Hey guys, I'm currently writing a tutorial about pixel art and there is apparently one thing I want to teach people that I don't know for sure myself.

When I was taught about hue-shifting I was told that once you go pure 60-yellow, you don't go back. Like "this is the "lightest" yellow no matter where you shift it will get darker".

While I totally agree with that there was one issue. Since colors are arranged in a full circle there would be an opposite to that, a "darkest" color. Most people told me that this was "something between purple and blue". But no one ever posted the exact hue-value of that color. Since you can go both ways with yellow this should be the same for the opposite color. I personally think that a hue of 240 is the "darkest" color, but I don't know anyone who agrees with that ...

My question would be: Does this anti-yellow exist? If yes, whats the exact hue? And would it really make sense to "stop" at that color?


Edited by -GetaX- - 04 October 2014 at 11:44am

I didn't mean any of these two. I was refering to "felt" brightness. I actually just found a picture in this forum which explains what I mean:



I pretty much agree with the guy who made this. But I see alot of pixelart where shadows of blue things are purple and shadows of purple things are blue and I don't see how that makes sense.

This picture was made by somebody who didn't understand hue shifting (it's especially silly to hue shift fire, a light source!).
Hue shifting should apply to a range of colors that go from dark to light, with *normally* the same hue and saturation. The point is that the range is much more interesting if the hue is not *completely* identical throughout : a typical thing is to make the lighter colors warmer than the midtone, and the darker colors colder than the midtone.
Keep it subtle! If the range covers more than 90° of the H slider, it's probably very psychedelic.

The blue cones in the eye have the highest sensitivity compared to the red and green cones, but only about 2% of the cones in the eye are blue sensitive.
How color looks depends on lots of things, so it's better to just study about the eye and how it works, and also how light refracts, the wavelengths, etc..
Hueshifting is just a term used to describe the changing of hue.. if you're changing hues, then you're technically hueshifting- doesn't really matter how you do it because hue only changes one way.

That's the general idea if you want your piece to look like it's being lit with natural light/sunlight.

And people will go beyond blue into purple (for example in pixels of trees) because even though the way color is assembled on a monitor is different than traditional paint the eye still feels that purple being the complement of yellow is natural.