How to Use Colour to Enhance Your Photography

1. Introduction: When used correctly, color can be a fantastic way to elevate your photography, whether you're a portrait photographer or a street photographer. Experimenting with color and using it purposefully can not only help you create more visually pleasing and cohesive images, but can also assist you in communicating meaning and stories within your work. Hi, my name is Sophia Carey and I'm a fashion photographer from the UK. I work predominantly in fashion and portraits, but my full body of work spans across multiple different genres, with clients spanning from Leigh-Anne Pinnock to Lumix. With a background in graphic design, the ideas and the theories that surround color have always been something that I focused on within my photography work. In today's class, we're going to be exploring the basics of color theory and how you can use color to enhance your photographs. If you're looking for a basic understanding of color, color theory and color psychology, and how you can use some really easy tools and techniques to quickly enhance your photography work. Then let's get stuck in. 2. Class Project: Thanks for choosing to continue. I'm so excited for us to really get stuck into the world of color and what it means for your photography. For the class projects, I'm going to ask you guys to create a photograph that either implements one of the color theories that we're going to be going through, all color psychology. Alongside your photo, give us a brief explanation of what colors you've chosen and why. For bonus points, see if you can try to use one color theory and color psychology in the same image. When you've complete your photograph, upload it to the project gallery so that we can give it a look and give feedback. On our next lesson, we're going to be getting stuck straight in and talking about what is the color wheel. [MUSIC] 3. The Colour Wheel & Colour Vocabulary: In this lesson, we're going to be discussing the color wheel and some common terminology when it comes to colors. The color wheel is simply a circular arrangement of colors organized by their chromatic relationship to one another. If we take, for example, primary education where we're taught if you mix one color with another color, it creates one color. If we mix blue and yellow, two primary colors, then we get green, creating a secondary color. As you continue this mixing, we create tertiary colors, etc. This ends up fleshing out the color wheel into something that has a variety of different colors and hues. When it comes to color, there are four particular terms that you want to get acquainted with. Hue refers to the color selection. The actual color, for example, red, blue, green, those are all hues. Next up we have saturation. Saturation refers to the intensity of that hue. Thirdly, we have value which is also sometimes referred to as luminosity. Value refers to the brightness of the hue. If we take a hue, for example, red and we add white to that hue creating a lighter red, this creates something called a tint which is essentially a lighter variation of a hue. However, if we were to add black to red and make a darker variation of red, that we refer to as a shade. Hue, saturation and luminosity/value are things that you'll often come into contact with, especially when it comes to editing your photos in something like Adobe Photoshop or Adobe Lightroom. It's quite common for you to hear of an HSL slider which refers simply as a Hue Saturation Luminosity slider where you can change the hue, the saturation, and the luminosity of certain colors or all colors within your image. Later on in the class, we will be looking a little bit more at editing and how you can use the HSL slider. We've covered hue, we've covered saturation and we've covered value/ luminosity. Finally, we want to talk about temperature. Temperature refers to how warm or how cool a color is. Often, we think about colors in terms of spectrums. When we look at a color spectrum, we often think about them and categorize them as warm and cold colors. For example, reds, yellows, oranges tend to be on the warmer end of the spectrum whereas blues and greens tend to be cooler. Understanding these key bits of terminology will help you as we move through the class. In the next lesson, we're going to be talking about color theory and exploring some key color pairings which will help you in creating your class projects. 4. Colour Theory: How to Pair Colours: In this lesson, we're going to be exploring color theory and some really key color pairings. Color theory really just refers to how you use the colors within the color wheel in harmony, how you can use specific pairings to create visual effects and cohesion within your images. The first type of color scheme we're going to be looking at is a color scheme called monochromatic. Monochromatic refers to taking one hue and creating variations of that same hue using saturation and luminosity. Often people get confused when they hear the word monochromatic and they straightaway think black and white. Simply put, monochromatic or monochrome derive from the words mono, meaning one, and chrome, meaning color. It just means one color and this instance, we know that color refers to hue, so one hue. For example, you could have an image that uses a variety of blue hues. When it comes to using a monochromatic palette, monochromatic palettes don't tend to be very eye-catching. If you're working on advertising work or some other work where you're really needing to grab the viewer's attention, then this might not be the scheme for you. Because of the lack of contrast within a monochromatic color scheme, it tends to be quite easy to digest