Complimentary contrast

Which complimentary colours supplement a starting colour harmonically?

The opportunity to contrast the starting colour with complimentary colours presents itself with this window. Complimentary colours help each other to reach higher intensity, it creates a lively mood, in the extreme it creates a dramatic effect, and when employed skillfully it creates a harmonic overall picture.

Federico Zandomeneghi: "Le Moulin de la Galette", 1878, 80x120cm
Variations of the complimentary colours red-orange and yellow-green provide for a tension filled, harmonic whole.

In the first step the window ascertains the ideal typical colours, which result in a n-Eck in the CIELAB colour circle of the same brightness and saturation when taken with the starting colour. In each case you can indicate the next closest colour to the ideal typical addition in the chosen colour model by using “show real colours”.

This variation is also referred to as hue contrast.

The hue contrast according to Itten, Ostwald, and Goethe

An old standard according to Johannes Itten and Wilhelm Ostwald states that colours fit with each other harmonically if when mixed together they are no longer colourful but rather grey. This rule is based on the psychological concept that humans perceive tension as displeasing and try to balance it out. Nobody says it better than...

"When the eye sees a colour it is immediately excited, and it is its nature, spontaneously and of necessity, at once to produce another, which with the original colour comprehends the whole chromatic scale. A single colour excites, by a specific sensation, the tendency to universality. In this resides the fundamental law of all harmony of colours..." Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

This principle of colour harmony has not lost any of its relevance even after over 200 years!

The complimentary contrast is as manifold as life itself and stands for an easy going, natural vibrancy.

Carried over into today’s CIELAB colour model the rule is as follows in mathematical form: The CIELAB colour values from two or more harmonic colours result in a mean of a neutral CIELAB colour value (a = b = 0) or in a HLC colour value in which C = 0.

A RAL DESIGN colour is supplemented by five complementary colours.

Short instructions

• Select “harmony” and “colour tone variation” in the main menu.
• Select the colour inventory from whicth the starting colour was taken and from wich the harmonic colours are to be acquired.
• Select the number of grades.
• “Ideal” or “Real” appear on the right side of the window with either…
  - the calculated ideal complimentary colours (Lab coordinates), or
  - the results within the chosen colour system as well as the deviation Delta E to the calculated ideal colour.
• A window will appear in “Details” in which the results are consolidated in the concise form of an A4 page. This page can either be printed for documentation or the text can be copied out to send the complimentary contrast on via email, for example.
  
  

The "Details" window will show you the exact information of the chosen contrast.