Photographers are used to valuing ‘great light’ and striking compositions—think soft, even lighting for portraits and striking rock formations for seascapes. There’s also value in great colour too, but you can have too much of a good thing. Don’t simply crank up Lightroom’s saturation slider and call it a day

A richer understanding of colour will enhance how your images are experienced—how exactly? Subtlety and refinement is key. 

Note: The below points are a summary of the above video.

The Impact of Colour 

• Attention: Our eyes drift towards warmer and more saturated areas

  • Look to avoid warm areas in the periphery as this can draw the viewer out of the photo

• Depth: Cooler areas tend to recede into the image, while warmer areas tend to come forward

  • Consider cooling down the shadows and warming up the highlights to create colour contrast, and better direct the viewing experience

• Mood: Refining colour tones helps to better establish the intended mood for an image

  • We may wish to cool down a forest scene to emphasise the eerie experience, or warm up a sunrise to make it lighter and more inviting

How to Use Colour

• Control & Constraint

  • A kaleidoscope of colours is often visually distracting

    • A wide range of hues in a single image may clash, each competing for attention

• Colour Theory

  • A pleasing, ordered sense of harmony in your images 

    • Achieved through colours that work well together

  • The three colour harmonies that are easiest to recognise—and realise—in your own imagery:

    • Analogous

    • Monochromatic

    • Complementary

  • Colour harmonies are a tool, not a rule

Analogous Harmony

• Analogous colours are neighbours on the colour wheel (such as a collection of cool or warm tones) 

  • Picture a lush green forest scene with small patches of yellow light

• Processing Tips

  • Darken or reduce the saturation of outlying hues

  • ‘Squish’ outliers into the Analogous range

    • For example, shifting reds to magenta in the above colour wheel

Monochromatic Harmony

• Monochromatic colour harmonies consist of a very tight cluster of hues, only varying in brightness or saturation to emphasise light and forms 

  • Consider an eerie blue twilight scene

• Processing Tips

  • Shift the global white balance to reign in all the colours into a single (monochrome) hue

  • If the image becomes unnaturally blue or green, reduce global saturation

Complementary Harmony

• Complementary colours exist opposite one another on the colour wheel, and look great in contrast

  • A classic example in Australian seascapes is cool rocks/water underneath a warm sunrise

• Processing Tips

  • Achieve this colour contrast through the Split Toning module in Lightroom or luminosity masks in Photoshop

  • Warming up the highlights and cooling down the shadows

Practical Applications in Lightroom

• Balance Your White Balance

  • Shoot all your images in RAW 

  • Experiment by dragging the two white balance sliders to their extremes and observe the effect

    • Perhaps a warmer tone suits the golden hour scene, while adding magenta makes the seascape sky pop

• Warm Light and Cool Shadows

  • Natural sunlight is warm—both in temperature and in white balance 

    • Use the Split Toning module to create colour separation between light and dark areas and emphasise depth

• Achieve Harmony with HSL Sliders

  • Shift hues to better align with a particular harmony

  • Desaturate colours that clash