Workshop: Screen Color Tones

[Zeriab]

Screen Color Tones Workshop

The idea with this workshop is to discuss and provide a guideline for creating proper screen tones.
If you look in the screenshot and mapping threads you'll find quite a few maps with bad screen tone, but where can you find advice about using the right screen tones? That is what I want to investigate here.
It is obviously impractical do to exhaustive testing since there are 34 billion different screen tones (34158804736 to be exact)
Which screen tone to pick is not a standalone choice. It also depends on the tilesets, the characters and on possible fogs and panoramas. Even so I believe that there is a lot of stuff to be said about it. Like how blue protrudes more at night.
You should not limit yourself to only talking about which screen color to use, also incorporate fogs. They affect the tone when used and you have to account for that.

To start I will pick a scene to discuss every two weeks, every month or whatever interval feels the best. I will also try to keep it all in this topic. The structure can be discussed as well. Maybe it will work better to have a workshop for each scene.
Sometimes I may pick a fog which usage then could be discussed. How does the Normal, Add, Sub affect it? Can I change the hue to help emphasize certain colors? e.t.c.

I'd like to establish the convention in this thread of using (red,green,blue,gray) for specifying screen tones. So whenever you see a (120,5,64,100) expect it to be a screen color. Just so it's quicker to write ^_^

Scene 1 - Nighttime wandering over the plains
Night time is the most common use of selecting a screen tone. (except from fading)
A typical error seen is to simply decrease all colors with say (-100,-100,-100,0).
If (0,0,0,0) looks proper in daylight then (-100,-100,-100,0) simply just looks darker like you are in the shadow of the mountain or the volcano erupted blocking out the sun and making everything dark.

The scene here is that the party is traveling over the vast plains, cloudless sky and nearly full moon.
How should night time be modeled then? Which colors should be emphasized? How dark/light should it be?

Scene 2 - Nighttime camping in the forest
The scene here is that the party has been traveling all day and is a couple of hours into the forest.
Here they build a camp with campfire and a couple of tents.
How should night time be modeled here? Which colors should be emphasized? How does it or should differ from scene 1?

*hugs*
- Zeriab

 

[Zeriab]

*reserved*

 

[coyotecraft]

Scene 1-
Since I live in Kansas I can tell you that a full moon on the plains is pretty bright. At night our eyes see less of reds and yellows, and more of a grey scale. In this screen I lower red and green, making blue more dominate, and moving up the grey. I think it's tacky when there's too much blue. This probably is not dark enough.
(-119,-103,-51,153)

Scene 2-
The major difference here is the camp fire. I think it's best to use a fog here instead of just tinting the screen. Tinting the screen like I did in Scene one would look like this:

The fire doesn't look very bright or warm does it?
For my Fog I created a simple gradient over the fireplace. My fog mode is set for "subtract":

Backlighting objects with a blue light is something you see in movies, that's what I did with the trees here. The yellow will appear blue when the fog is set to subtract. Here's what it'll look like:

I didn't tint the screen at all here. Another difference between the two scenes is the amount of contrast here. When you are looking at a bright object everything around it appears darker.

 

[Truly else]

Unfortunately, If you were to move in the way of the horse / tree with this fog on, it's backlighting will still be cast on you, looking odd, so that method is only good for cutscenes.

 

[Tindy]

The fog is a good idea, but I can't help but be distracted by the saturation of blue for the shadows of the trees/etc. It's just...I dunno, too blue? The rest of it looks pretty awesome, though.

 

[Glitchfinder]

The fog is a good idea, but I can't help but be distracted by the saturation of blue for the shadows of the trees/etc. It's just...I dunno, too blue? The rest of it looks pretty awesome, though.

I agree. It makes it look like the trees have blue backlights. Aside from that, it's pretty cool. Especially if you combine it with a script that puts the player and such above the fog, so that you can't see it in front of them.