8 Tips for Better Color Photography

this video is sponsored by squarespace if you need a domain a website or an online store squarespace is a great option for this why do some color combinations work so well how much color is too much and how can you control color in your shot when you can't control the scene you're shooting good or bad use of color is one of the biggest factors in why some photographic work looks amateurish and some look stunning learning how to use control and edit colour is a vital part of learning colour photography a lot of that is down

to what you choose to put in the frame but there's also a large influence from how those colours are tweaked in post-production so i'll take you through eight quick tips tricks techniques and ideas for shooting and editing that will hopefully help you create photographs that use color well [Music] one make color a major subject in your photo before we edit and ideally before we shoot we need to decide why we're using color and how we want to use it color can be used to great effect to emphasize the subject of your photo take a look

at these images by mazie cousins cousins is a very interesting photographer and one you really should be following on instagram she uses traditionally feminine color palettes being a saturated and saccharine way and these are juxtaposed with things society associates with disgust snails insects and rotting food but also with close-ups of the female body showing hair and stretch marks and blemishes on skin with project titles like what girls are made of her work has been described as feminist cousins is using colour as a key element to communicate her concept by using colour in the way that

she does she's tapping into our subconscious understanding of the language of colour and subverting our expectations of it this photography would not work in black and white as well as using colour to convey a message it can also be used to construct a style artist louis porter uses colour to create a distinctive style his usage is so vibrant and bright that his images take on an almost surreal quality mundane subjects glow with a tapestry of artificial hues as a result his work becomes easily recognizable in addition to emphasizing a subject color can become the subject

of your photo this shot by steve mccurry is as much about color as it is about the people in it ian berry's image of this recently married couple is largely about the pink of the cadillac against the green foliage alessio ferrari's photo of captain beanie is about the color orange if we were to turn any of these images black and white they wouldn't work two be abstract taking colour is the subject a step further there's no need to be figurative at all your photography can become completely abstract photographer ola konamen makes abstract work of architecture

that often employs strong use of colour he inverts flips and recolours his shots until he achieves the vision that he was looking for try going out with a view to making abstract colour work with your camera look for light look for reflections color casts shapes take a mental step back from what you see and experiment with not viewing the things around you as people or buildings or objects with a function but instead analyzing a scene in terms of shapes and areas of color think about what you could do in post to bring out particular colors

concentrate purely on the aesthetic value of the frame rather than representing something that we recognize three be surreal whether you're using infrared film or digital editing software we have the power to manipulate different colors in our shots normally we just tweak the hues and tones slightly to achieve the image that we want but we can also take color very far away from its origin we can take it far away from what we expect to see we can create very surreal and striking work that plays on our expectations of the scene photographer richard moss takes some

really stunning imagery of conflict using kodak aerochrome film which picks up infrared light and turns the greens of foliage into reds and pinks and purples the results are a series of very surreal landscapes soldiers wielding large guns surrounded by this sea of unexpectedly vibrant colour you can also manipulate colour by editing your images in digital software i made some aerochrome style presets for lightroom and photoshop i'll leave a link to them in the video description i'll show you later on in this video some techniques that you can use to manipulate color in post yourself photographer

magik jasik likes to create surreal colorscapes in camera he shoots through prisms and gels that he places in front of the lens in his project the world with us this creates a series of surreal and fragmented landscapes maybe experiment with holding things over your lens to see what color effects you could create try shooting through gels even through things you might find lying around like some colored cellophane packaging or a translucent plastic folder [Music] coloured smoke grenades can be fun to experiment with too but they're a little overused so do try to do something interesting

with them like jasic has done here think about how you could use them to create an unexpected image don't just have someone hold it and wave it around [Music] four be selective a large part of what makes color work in your photos it's not so much the colors that you use as the colors that you leave out you might have heard about color theory but this can maybe seem a little bit intimidating and confusing as it's a really massive subject [Music] this is the colour wheel we have our primaries our secondaries and our tertiaries colour

theory is about how colours work together we have our list of colour harmonies monochromatic analogous complementary split complementary triadic tetradic double split complementary square compound etc you can see why this gets a little bit intimidating while it may seem too complex in a way it's also an oversimplified way of looking at color it deals only with hue and it doesn't account for other factors like saturation or brightness or how much color is actually in the frame my advice here would be not to worry too much about all the variations and start with learning the two

most common color harmonies which is analogous and complementary once you start seeing where and how these are used you'll begin to notice photos that don't use these rules and that's probably the best time to do further reading and learn a bit more but just take it one step at a time and you'll start to absorb these and ultimately they'll just become intuitive analogous colours are groups of colours that sit next to each other on the colour wheel analogous harmonies tend to give a calm and soft feel to your images when used in more natural tones

they can also make an image more about one particular color when they're used in more saturated combinations they're also used a lot in films to create a feeling different colors can have different associations for us depending on the context they're used for example analogous sets of blues and greens can feel natural and fresh or they can feel cold and sad or even monotonous and boring until the complementary color of red is brought in to stand out from all that green one instance of the complementary colour in a frame of analogous or monochromatic colours will stand

