Color wheel mode: local color and light source color (just an idea)

[Florian G.]

This isn't necessarily meant to be a suggestion, but rather an idea that I just wanted to share:

I thought about how to make it easier for people to get their color harmonies right – or at least how to give them a tool, that has a rather simple and logical approach.

We know, the colors we receive with our eyes (or in a photograph) are basically the result of the color of the light source being reflected off of the objects. And the local color of the objects determines which light waves get absorbed and which get reflected into the eye/camera. This naturally creates some sort of color harmony/unity.

So the idea is:
What if there was a mode for the color wheel, that treats its colors as if they were local object colors that get lit by a light source color (that the user can choose).
So white would take on the color of the light source and the rest would change accordingly in a physically correct manner.
Like in the demonstration below (sry for the bad quality, but I needed to stay below the upload size limit).

You could choose one color for the sun, one for the ambient sky and switch between them, to paint either the light or shadow sides for example. If there is a large area of grass that reflects light into the underside of some trees, you could pick that grass color, add it as a light source color and then easily choose colors of the wheel that would fit into the shadow areas of the trees. – Just as an example. But you see how this could be used. That probably wouldn't be the solution that magically turns every painting into a beautiful painting, but at least it would be a helpful and supporting option to work with.

[support]

interesting idea
Usually, it can be solved by the overlay layer above all other layers. But in your example - this overlay layer applied to the color picker.