[Week II] Value, Second Entry - Value in Television

Tom & Jerry

Most of us grew up watching cartoons as children, and some of us was define them as colourful educational fun. But wait a second, if you grew up with a colour television, wouldn't anything you watch be colourful? What makes Tom & Jerry more colourful than say, the World News?

Tom & Jerry, lowered Value

By simply lowering the value of the colours, not saturation, we consider this new image to be less colourful. Except from the fact that lowering the value makes the details harder to see, but cartoons deliberately had very bright colours to make them feel more friendly and inviting to children.

Bruce Willis in Pulp Fiction (Edited Value)

The mood of the image above doesn't change, as the contents within the picture tells too much of a story for the value to make real difference. Either way our televisions may simply have different settings for brightness and contrast anyway, so it's important for value to not make a significant difference.

Unknown Painting (Edited Value)

In this comparison however, we see that value makes a huge difference to how we feel about the colours. The above image shows an almost divine expression of a girl welcoming the light, whereas the bottom image shows what looks like a Gothic cry for help.

Because of this difference, while Cartoons prefer the use of brighter colours, television refrains from using images that are so easily warped by value. If a scene could have a different meaning just between the viewer has different brightness and contrast settings, then that would be an issue.