Color is a powerful, if mercurial, tool. There are no absolutes with color. Blue or white do not exist. There are only relative degrees of color. Controlling the relative aspects of color should not require guesswork. A solid grasp of the basic properties of color perception is all we need.
What is Color?
We often think of gels and dichroics and scroller strings, but it is far more personal than that. Color is a physiological experience in our consciousness. When the cone receptors in our eyes encounter electromagnetic radiation between 400-700nm wavelengths. we experience color. As if the cultural and personal meaning of colors were not subjective enough, every one of us has a different number of cones in our eyes. This means we each perceive color with differing degrees of resolution.
While some aspects of color are personally subjective, there are a few physical absolutes involved too. Just like there are different frequencies and pitches in sound, so too are there in light. In fact, the difference between Middle C and Red is simply a matter of 44 octaves. Sound waves with opposing sine curves cancel each other out and create silence. Opposing color waves also cancel each other, creating white light.
To control color, a system is needed that gives clear guidelines for analyzing the stage and making adjustments in the short time allotted during tech. To create strong and bold color we first must understand white light.
White Light
Technically, white light is a mixture of all the various wavelengths of light at once. Every color we encounter is a mixture of one or more primary colors: red, green, and blue. A 50/50 mix of two primaries gives us the secondary colors: cyan, magenta, and yellow. Primary and secondary colors have opposites, or complements which, when mixed, create white light. Magenta, for example, is an equal mix of red and blue. So green and magenta are complements of one another and, mixed together, create white light. White light then is an equal mixture of all the visible wavelengths (red/green/blue). But not always. This perfect white differs from perceived white.
The human eye (more accurately, the human brain) creates patterns. Add the evolution of the eye to see the full visible spectrum as white and you end up with a piece of technology that expects to see all three primary colors in its field of vision at all times. A look on stage composed of only two of those colors leads the eye to turn the least saturated into that missing third color. Using only red and blue, the eye desperately searches for green and will take liberties to turn non-green light green if it has to.
The shadow color of a light is perceived to be its complement. Consider a sodium vapor (orange) streetlight. The shadow has a faint tinge of blue or cyan depending on the exact color of the lamp. Missing color syndrome is the perceptual phenomenon that occurs when one or more lights with more saturated color plays against a less saturated or clear light. The less saturated light takes on the appearance of the shadow color of the more dominant light. Clear, intended as white, playing against L106 appears cyan. A pale tint of cyan, but cyan nonetheless. Using a pale pink (more precisely a minus green) like G108 or G109, the clear looks white again. This minus green is not a perfect white, but it is white in relationship to the red. It is a reference white.
Film and TV designers are more than familiar with the concept of reference white, or white balance. This is the value one gives to a camera to balance for various lighting conditions. Since tungsten lamps are more yellow than sunlight, we must tell the camera what light source we are using so it can correct properly. Once the reference white is found, color filters are used on light sources, or to cover windows, to balance for the camera’s idea of white. When this is not done, we see the interior of a building that appears lit with white light and the sun coming through the window as blue. The camera has shifted everything blue to compensate for the tungsten. Thus the already blue sunlight has been pushed further.
The human eye does this too. Because the eye has significantly higher resolution than any camera, the differences are slight. The eye has an awesome tool to process this information, the mind. When our eyes take in discordant color information, the mind corrects, to an extent, and gives us a perception of white light. When I put my handset down and step out of the theater into sunlight for morning coffee, everything is momentarily blue. The mind has corrected for the yellow tungsten, adding blue to everything. It takes a moment to catch up to its new, blue, surroundings. We can use this dramatically with opposing colors of sidelight. Red opposite magenta, not so striking. But red and cyan…
Everything is Relative
Under the right conditions, your favorite red might look amber, magenta, or even green. I’ve punched so much Congo blue out on stage that R80 looked white. This makes light fun. We take one color and make it appear to be its opposite. We even turn red floors black.
How does red become black? Our eyes give us two ways of seeing an object — through the rods which perceive light/dark, and through our cones, which perceive color. When we perceive a colored object, we do not actually see the object itself. The object out in the world is a mirror which reflects certain wavelengths of light. My yellow legal pad does not have any inherent yellowness. It is a mirror reflecting yellow light. When I write on it with my red pen, I turn it into a yellow and red mirror.
Since that legal pad does not radiate yellowness, the yellow must come from the sunlight filling my studio. That legal pad absorbs all the sunlight except the yellow, which is reflected. When that yellow hits my eye, I perceive the legal pad. If the light hitting the legal pad had none of the yellow in it, I would only perceive the legal pad with my rods, noting shape but no color. And thus it would appear black. The same goes for red floors and cyan light.
Imagine that you are standing on top of a mountain range looking out over a valley and some foothills, followed by another mountain range. There are some interesting color phenomena going on here. The objects closest to us appear in white light. Looking further away, the objects and air around them take on increasingly saturated hues. Depending on the time of day, these tend toward lavender or green. After millions of years of evolution, the human mind has learned to associate colors of specific hues with distance. Less-saturated tints denote closeness. Want focus on one performer? Bathe the stage in a chromatic color and pick the soloist out in a tint or white light. Done.
Backlight and scenery washes are going to give you a lot of bang for your buck, color-wise. The angle of reflection from backlight makes it appear brighter than other angles. Frontlight and sidelight, on the other hand, don’t affect the stage so much. They impact the performers. Putting saturated colors in the backlight and saving tints for facelight uses color to give focus to a performer.
A Fiery Circus
A few years back, I lit a Dracula-ballet-turned-circus-extravaganza — a performance of Dracul: Prince of Fire at The Crucible in Oakland, CA. There was an industrial steel set with flaming liquid gas waterfalls, flame poufs and a fire rail on the downstage edge of the stage (flaming footlights are awesome, by the way). In addition to the ballet dancers, we had aerialists, acrobats, fire dancers and burlesque. If ever a show called for heavy color, this was it.
I used Morpheus color faders to light scenery and performers. Some of the ballet moments were truly beautiful. The dancers should be seen in a natural light. At the same time, a heightened sense of color had to fill every moment of the show.
In one duet, the last moment before the lovers die, I wanted the sense of foreboding to permeate the stage, yet have them lost in their love.
I put my scenery washes into a deep cyan, pushing it into the distance. The dancers themselves were lit with head highs in complementary colors, each distinct from the cyan. L151 head highs from SR keyed the scene. I filled from the other side with L202 shins. L151 has a good touch of red in it and L202 is blue. The overall look used basic RGB theory to avoid any missing color syndrome. None of the colors were primaries, but there was enough of each primary for the eye to be satisfied. Further, the L151 and L202 play off each other nicely as opposing sidelights. The L151 is an amber with a lot of red in it, while the L202 has a hint of green in the blue. While not perfect complements, they are close enough to create wonderfully contrasting sidelight. The saturated background pushed the warm tones in the tints to bring out red notes. This made the foreground feel more colorful in relative terms than it was with regards to absolute color values.
Using color to create foreground/background distinctions is powerful. The same techniques give strong focus to performers upstage as well as downstage. Employing complementary colors in opposing sidelights gives further strength to stage compositions. This system gives impact and meaning to every color choice on stage. The only good color is a well-used color. Knowing your colors and how they relate to each other is critical to getting the looks on stage you want.
