" title="Pare and Focus"> Pare and Focus

Last time I talked about getting the colors in your digital photography to look accurate. You want people to see what you saw, right? Now that we’ve got those colors looking their best it’s time to get creative. No, we’re not going to start adding crazy effects or processes. All it takes to make your photos look great and stand out from the crowd is a little planning and a little composition» .

Think Like an Advertiser

Advertisers know what they’re doing when it comes to color. They know that people have innate, learned, and cultural responses to certain colors. So they use those colors to get a response from you.

The rumor is that red makes people hungry or thirsty and that’s why fast food and cola companies use it. I don’t know if red actually makes people thirsty, or if it’s just that companies like Coca Cola have used red so much that Americans now think of red as the color for soft drinks. Either way, it works¹.

Even if you’re not trying to sell something, you can use color in your photography to encourage a response from the viewer. Want to give people a calm, relaxed feeling when they see your work? Try using cool tones like blue and green. For a more active and excited response from people, try warm colors like red and yellow.

Some colors have cultural meanings. When I see blue and white in a snowy scene I think of Hanukkah while the same snowy scene with green and red elements would make me think of Christmas. Some colors are thought of as masculine while others are considered more feminine. Colors can have all kinds of meanings and choosing them deliberately can help you tell a story with your photos.

These photos of persimmons are almost identical except for the different backgrounds. The one with the pink background looks feminine wile the blue-green background looks more masculine.

Use conditioned responses (like associating red with cola) to create a mood in your own photos. Try adding some red to a photo of a cola. Playing on the connection between red and soft drinks might make the viewer long for a certain brand of cola. Using primary colors in your back to school photos might remind people of elementary school. The photos will look familiar, pleasing, or “right” to the viewer since they’re (consciously or not) reminded of a color connection they’ve already made.

Get some inspiration and find out the meanings of colors. Smashing Magazine has a great article on color meanings. It’s targeted to web designers but the ideas apply to color photography as well.

Use a Color Palate Generator

Big Huge Labs automatically created this palette from my own photo.

Make sure the colors in your photos will look good together. Your whole family doesn’t have to wear the same color to look good in a group photo. A color palate picker can help you choose colors that will compliment each other. Or get creative and pick colors from a favorite painting and recreate them in your photos.

Easy to use color palate generators can help you plan your shoot without learning color theory. These tools automatically provide an array of colors that look good together. Some even connect to flickr so you can pick colors directly from existing photos and artwork.  Once you know a palate looks good and not garish you can confidently use those color combos in your photos.

Big Huge Labs palate generator chooses colors from your own photos automatically. Kuler, a free website by adobe, has more options and lets  you select colors  from other flickr members photos, generate palates from a color wheel, or browse palates other folks made. I’ve used Kuler to inspire my still life photography and plan on using it for portraits» in the future.

Another tool I love for choosing colors in my photos is the interactive online color wheel. I talk more about it below.

Keep it simple

Photo generously provided by Deirdre. Click to see it large at Flickr.com

This cool photo of a mantis on a sunflower, generously provided by a subscriber, looks awesome without a distracting background. The simple green and yellow color scheme let the action in the photo speak for itself.

Color photos look great displayed on a plain white or black background b/c there aren’t any other colors to compete. Many photography sites use either white or black as their background color and museums often have plain white walls to let the artwork shine.

The same can apply to color photos themselves. The subject is the most important part of the photo and you want it to stand out. By choosing to use just a few colors it’s easy to make the subject look different.

Try pairing down your photos to just a few colors. Use post processing to convert the photo to black and white then re-color just one key element.

Or compose your picture to include only a few simple colors in the first place. Product photographers often use simple white or gray backgrounds to make the products stand out. Do the same with portraits by sticking a white sheet or piece of white foam core behind your subject. Simpler still, choose to take snapshots with just the green grass behind your subject rather than including the entire garden in bloom.

You don’t have to stick to black and white either. Make the background color contrast with the subject to make the subject really pop like this watermelon on a turquoise background.

I actually found this color combination by using an interactive online color wheel. I chose the color of the watermelon on the wheel, then found it’s exact opposite (opposite colors make each other look brighter). I had this turquoise place mat that was just the right color so I used it as the background.

Thinking about how simple you can make the color in your photos is a great exercise. I think like this all the time and my shots are that much stronger for it.

Next up is the last post in the Color Series. I covered getting color right in the last post, and now we’ve talked about using color in composition for effect. The last post will focus on fun effects you can use to change the color color of your photos. I’m looking forward to this one!

Stay tuned, and if you haven’t subscribed the big orange RSS button at the top of the page is waiting for you!