and because of this, it can create a more soothing and relaxing image to consume. We will later move on to exploring color psychology but one of the things about a monochromatic color scheme is that because you are using one hue in such intensity, you can really drive home the connotations of whichever hue it is that you're choosing. The next pairing to explore is the analogous pairing. Whilst it's a mouthful and a bit of a tricky word to say, it is a really easy one to remember. Analogous color pairings refer to colors that are next to each other on the color wheel. Analogous color schemes create visually pleasing and often calming displays. They go so well together that it creates a really comfortable and almost serine design. Next up is another easy one to remember and this one is complementary. Complementary is what it sounds like, there's two colors that complement each other very well. The way that we can spot complimentary colors is that they are opposite each other on the color wheel. Using complementary colors is a great way to introduce contrast into images. The science behind this is to do with the different photoreceptors in your brain. Your eye actually wants to see the color that contrasts whichever color you are using. Using complementary colors simultaneously stimulates different parts of the eye, which creates a really strong sense of balance, hence why it's so visually pleasing. Using complementary colors within your photography or any kind of visual art is probably the color pair that you will find most often. Moving on to our next pairing, split complementary is a variation of complementary colors. To create a split complementary color scheme, we want to pick a hue and then look at what's opposite here and choose the colors either side of the color that is opposite. This creates a triangle shape. Using this scheme is great because it creates the same amount of contrast as complementary, but it gives you a little bit more variety to work within. Next stop is triadic, which refers to three colors evenly split up that form a perfect triangle and create a really intense look. Following triadic, we've got tetradic. Tetradic refers to four colors creating a rectangle on the color wheel. A great way to use a tetradic color scheme without overwhelming the viewer is to choose one of the colors as a dominant color and the other colors more as accented colors. In this lesson, we have covered some of the basic pairings that we're going to be using throughout this class. In the next lesson, we're going to be touching on color psychology and exploring what different colors mean and what they tell your audience. 5. Colour Psychology: The Meanings of Colours: In this lesson, we're going to be exploring color psychology. Color psychology really refers to the concept of visual communication. It's the idea that every color that you've use sends a message to your audience. Generally in day-to-day life we already know this, we know that if you see bright colors, that tends to mean uplifting or fun or happy. Color psychology just uses the concept that we already understand where colors or types of colors carry these connotations, but it's also important to understand that color is subjective. Meaning is subjective and context is important. For example, the meaning of colors can change depending on the context, depending on you as a person, your relationship with the brand, your relationship with an image, a piece of clothing, your upbringing, your culture, things you've learned as you've grown up. All of these things, all these different contexts come into play when we talk about color psychology and so color weren't always read exactly the same for everyone. However, there are some common connotations that colors carry. For example, red is often connoting danger or passion, excitement or love. A lot of the ways in which red has come to connote this, is through not only the psychological effect it has on your brain and the actual messages that sense your brain in response it creates, but also through years and years of marketing and everyday life. For example, red has a really long wavelength. Because of this wavelength, it means that it's really easy to catch someone's attention with the color red. Of course, that's why a lot of signs, traffic lights, things like that, that needs to get into people's faces that need to be seen quickly and urgently use the color red. Things like this being used over time. This repetitive notion the red is urgent helps to consolidate that in your head, that red equates danger. Then we look at the way that marketers use colors. For example, a lot of fast-food restaurants use the color red because there are studies to suggest that the color red stimulates your hunger. Marketers, brands have capitalized on these psychologies and use it within their brands for decades, for as long as branding and marketing has been around. This is a really good example about how contexts and upbringing can change your perception on a color. Another great example is the color blue. The color blue can often be seen as very calming and serene, probably because we associate with things in nature that are calming and serene such as the water. There is also another connotation of blue that suggests that it's quite a corporate color, suggests that it's trustworthy, it's reliable, it's professional. Similarly to the color red and the connotations that red carries, blue carries similar connotations for similar reasons. First of all, there was a study done that suggested that blue would increase people's levels of productivity. Because of this, it was used a lot in corporate environments. I'm sure you can think of a million brands from the