Our eyes are extremely delicate tools,
but also very trickable ones.
They can detect even the slightest change
in hue or saturation, but they can also be misled
when the enviroment of a color changes.
If you know the mechanics of a color contrast,
you can manipulate with what is being perceived.
The first and most obvious color contrast is the one between the
colors in their strongest chromatic value. (Think of the pigments in color
tubes and the top right corner in Photoshop color picker.) This
contrast is at its strongest between the three primary colors.
The yellowest yellow,
the reddest red and the bluest blue will give you the strongest Color vs. Color
contrast.
When we decrease the chromatic value of these three colors (here I messed with their hue, saturation and brightness),
the result is a smaller contrast:
The secondary colors also give us a strong Color vs. Color
contrast:
This contrast gets even stronger if we separate the colors with a
black, or white background:
Without further ado, I'll leave it to your eyes to tell you more about this contrast in its top usage.
From Henri Matisse, the master of color...
"The Dance"
"Music"
...to the traditional weaving - a myriad of Color vs. Color contrasts:
In the next post we'll see what's up with the Light vs. Dark Contrast.