¹ Studies suggest that consumers can learn to associate colors with specific products like associating the color red with soda:

“What we know about consumers’ color choices” Randi Priluck Grossman Seton Hall University, South Orange, New Jersey, USA, and Joseph Z. Wisenblit Seton Hall University, South Orange, New Jersey, USA

More often than not, I want the colors in my photos to look like they did in real life. Ok, sometimes I want them to look better than real life. But even then, I want the colors to be realistic.

If you’re beauty blogging, food blogging, or selling products online, you want your photos to look true to life too. Your audience deserves an accurate representation, right? Food doesn’t often look appetizing when the colors are off. (Imagine green tinted meat loaf…yuk!) And how could your readers take your eyeshadow recommendation if your swatches didn’t look like the real thing? Just imagine how you would feel if that gorgeous purple shirt you ordered online arrived at your house an awful shade of blue.

Bottom line is, color is important. Knowing how color can go wrong will help you get it right.

The cause of problems:

Two of the most common problems I see in color digital photography are incorrect white balance, and poor (or no) color management. Both are easy to understand and easier to fix.

White balance in a Nutshell

Digital photos are made up of just a few basic colors mixed together in different ways. Different kinds of light require a different mix of those colors to make the photo look real. That’s why digital cameras often have options for light sources including Sun, Shade, Cloudy, Tungsten, and Fluorescent, and sometimes others. Choosing one of these options lets your camera know how it should mix the basic colors to make your photos look their best. Choosing Automatic mode lets your camera decide what kind of light you’re in and what it should be doing with colors. When the wrong mix of colors is used, photos can end up too yellow, blue, green and even pink.

If your camera gets it wrong, don’t sweat it. White balance is often easy to fix. If you start shooting in RAW it will always be easy to fix. (Unlike JPEGs which lock in your camera’s white balance decisions, RAW files can be changed after you take the picture. Pretty cool.) I have an article on correcting the white balance of your photos whether you take JPEGs or RAW. See, wasn’t that easy?

Next up is Color Management.

No, this won’t require a business degree. Or any degree. Here’s color management in a nutshell.

Different devices like cameras, computers, monitors, and printers read and produce colors in very different ways. In order to get the thing you saw with your eyes to go from camera to computer to print (or the web) and still look the same, there has to be some translation along the way. Color management gives you that translation. Now here’s the trick. There are different color spaces» to choose from. Some are big, they can use a whole lot of colors, like the big 64 box of crayons and some are smaller like the 12 crayon box. And there’s not a “right one”. But there are better and worse ways to use the different options. Here’s a couple of options.

If you’re just starting out and you want to keep things really simple, use a color space called sRGB. It’s a smaller color space (like the 12 pack of crayons) but it can still produce very nice and accurate looking pictures. It’s the easiest way to go since nearly every device will be able to produce the colors in this color space. Since every device will be on the same page your picture will look the same no matter where you look at it. And you won’t have to do special correction or adjustments when you move between devices, like going from your desktop to the web.

If your camera has the option, choose sRGB as the color space. If you don’t have the option to choose, your camera is probably using sRGB anyway. If you use GIMP  the default color space is sRGB (scroll down to point 1.2.1 Input). Now you’re all set.

The other option is to use a big color space (more like the 64 pack of crayons) in your camera and then make adjustments as you go. The idea is that if your original file has lots of colors you’ll have more information to use and more options to choose from. Not a bad idea, but it can get tricky. You’ll have to convert and adjust your photos as you transfer them to different devices.

For example: Internet browsers generally use sRGB. When you switch from the big color space to a smaller color space colors often get lost in the translation. Imagine the crayons. To switch from the big 64 pack of crayons to the 12 pack, internet browsers will just use the closest crayon available. But sometimes the closest crayon isn’t the most accurate looking color. Sometimes a mix of two or three colors is a better match. Sometimes adding some contrast or other adjustments makes the photo look more like the original too. Straight conversion from a big color space to a small color space is rarely exact so you’ll have to make those extra adjustments yourself to avoid losing quality.

And you have to remember to change your color space every time too. Otherwise your photos may end up looking dull and lifeless.

If you’re interested in this option, choose either Adobe RGB or ProPhoto RGB from your camera’s menu.  If you don’t have the option check your camera’s documentation. It may tell you what color space the camera uses by default (though it’s most likely sRGB). You can even set up GIMP to use one of these larger color spaces so all of your devices are on the same page.

More details on color to come. Next up is color in composition. Stay Tuned!

 
 There are  a lot of free photo editors out there. Some are tools you use online, and others are programs that you use on your desktop. Most let you make very basic adjustments to your photos. A few allow you to use very advanced and creative techniques. Some are even linked in to popular photo sharing websites, like Flickr, and Facebook.

So, which one is right for you?

I looked at 5 of the most popular free photo editing programs available to show you the differences and help you make the choice. Check out each photo editor’s description, then use the table at the end of the post to compare options, tools, system requirements and more.

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