top of your head that use blue in corporate settings. Now because of this connotation that's likely why we associate it with professionalism, with trust, with sensibility. It's important to understand that not only do colors create a physical and mental response in your brain, they are also carrying connotations that's are very dependent on your life experiences and what you've been exposed to. Let's quickly go through some of the connotations of other colors. For example, orange tends to be quite a happy and friendly color. The color purple is often associated with more luxurious themes such as royalty and wealth. This actually comes from an interesting context where purple dye was really expensive to get a hold of and so the only people that were able to paint with purple, for example, were those who were wealthy or royal. The color yellow is quite similar to the color orange in terms of its connotations. This is likely due to the fact that is a warm color, but generally, we associate the color yellow with happiness, enthusiasm, friendliness, optimism, and confidence. When it comes to the color green, of course, we usually relate this to not true themes, to the idea of new beginnings and growth and refreshment and balance. [MUSIC] In our next lesson, we're going to be looking at color in practice. I'm going to be heading out into the field with my camera to take some portraits and we're going to be looking at how we can use particular color schemes and color techniques within our walk. 6. Practice: The Shoot: In this lesson, we're going to head outdoors and I'm going to be taking my camera to portrait shoot. We're going to be playing about with different color pairings and how we can use things such as artificial light to help us enhance and solidify the color techniques that we want to use. For the shoot, we are going to be playing a lot with color, we're going to be playing a lot with monochromatic color schemes, with color matching and pairing. I just headed to Sainsbury and picked up a Lucozade, the red one, which I didn't know that they did, and a bunch of red roses. Hopefully with the lights that we're going to be using, and some of the other props that I've got with me, is going to make for a really good unified shoot. Yeah perfect. Okay. Then just tilt your head down a little bit more [inaudible]. In this setup, we are playing around with two different color pairings in particular. Firstly, we are looking at complementary colors with the green of the flower stem and the red leaves and the red light. That green and that red are complementary colors. Secondly, we're using a technique called color matching, which essentially plays around with the idea of a monochrome palette, and we're matching the red light to the red leaves. In this example, we are using the same two techniques in a slightly different way. Instead of matching the red light to the red petals, we're matching a green light to the green stem. Still keeping within that complementary color scheme of the red and the green. Maybe if you just lightly back on the thing, I think maybe you got to bend more on your knee. Yeah perfect. Then just tilt your head down towards me a little bit. Nice I'm going to [inaudible] so. Here we are moving away from the idea of color matching, the sticking with the technique of using complementary colors. However, this time instead of using green and red, we're using the orange ambient light from underneath the tunnel and some added blue lights. Since orange and blue are complementary colors and a really common color pairing that you'll probably come across. As we discussed in a previous lesson, the color red has a really long wavelength. Because of this, when we're using red lights, it can become really overpowering which makes it a great color light to use when you're trying to achieve a monochromatic color scheme, as it tends to override the other colors in the image. [MUSIC] In our next lesson, we're going to be jumping into Adobe Lightroom. We're going to be looking at some of the post-processing techniques that you can use to help enhance your images. We're going to be looking at how we can manipulate colors, and how we can create more concise communication with our color choices, as well as how we can adjust colors to make for more harmonious and cohesive images. 7. Practice: Editing: In this lesson, we're going to be going through a selection of different photographs that I've taken over the years. We're going to be looking at some key techniques within Adobe Lightroom that we can use to enhance the colors in our images. First up, we're going to take this photo of Dan that I shot on medium format film during the practice that you would have seen in the last lesson. I'm going to come into the Develop tab. We're just going to start by flipping this image into portrait orientation. The first thing that I'm going to do is in this section where the shadows are underexposed, I'm going to look at playing around with something called split toning. Split toning essentially is the color grading section of Lightroom. It refers to adding a color to the highlights, the shadows, and then just the overall image. As we can see in here, these are your midtones. If I select a really intense color, let's go for a bright pink or purple so that you can see. You can see how in the midtones here, we've got a really bright pink hue. By moving this down towards the center, I can reduce the saturation of this hue. As I run around the wheel, you can see that this is creating a color cast on, pretty much the whole image is affecting most of the image given that it's affecting the midtones. I'm just going to double-click in the center here to reset that. If I want