Learn more about color with Pixar

We all know Pixar (Animation Studios) for the funny, witty, touching animation movies. Part of the reason these movies are so good is the focus on excellent story telling. And these stories are told with excellent quality standards and the focus on all the little details.
But what does Pixar have to do with astrophotography, I hear you ask. Well, one could make some philosophical point about story telling in (astro)photography I guess, but the real reason we are talking about Pixar here is color and color theory.
One of the things Pixar needs to be great at is the use of color in their movies and how it will be perceived by the audience. Pixar even has a ‘color scientist’ to support that and now you are able to learn a lot about color from him.
Pixar teamed up with the Kahn Academy and created a course on color science.

I’ve talked about getting the colors right in your astrophotos before and now you can learn more about color from this online course here: Color Science on KhanAcadamy
It’s relatively short (it takes around 2 hours to complete) and it covers some great things that is relevant for all of us as (astro)photographers.
“Just as dialog, acting, and music are tools filmmakers use to convey meaning and emotion, color can be used to the same effect. But determining “color” is not as simple as saying “red” or “brown” because there are endless shades of color in the visible spectrum. In this lesson, you will learn how color is determined partly by the physics of light and partly by how our brains perceive it.”

As usual for course on the Khan Academy the Color Science course encompasses some nice short videos in which Pixar explains things about color, followed by some questions and practice sections in which you are presented with a tool and you are going to work with color and color grading yourself.

This course on color science is part of ‘Pixar in a Box‘ which covers more topics on animation and it’s great fun and insightful!

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