subject: The Basics About Color Photography [print this page] The Basics About Color Photography The Basics About Color Photography
While black and white photography has long been the photo class standard, there comes a time when every photographer wants to experiment with representing the world in the exact way that we see it in color. Adding color to images brings its own set of complications and requires the photographer to have a firm understanding of the basic elements of photography, but can still be broken down into a few easy to understand elements.
Contrast
In black and white photography, contrast refers to the difference between the lightest and darkest elements of a photograph. In essence, you can think of contrast as "how white is white?" Basically, black and white photography only has high, medium, or low contrast. In color photography, contrast gets a little more interesting.. Color photography has color contrast compared to the tonal contrast of black and white.
Color contrast is determined by the way each of the colors interacts with the colors surrounding it. So, although you can still adjust the contrast and push bright colors darker, the colors will look different in the picture depending upon the colors around it. For instance, think of a baseball sitting in bright green grass that image has high color contrast because the bright white of the baseball will stand out against the cool green of the grass.
Color Temperature
Whenever you take photographs in color you will have to keep an eye on their color temperature. One thing that will affect the color temperature of your picture is the different types of lights that you use. While there are a lot of technical measurements for color temperature and the way it interacts with actual temperature, we can think of it in terms of tint.
Tint and color temperature are actually referred to as "white balance" in photography. Film and sensors are developed with a certain kind of light in mind, and any time photos are shot in different lighting circumstances it will affect whether or not white looks truly "white." For example, if you take a picture underneath a fluorescent light is always has a green tint to it because that's the color temperature of those lights
How to Use Temperature
When shooting in color, it is important to understand which color temperature or tint is best for the image you're trying to create. Warm, reddish tints, like those at sunset, are flattering to most skin tones while buish tints are better for neutral product pictures.
Color temperature can be modified in-camera by adjusting your white balance or by using filters, or you can attempt to edit the image after the fact with darkroom work or in editing software like Adobe Photoshop. Similar to aperture and shutter speed, it's usually a good idea to take a photograph several times with different white balance settings to give yourself the most flexibility after the shoot is over.
Learning how to master colors is a skill that takes lots of practice. The theory behind the use of different colors is a controversial and complex topic as photographers often use different colors to help achieve certain emotions in their photographs.
If you're just getting started with color, the best first goal is to accurately capture the environment the way that you saw it. Once you can do this reliably with color photography, you can start working to manipulate these colors to add to the narrative of your photographs. And as usual, find what works works best for you and have fun doing it.
