I tried to get into this discussion a few weeks ago, but not many people seemed to be interested. I use photos as a note-taking method for paintings; the paintings don't come out looking like photographs at all, but I wanted the color notes to be right. I drive past one particular landscape almost every day, and finally got around to trying to work it out in paint. The problem was, I'd get the painting going, and the next time I drove past the actual landscape, I'd notice that all the (remembered) color notes in my painting were wrong. Even the relative colors had shifted in what (to me) were unpredictable ways. That's because the light was *always* different. I'd encountered this problem before, but usually I took color notes right on the site with colored pencils, and I'd go with the notes; also, I didn't drive past other landscapes all the time. This is a common problem: Grandma Moses once joked that she'd never seen blue snow. That's because she never looked. Of course she'd seen blue snow -- if she hadn't she wouldn't have been able to see any snow at all, all she would have seen was something that looked like a burned-out highlight. The only thing that gives snow definition is various shades of blue or grey...She just thought it was white. It's not, except under certain "white-like" conditions. So -- the point of this is, **there are no absolute colors.** Local colors are essentially a fiction; you can watch a color card change by moving it around in a room, with different lights on it. So is your photograph too blue? Well, do **you** think so?
