Advanced SearchYou've finished your image and everything should look perfect: you've got lots of detail, you've put a lot of thought into the overall placement of each element, and you've got a great concept. But something's not working.
If you're not paying attention to the color in your image, you're missing one of the single most important visual elements at your disposal. Color does it all: inspires emotions, punches out elements and draws the eye, heats up or tones down a mood. Color creates drama, depth, and volume. On the flip side, though, using the wrong color can easily ruin what otherwise would have been a great composition. Don't settle for the colors the world dishes up. Choose your hues, organize your tints, and take control of your palette.
See, different surfaces reflect or absorb different parts of the visible light spectrum. Your eye, little marvel that it is, sorts the light out and gives you the color. "What is red?" is a question for philosophy students and stoners. What matters to us is that all colors evoke different moods, feelings, and reactions in people, and if we can control the color in an image, we can influence how people react to it.
The thing to keep in mind is, we're not always viewing the same reflection and absorption of light waves 24/7. For example, a bright red shirt when viewed in broad daylight will likely appear, well, bright red. But the same red shirt when viewed in the evening will be a very different shade, it will be a much darker color. Yellow lighting will make the shirt appear more orange.
For photographers, the fickle relationship between color and light is one of the best things going. It means that not only can you control the color of the elements in your image, you can manipulate the temperature and tones as well. From playing with transparent light gels or colored reflectors, to the white balance settings you choose or time of day you go outside, you can learn to micro-manage color for precise chromatic control. And that's just talking in-camera. When the time comes for post-processing, you're into a whole other realm of sliders, graphs, and RGB values.
Illustrators have even finer control — they get colors at the touch of a button. There are millions of shades built into the brain of the computer sitting in front of you — all you have to do is pick the right ones.
The key is to know the effect you're after ahead of time. Think about color right from the planning stage. Visualize the mood and tone you want, and the palette that goes along with it. How is the interaction between colors going to enhance your composition? How much needs to be arranged before the shoot, and how much can you do later with software? Illustrators, is the default palette going to cut it, or do you need to select a specific color range to work with?
And how do colors interact with each other, anyway?
We're all familiar with this happy little diagram (right?). For those who don't remember, there are 3 primary colors: red, yellow, and blue. You can take any combination of these colors and create 'Secondary Colors': green, orange and purple. Combining red and blue will create purple, and mixing yellow and red together will create orange. By varying the amounts of primary colors you're combining, you can create reddish purples, deep indigos, bright teals, and yellowy lime greens. Pick up a couple tubes of paint in the primary colors and see how many color combinations you can come up with. Arrange, blend, and compare side by side to get an idea of how they relate to each other.
Even better, if you're in the mood for experimenting, play with the lights to really get a feel for the right color mix. Spectral colors interact differently than pigments, so combining lights will make for different outcomes than mixing paint. Transparent gels, colored lens filters, tinted novelty lightbulbs — try them all out and see how the colors change.
There are a few different ways you can combine colors. What we'll need to illustrate our examples is the classic Color Wheel (shown right).
If you check out the wheel, you'll see it's divided into 3 sections by each of the Primary Colors: red, blue and yellow. The colors that appear between each color are the colors that can be created by mixing the Primary Colors, creating the aforementioned Secondary Colors. Between red and yellow you'll see orange, and on either side of orange the orange will appear yellower or redder, depending on which Primary Color you're travelling towards.
These colors can be combined in any number of ways, but there are a few particular combinations we'd like to draw your attention to (don't worry, we'll keep things simple).
Colors can be modified through the use of what arty types refer to as shading and tinting. The unshaded, untinted color is called the hue. Shades are created with a single color and then adding varying degrees of black. Tints are where you take a single color and add white to create lighter colors. Pink and red are the same color, but the pink has been 'tinted' to create a different look, and rust is simply a shaded version of red.
A composition containing a single color that's been tinted or shaded is known as 'monochromatic'. Monochromatic color combinations can be used with dramatic results: Don't ever feel you're limited when working with a monochromatic color palette. The trick is to use the opposite ends of the color swatches you're working with to give maximum depth and volume to an image.
If you take the color steps between any 2 Primary Colors, you have what are called 'analogous' colors. These colors share much of the same base colors, for example, reds, oranges, and yellows. You might think, well, that's a limiting color palette... But analogous colors can be used together in suprisingly dramatic ways. Take the examples above: there aren't a wide variety of colors in use, but they work together in a way that creates very believable and realistic images.
Like analogous color, we base 'complementary' colors on our handy dandy color wheel. Pick any color on the wheel, then pick the color directly opposite. The combination you've just created is what's known as a complementary combination. Orange birds love blue skies, green trees crave red lights, and purple lips are best with golden yellow hair. For whatever reason, they just look good together. Actually, we know the reason, something to do with direct opposites in the color spectrum creating the maximum contrast. If you really want to draw attention to any part of an image, pair it with a complimentary color to make it pop.
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