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Oluseyi Ekanem

Understanding Colour Science!

Updated: Oct 22, 2022




What's your favourite colour. There's no doubt that colour sparks our interest and affects not only our conscious mind but also our unconscious mind, As filmmakers, we are aware of the power of colour. Colour is used in films to immerse the audience in the experience by connecting their primal senses and evoking deep emotions within the them.


Understanding color science is key to utilising digital cameras for image capture.. Once choices in the use of colour in production design and lighting have been made the next step is to capture the scene with a camera. But can a camera truly capture the range of colours the eye can see. The answer is no or at least not yet..


On my journey to build Paitan Media. I really wanted to understand how cameras capture color and why I didn't see the same range of colours in our lNollywood movies as I did in international films,. This quest made me research Colour Science. My research made me understand the sensor technology used in digital camera's . That cameras have sensors to capture Red, Green and Blue light from a scene. These sensors produce analogue signals which are converted to digital signals via sampling . I learned that it is the sampling bit depth that determines the range/resolution of colours that can be captured by the camera. The higher the bit depth the higher the range/resolution of colours. So, most likely our local films used camera's with lower bit depths while the films that inspired me were captured at higher bit depths. In addition, I learned that the amount of raw data from a camera's sensor was so large that in the past compression technology was developed to make the data more manageable at the cost of image quality.


There is a lot to to colour science and I definitely can't go into all the details in this blog. What I can say is that at Paitan Media, we are using our understanding of this technology to create art. We capturing at 4K +, 10bit + and RAW to create high resolution images for digital image processing, colour grading and vfx. For our first short film " Revelation" we'll be leveraging this to bring our story to life in full COLOUR.






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