out and catch your eye were you listening to me neo or were you looking at the woman in the red dress these complementary harmonies use colour from opposite sides of the colour wheel these sit well together and they make an image feel balanced and this is by far the most common way people use color in photography and in film this is the reason for many popular color combinations including the classic cinematic orange and teal look that you see everywhere more on that later and the reds and greens of film like emily some of the most

famous and revered color photos throughout history use this color harmony to great effect it's one of the reasons that mccurry's afghan girl portrait works so well once you start looking for this technique you'll start to see complementary color harmonies used absolutely everywhere and you'll also start to find that you have a more clear direction when looking to compose your own shots 5. use colored lighting coloured lighting can work to great effect in your images you can buy coloured gels for your flash guns very cheaply online you can also just use other things i shot these

just using two desk lamps with a couple of colour changing smart bulbs that i can control from an app on my phone you can also look for sources of colored light while you're out and about maybe things like neon signs in shop windows or glowing adverts on bus stops there's plenty of stuff you can find around your house too maybe use your tv or your computer screen to give off a colored light just fill the screen with that color and then you have an effective light play around because you'd be surprised at how good the

results can look number six understand that our perception of color is relative like many things in life our brains understand color largely in relation to the other colors around it make sure to take this into account when editing colors because we can often push colors further than we expect and still perceive them as looking correct for example these are what we may call good skin tones and there are formulas out there to achieve them i've referenced them myself before on my channel so when we look at these to add in a bright orange like this

would seem completely out of place it would be a bad skin tone but this is the color of the skin tone used in the film amelie and when we see it in context it looks perfectly fine because of the way the film is graded to use a correct skin tone here would look weird number seven know your software whether you shoot digital or you shoot film it's important to know how to achieve the effect you're looking for in your editing software it's generally a better idea to have a vision in mind for your image rather

than to just play around until you hit on something you like there's so much to go through in editing software that i'm just gonna give you an overview just a really top level sort of rundown in lightroom but hopefully you'll be able to translate what i'm saying to whichever program you use to edit okay so i'm in lightroom now and i'm just gonna give you a very brief overview of the different ways to edit color in your images now i've got an image here from a canon eos r i can see straight away actually that

these colors don't look right and i know the reason for that so this is another little tip here the reason for this is because lightroom is set to adobe default if you go into your preferences in your presets tab change that to camera settings and then it will apply the profile from your camera rather than adobe's default so if i change that and then reset this then we get the proper colors that's the colors that are meant to come out of the canon little tip there so first off we start at the top and we

got our white balance that's very simple just makes it cooler or warmer and you've got your tint to just tweak that but try and think beyond just getting a correct white balance try and think what you want your image to say do you want it to feel really warm do you want it to feel cold and don't be afraid to really push the white balance you can really change how an image looks you can make this shot feel like it was a night shot or you could push it into the kind of afternoon sun do

you want it to feel clinical do you want it to feel comforting do you want to feel too hot there's a lot of things you can do with white balance if you push it so play around with that a little bit so next down here we've got our vibrance and saturation saturation takes all the colors and adds saturation to them what vibrance does it adds saturation and takes it away but it adds more saturation to the less saturated colors so it kind of brings them all together a little bit and the more saturated colors it

doesn't push up so you get a more natural look so if i push my saturation up that looks quite weird but if i was to push my vibrance up doesn't look quite so weird so the next one down is your tone curve and you can get a lot of control out of your tone curve you've got your basic tone curve here but you've also got your red green and blue and if you look here you can see you've got red and a sort of cyan there and you've got a green and a magenta and a

blue and a yellow so if i want to warm up the white balance another way i could do that would be i could push this red up but i need to get rid of some of that magenta so i'd go to the green and i'd pull that up to there a little bit and i can push that down there that's very very warm white balance so the tone curve is probably the best way to grade your image you can get a lot of control out of it more control than anything else in pretty much any

program it's the most powerful tool it's quite tricky to use but you just need practice and if you're in lightroom you can hold alt or option and it will slow down your movement so you can make more gradual incremental shifts so the next one down the hsl the hue saturation and luminance this deals with the perceived color of the image and i'll explain what i mean by that in a minute because we also have the calibration which deals with the actual color so it does the same thing i will come back to this because we've

got one more thing the color grading now i would generally stay away from color grading if you do use it use it very minimally because it puts a whole wash just over the whole image and it's not very selective and it can start to look very weird very fast but it can be used a good effect if you use it right so now let me try to explain the difference between the hsl panel the hue saturation and luminance and the calibration so they basically do the same thing but hsl deals with the perceived colors and

calibration deals with the actual colors so i'll explain what i mean by that using the color wheel perceived colors what we see when we look at the screen so this color here we see red so if i were to change the luminance of the red slider the colors with red in change their luminance same with blue if i were to change the hue value of the blue the colors with blue in change but these aren't actually just the colors with blue in if i were to hover over the blue what we can see up here

