WorshipSession

[Tim Ingham]

"Black is the new White" Originally Nov 2002, copied from the original "Hints and Tips" area of WorshipSession.info.

To maximise the effectiveness of your projector,
Consider the advantages of negative images.

In the WorshipSession demo on this site, the background of the pages is black, and the text is white, or pastel colours. On the PC screen it looks strange, because dark text on a light background has become the norm.

WorshipSession can format songs any way you choose - the fonts, colours and margins are completely variable, but the WorshipSession team recommend the "black background" style for projecting songs in church.

Projecting images in light churches

Projection is challenging in churches, because usually it's quite light - we don't like to worship God in the dark. "God is light; in him there is no darkness at all" (1 John 1:5). This means that there will be loads of light on the screen, which tends to wash out the projected image.

Take time to plan the lighting in your church, especially at the front where the screen will be. You may want to reduce your overall light level, and introduce spotlights to highlight the leaders.

Dark colours are lost on projection

In most churches, there will always be a certain amount of ambient light on the screen, and this stray light means that any dark colours you project are not seen at all, whereas light colours project well. To illustrate this, consider these two images


Both look great on the PC screen, but when they are projected in church, the image on the right simply doesn't work. It is not possible to project a dark, moody scene into a light place.

The secret of the black background

Projectors can't display black, so if a page has a black background, the projected image doesn't appear in a frame at all - it just looks like "writing on the wall". This means that you don't need to leave any margins - you can use all the projector's pixels for text.

To understand why this is important, consider these two photographs, which show a severe case of light shining on the screen.


The page with a blue background obviously has lower contrast, and also it must include a border around the text, but with a black background no border is required so a bigger font can be used, making the words much more visible.