Some color theory bits and pieces

I was tempted to drop all of my notes from my color theory lecture directly into this post with examples, but for your sake I'm sticking with the interesting bits.

Some terms you may never need to know (but that you probably should)

- Hue: Family name of a color, holds colors symbolic value (orange, green)

- Value: amount of black or white in a color. Holds about 90% of visual information.

- Chroma: saturation, intensity, brightness of color.

Balance/Unity Either for aesthetic or directive purposes, these are achieved through the contrast or harmony of Hues, values, or chroma.
Harmony via consistent, weak chroma:

 Balance via contrasting value:

Unity via contrasting Hues:

Keying the color:   attempted by instagram filters, but perfected 
by water, clouds, sunsets, and sunrises, keyed color is when one hue affects all the other hues in an image.

Why projected images don't look right:

Computers use additive mixing of primary light colors (red, green, and blue) to project an image directly from the screen to our eyes. Images projected onto screens, walls, horses etc, on the other hand, are a result of that same light, formatted in the same fashion, being reflected off of an imperfect surface. This surface reflects or absorbs light we didn't expect. This is why blacks are not black enough and colors seem distorted. Moral: test your presentations and see if you can format for such surfaces ahead of time.