Calvin’s Dad explains the history of color

The next time I teach Photoshop class, I’m somehow going to work this Calvin & Hobbes comic into the explanation of how to add color to a black & white photo.

I remember thinking the exact same thing when I was a little kid. My childlike logic deduced that black and white photos were really old, therefore I should ask the oldest person I could find about them. I went to my grandma and asked her what it was like living in black and white times. I got a very grandma-ish answer about how it wasn’t really black and white back then.

Now, my adult logic dictates that since photos & TV both started off as black & white and eventually became color, holograms must also start off as black & white. I suppose that science fiction works aren’t too far off the mark when they have a mono-chromatic hologram, like Cortana in Halo.

The cover to a $90 textbook.

What the hell. This is a real textbook. A real textbook that costs $90 dollars. Seriously, anime? This isn’t an isolated incident either; there’s also The Manga Guide to Calculus and The Manga Guide to Molecular Biology, among other choice selections for the discriminating Japanophile who cannot function unless absorbing information via Japanese comic art. Note that some are published by Manga University! Damn, I want a degree in Manga; I’d hang that shit on my office wall.

I cannot comprehend how that cover could lend any sort of legitimacy to the book itself; it’s not even a decent drawing. Look at the anatomy. Her leg seems to be growing out of her stomach, which is in equal vertical proportion to the head and those are some long-ass monkey arms. Don’t even try to pull the “personal style” card either. That’s clearly an attempt at a realistically proportioned person based on the scale and rendering detail.

As for overall design: why is the illustration in front of a blurred photo of (or CG generated) explosion? It’s way too disjointed and there’s no cohesive connection between fore and background. It reeks of lazy cop-out design; throw a sketch on top of a stock background rather than using a fully fleshed out illustration. The “thought bubble” that forms the title is done with a thick black stroke on ellipse primitives; another stylistic departure from the illustration. Drawing a matching thought bubble is. not. that. hard. Poor implementation of the dodge tool for the laptop screen “glow.” Failure of contrasting the yellow “5th Edition” text on top of other warm colors, killing legibility. The author names fall victim to the same fate; cool contrasting with cool (but at least it is strong enough to work).

I got linked to a Color IQ test from the Something Awful forums. It’s an interesting little exercise. There are 4 gradient ranges, each with 22 levels. Only the first and last colors are set. The rest are randomized and it’s your job to arrange them properly. The lower your final score, the higher your “color IQ” is.

I scored a 6. Messed up a bit in the blue-green range. Not surprising, since my last job had a distinct preference for those two colors. The use of anything else was frowned upon, and became an in-joke among the graphics department. It all starts to run together after a while; you get tired of eating the same flavor every day.

Messing with your monitor’s gamma or calibration is totally cheating.