to go down into the shadows, I can also click here. I can do the same thing and apply a color to the shadows. You can see here, that if I add a red, we're adding more of a monochrome vibe by having lots of different red hues within the image. If, however, I go around to the green section, we're utilizing a complementary scheme. However, I don't like how overbearing that is, so I can just reduce the saturation here. Then if we go to the highlights, you'll see that that is affecting mostly these highlights at the top, there's not many highlights in this image for it to effect. If we're going through a complementary scheme, for example, I could add some green highlights into that as well. Split toning is a really useful device to create color combinations within your work. However, because I've been using such a strong light in this image, it might not be the best way to show you how to use it. We're going to open up a world digital image. This is a landscape image taken in New York. What we're going to do now is we're going to do the same thing. We're not going to touch any of the other editing tools for now, we're just going to come down into the split toning section, the color grading section, and we're going to look at how we can introduce color into this image to create a more dystopian feel, think, like a Gotham vibe, really dark sitting. We're going to use two things here. We're going to use our knowledge of color theory, we're also going to use our knowledge of color psychology. We're going to head down into the shadows. We're going to think dystopian look, depressing, dark. We're going to introduce some blue colors. As you can see here, we're introducing some blues into the shadows. We can do the same in the highlights, or we can contrast those shadows with a complementary color such as orange. I think I'm actually going to go for this really desaturated green, just so that it's not too monochromatic. There's a little bit of contrast in there. Then when we come to the midtone, we can play around again and have a look at what color looks best for our dystopian city. If we're adding an orange, we have that complementary color between the blues and the shadows and the oranges in the midtones. It looks like the city is on fire. Also using what we know about red tones, it does promote that danger. I'm going to stick on the cooler spectrum, and then we're also going to come up and play around with some of the tools and techniques in Lightroom that don't necessarily affect the colors. You can see that as I've added contrast here, maybe this blue is a little bit too saturated. We're going to come into our HSL sliders. HSL again, stands for hue, saturation, and luminance. We're going to stick with the saturation box. We're going to click this little dot here, come into the image and drag where the blue is to slightly desaturate those blues. Again, if you want some more fine tuning, you can use the sliders on the actual image. To decrease the saturation, we can come into our split toning and just bring that down slightly so that it's less intense. What we can also do is we can use the hue slider, and we can use this little dot to drag in the image and change certain hues within the photo. For example, we could make this sky a little bit more fiery by changing the hue to a red tone. Coming back into our saturation tab, increasing that saturation, and then into luminance, we can make it darker if we want to or lighter. I'm going to go back into it again, and make it a little bit more orange just so that it goes better with the blues that we have going on. You may use these darker as well to make it a little bit medial. Next step, when it comes to the colors, we can go into the tone curves. Essentially, what a tone curve does, is it changes the color channels, the tone channels, makes things darker, lighter. You have seen that I did that earlier on when I was using this curve. But what we can actually do is you can come into the colors. As you can see here, if I click this red circle, I can edit the red channels. I'll start to make some points on this tone curve just to explore what this means. For example, as I'm bringing this down, you can see the diagram on Lightroom explains it quite well. If you move something down, it's going to go more towards this blue color, if you move it up, it's going to go into the reds. We can play around with that and what look that gives your image. I'm going to keep out that for now because I quite like the way the shadows look. This is your midtones. I'm going to add a little bit more red into the midtones, and then we're moving up into the highlights. Add a little bit more red into the highlights, and then when we click the green, we're changing the green tones. For example, here, you can see the upper edge is green, the bottom is a pink magenta color. What I'm doing here is really fine tuning, I'm not making any major adjustments. When we go into blue, you can see the bottom edge is yellow, the top edge is blue. We can see now that we're creating a bit of a yellow, orange haze over the back of the city here. Next up, we're going to look at these color calibrations. This essentially again, is changing the way that these colors appear calibrated within your image. We can start with red and we can see that that hue is changing the reds in the image. We're going to stick on the warmer orange side of that, and we can also change the saturation, so we can bring those reds and those orange warmer hues up or we can reduce them. Down into green, let's have a go here. You can see that it's having a little bit of effect on these orange colors here, mostly because you have a little bit yellow in the orange. We're not going