on the screen we've got 40 red in there and 18 green as well as 93 percent blue and on red we have 75 red but we've also got 34 green 13 blue because every pixel in your image is made up of a level of red a level of green and a level of blue so what the hsl sliders do is they affect the outcome of the red and blue and green channels mixed together so what we perceive as red what we perceive as blue whereas the calibration sliders affect the actual breakdown of each color they

just affect the red channel or the green channel or the blue channel this is one of the reasons why i like lightroom as opposed to capture one because lightroom has this calibration capture one doesn't photoshop has it as well in its camera raw feature um i'm not aware of any other editing programs that do have this i'm sure there are some around if you know any please let me know in the comments and so other people can see which ones have them but if i were to change the hue of the red or the saturation

of the red with these you'll see that every single color changes because every single color has red in it same with the green every single color has green in it and the blue but the interesting thing about the calibration palette is when you pull the hue sliders to one side or the other you start to get breakdowns of color like here we have teal and orange or green and purple we are creating complementary color palettes and this can be used great effect to grade your images so if i take this for example and i just

go to this image here and i just click the previous button it's cropped it there but if you ignore the crop if you look at what the calibration's done it's giving you a bit of a teal and orange look [Music] so let me take you through a couple of quick edits just to show you why this is good so this is an image of some flowers i took a wedding it was all the jars together before they went out onto the table so i just took a cropped shot filled the frame with it now it's

very colorful but there are so many different colors in here you've got this green and this pink and this purple and the different purple then a different purple again and yellow and orange and red and none of the colors sit harmoniously together so if we go into the calibration and i start messing around with these i start taking out colors so what i'm doing here if you can see see the effects of this now i don't need to pull them completely to the sides but if i if you look at what was there before and

how this is going now what's happening is where there are different oranges and greens and yellows it's now putting them all into a similar kind of hue and so if i were to bump the vibrance up a little bit of that and pull the contrast up maybe dehaze it slightly we've got quite an interesting looking image it has a much stronger color theme to it okay this is another shot from the same wedding and say we wanted to make this look cinematic because that's uh something you hear a lot of people go oh that looks

really cinematic so what we do to make this look cinematic so we'll take a crop first and just maybe crop them into the middle third of the frame when you have a more panoramic shot it looks more cinematic to start with but the main thing is the color we don't have too much color going on here but we can give it that orange and teal look by taking the blue primary pulling it to the left the green primary can bring back some orange in there and we're getting very strong kind of orange and teal look

now that's where we were there there we go so i'm going to pull the warmth up a little bit but i want to bring back some of that teal in the sky and what i'm going to do is use the hsl panel now so i'm going to take my targeted adjustment tool which is rather than going on the individual color sliders you can click an area of the image and drag it up and down to change the luminance so i'm going to pull the luminance down a little bit i'm really overdoing this to um i

wouldn't normally grade an image like this but i'm just for purposes of showing you pull the saturation up and maybe i just might put a little bit more green in that so i think the overall saturation of the image needs to come down a little bit and i need to pull the blacks down a little bit uh cinema tends to have quite deep blacks in a way that photography tends not to do photography tends to have more detail in the shot and cinema because it's moving you can get away with losing more information so that's

another another cinematic look so there we go it looks a lot more cinematic now and this is mainly due to the calibration if we turn that off it just looks it doesn't look anywhere near as cinematic and it's because by using the calibration we've removed colors and we've made a much stronger color theme to the image the calibration can be used in a much more practical way um i've got a shot of a bride and a groom here walking through this sea of kind of green foliage but it's very overpowering i don't really like the

colors here if i were to go to the hsl um i could pull the luminance down and maybe the saturation maybe the hue but it's starting to look weird if we take some of the yellow out of there like that it doesn't look right so i'm going to go to my calibration and i'm going to take my green primary and i'm going to pull that up towards the blue so that now is looking very weird but if i take the blue primary and i pull that down that way and then to fix their skin tone

i'm just going to pull the reds up a bit more into orange and just take a bit of saturation out of it if you see how the colors have shifted now with that calibration we've just taken the focus away from the green foliage and we've just pulled the tones kind of we're going to crunch them closer together so you can do lots of very interesting things with the calibration and what's great about it is it looks so natural when you do it it doesn't look like it's obviously been tweaked so while your calibration is good

for just grading your whole image the hsl panel is great for just taking a specific color and changing it so maybe we want to make that chair purple we can do that or a vibrant green or we want to take the saturation out and only those areas of color are being affected number eight edit in the right conditions please don't go sit in a cafe with your macbook with sun streaming in at the window and try to edit color you need to edit in an environment where you can see the screen properly color calibrate your

screen as well as i've said before in other videos take regular breaks go away and come back see your colorful creations with fresh eyes experiment with color push the boundaries a bit try some new things try abstract work try creating surreal colors using just in camera experiment with maybe re-editing older photos that you've taken see how different you can make them also feel free to further experiment with color by getting some of my lightroom preset packs i'll put a link in the description you can support my channel this way if you want i've got kodachrome

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