used alone, the word color means an opaque area of color painted with the color tool. These areas are usually what give the drawing a distinct hue. The background area is large, but tends to be muted and merely compatible and supportive of the building surface color. There are also line colors, and lighting colors, but those are separate and less apparent uses of color.

In the following drawing the brick-red color of the flat surfaces in front of the dome was initially applied over the entire scene, except for the upper area which was left transparent for the background to be visible.

Variations on the red appear in several places and a yellowish color in a small area provides some local interest. The roofs are a shade of that yellow, even though they appear a bit green. The background is a muted version of the red.

It's essentially a two-hue scheme:

Click Layer\ColorAdjust to get the Color Adjust controls:

In the Normal mode you can adjust the Hue, Saturation, and Brightness sliders to change all the colors in the layer. You can also check All to change all the layers as well as the background. For the following changes, we had the backgound checked so it changed along with the surface colors.

Here is a version with the Hue slider moved to the right. You can see the flat surfaces are now more orange and the yellowish area has become more yellow:

Moving the Hue slider still further right, the drawing becomes more yellow, but the yellow is perhaps more vivid than what we want:

Here is a version of the previous view with the Saturation redused.

For this view, we hit Reset to restore the original colors and then selected the Flip Mode from the drop-down list. In this mode the color hues flip across a hue axis. The hue axis is yellow but it can be adjusted with the Hue slider. The reds become green and the orange becomes yellow-green.

This capability is useful, for example, when the color scheme has yellow features that indicate the presence of strong light.

If a mask is present, you can use the mask to change only the colors in the masked areas.

These samples are quite saturated, close to being too saturated. The balance between too vivid and too muted is often delicate, and all the color adjustments are affected by hard copy viewing conditions.

We use a DesignJet 500, which matches the screen fairly well, but with hard copy, the light coming off the drawing is reflected light, so you need good illumination to view it reasonably. Strong color schemes tend to produce darker drawings and these especially need good lighting conditions.