to change that too much. Then into blue, here, you can see how it's affecting the shadows. Effectively, what this does is it changes the red value within every color, the green value within every color, and the blue value within every color, which is why even in the blue, you can see the shift in the oranges. Then I'm just going to finish off with some minor adjustments. Going back over everything and checking that happen. Then we can go into our before and after. Next up, we're going to look at the hue and saturation luminance slider in a little bit more detail. We're going to take this rule digital photograph I've taken on a portrait sheet, and we're going to head into the hues. As you can see here, I've used a range of different color techniques. We've got our green and yellow pairing here, we've got our greens and our reds, we've got our yellows and oranges and reds. There's a lot of primary colors, a lot of complimentary colors, a lot of analogous colors that we're referring about in this image. But what if I wanted to change this green to make it more towards the warmer spectrum of colors? Again, we're going to just click on this little dot. I'm going to go over to the trousers and we're going to drag. As you can see, what that's doing is that is changing the green value. We've gone from being quite a vibrant green to being more blacker, muddy olive yellow. Again, we can use these sliders just to make sure that we've got all the colors are speaking well with these colors. We can change our luminance and our saturation as well to help it match well with the other colors in the image. As you can see here, let's go into a quick for an after view. We've changed those trousers from a green to a yellow that matches a little bit more closely with the yellow on the wall. You can also do this after you've added your preset. For example, if I was to add this preset of mine onto an image, make my adjustments, I can still then come down into our hue, saturation and luminance and make those adjustments. If we take this image, which is a really old image actually, and we can look at how we could create maybe a harmonious color scheme here. At the moment, we've got a very monochromatic color scheme. Like I was saying about the color red earlier, it does overwhelm an image often. As you can see, there aren't really any other colors in the image. But what we can do here is we can introduce other colors by using split toning. We can start by adding some yellows and oranges, greens into the highlights. The shadows, we can introduce maybe a blue or green if we want a very full complementary scheme, but I'm going to keep that fairly as close to the center. Just add a little bit of light green or teal to create a little bit of contrast. Most of what we're going to do here, it will be within the highlights, and we're going to be adding the complimentary color. We're going to be adding a green into those red highlights to create a yellowy orange vibe. Again, we can also use our tone curves if we want to further enhance this and make our final adjustments elsewhere on image, but I'm quite happy for demonstration purposes with what we've done here. To recap. We've gone through a few different techniques. We've been exploring how to use color grading and split toning. We've explored tone curves, and we've also explored the hue saturation and luminance sliders to look at how we can enhance and change different images that we've taken. Hopefully, that gives you a good idea on how you can use the tools within Adobe Lightroom to enhance your images. You can also use a lot of these techniques, of course, different editing software such as Capture One, such as Photoshop, such as VSCO or Snapseed on your phone if you don't want to edit on your desktop. Join me in the next lesson where we're going to recap everything that we've learned within this class. 8. Let's Recap!: [MUSIC] In this class, we've covered the basics of color, and how to use it within your work, [NOISE] to both create harmonious and cohesive images that are aesthetically pleasing, as well as using colors to connote and carry meaning within your work. We've looked at the power of a single color, and the predetermined ideas that an audience have about it, as well as some common pairings to help you create visually pleasing images. We've put some color theory techniques into practice in a portrait shoot using artificial light to help support our ideas. We've also explored post-processing techniques in Adobe Lightroom, such as color adjustment and split toning, to help enhance our use of color, and make more intentional choices with color. Now it's your opportunity to head out into the field and put into practice the techniques that we've explored. When you're out shooting, try to focus on finding natural color combinations. They say that nature always creates beautiful color pairings. Maybe start in nature if you're struggling to find any. If you really can't find any combinations in the field, consider bringing in color within your styling, your lighting, and your props, especially when it comes to portrait photography, or even manipulating your colors in post-production. You can also focus on looking for one particular color, for example, red and use the shortcuts that the brain already understands to communicate mood, meaning, and emotion. Again, feel free to use the post-production techniques we've explored to further enhance the color you've chosen to focus on. When you've captured your images, remember to upload them to the class project gallery, with a brief explanation of the color techniques you've used and why. Thank you guys for joining me in this class. I can't wait to see what you've created.