Digital Photography

Successful color photography means learning to use color as a compositional toolas a form of visual communication in its own rightrather than just reproducing a scene or subject that happens to be in color.

Color is far from being merely incidental, any more than is the surface texture of a subject or, indeed, the quality of the light illuminating it. Color is an integral part of our experience of the subject, helping to determine both the mood and the atmosphere of the scene and our emotional responses to it. One way to come to terms with this is to record colors as if they were distinct entities, separate from the things displaying them.

Once you have made this change in mental focus, you could, for example, start evaluating scenes not in terms of vistas or panoramas, but in terms of color content. Look at, say, the greensare they as intense as you want? Is the light too contrasty for them to have real depth? Is your shooting position right in relation to the light in order to give the color impact you want to record? Look at a city scene not because it is full of activity but because there, among the drabness, are flashes of red, or blue, or green. And if a neighboring color is distracting, change focal length or crop the final image to exclude it.

An advantage digital photographers have over their traditional counterparts is that it is easy, using image-manipulation software, to alter the colors of the recorded image. Not only are broad-stroke changes possiblesuch as whole areas of sky or foregroundbut you can also select very precise parts of a scene for the software to work on. And if radical changes are not appropriate, then it is just as easy to alter color contrast, saturation, or brightness to emphasize one particular part of the image or suppress another.