Color

Hello Fablers, and welcome back to another Academy tutorial. This one, we're going to cover the color utility. As in our previous example in our scene here, we're going to take our image. We're going to add a fill color. Let's leave it with use alpha channel active. Remember if we turn this off, it just fills our artwork with a solid color, but we want to see what's going on.

Go up here to our effects panel, type in color. Drag and drop. Now I notice something. Just as it is, literally nothing happens. Now as with most utilities inside of Fable, what this utility will do is it actually outputs data, which lets you drive other parameters. This allows you to individually keyframe, in this case, for instance, the color values, depending on the model that you're working in.

How do you do that? We click and drag here on the dot that lights up next to our property. We're going to drop it and let go of the mouse, on our fill color. Notice that they're now linked.

Here on the RGB, for instance, right now, when you have a full 255 in the red, green, and blue channels, you get pure white.

What happens if we drop this down to 100 75 35. This is where you start to see how you can get super minute control over the precision of your colors.

The cool part is that there's this little dropdown here that lets you change the way that your color works. So in RGB, we've got red, green and blue. H S B is going to stand for hue, saturation, and brightness.

In this case, we would bring down the brightness to about 125. We can bring up the saturation. The hue allows us to rotate around the color wheel.

As you change these values, the output color of here actually feeds the fill on layer above it.

The next way that we have controlling is called HSL, which stands for hue saturation and lightness. Hue is our color. Saturation is the intensity and lightness is how dark or how bright it is.

Lastly, for those of us still working with a print materials, we have CMYK, which stands for cyan, magenta, yellow, and key, which is known as black.

If we bring down the amount of black, you can see here that we can start to have our very nice little color mixes here. And it makes matching colors to brand artwork, for instance, very simple.

All of these have keyframes, meaning we can key frame and animate each individual color channel, independent of which set of parameters we're using.