Monday, March 17, 2008

Gray is Not Blue

Gray is not Blue

The bottom of a United Airlines jet is blue.

“UA175” was banking left in full sunlight. The round fuselage ought to show areas of highlight, of shadow, and of normal color.



Yet the bottom of this ghostplane is gray, not blue. Why? The rest of the video shows normal color – green trees, tan buildings, red brick, blue sky, etc.

2 comments:

spooked said...

the color scheme is off some, but one can make a case that this is a UA plane. The confusing thing is that "piping" down the bottom of the plane. That is actually an illusion created by the white/gray stripe on the very bottom of the fuselage that is standard for UA livery. If you can visualize the stripe, you can then see there is dark "paint" arund it, which would be the dark blue-- and there is even a faint trace of blue on the right side of the fuselage. This is more obvious in the Carmen Taylor photo. I'm just saying a case can be made that this is UA livery. Whether the coloring is accurate under the lighting conditions is another question that is very hard to answer.

Ace Baker said...

I'm quite sure they used a model of a 767 correctly painted with UA livery. A common problem with compositing is getting the color balance to match the color balance of the background.

You always have to do color matching.Reducing saturation to grayscale makes anything blend. Gray always blends in.