How to get them smashing colors
Getting the colors right in a photo is super important. It’s how you’ll differentiate yourself from most people who just shoot whatever with their phone and don’t edit afterwards. You should be thoughtful about what to shoot and then carefully consider what colors you want to bring out when you post-process. And I’m no expert—I’ll point you to these Instagram profiles so you can get a sense of what I mean:
- https://www.instagram.com/samanthacheng_/ white/bright, with a lot of flat lays and food
- https://www.instagram.com/essssssie/ minimalism, mostly cold colors
- https://www.instagram.com/saschakoller/ a lot of darks, moody
- https://www.instagram.com/bryanadamc/ a specialist in the instagram teal and orange look
- https://www.instagram.com/thismintymoment/ minimalism, geometric, white
So some of this is knowing what to shoot, and some of this is doing some good editing afterwards. Being deliberate is key. So let’s say you have a photo, and the colors are pretty meh right now. What do you do? Let’s look at a photo that I took earlier this year:
Raw image preview, Adobe Standard. Meh.
Back in February when I processed this photo, I slapped a VSCO filter on it and called it a day. The Provia preset I applied made the greens more yellow, slightly saturated the blues, and increased the contrast in the face area. Looking back, definitely not the right choice of edit.
With the “Fuji Provia 400X +” VSCO filter. Ugh!
Now as it so happens, I took this photo on a photowalk. Photowalks are great because you get to take photos with more experienced photographers. For portraiture, it helps because you learn how they pose models (which for me is something I’m less experienced with). In general, it’s useful to observe how other people decide what to shoot and how they frame their shot. And, afterwards, you see their photos, and since you’ve been to the same places, you’re better positioned to think about their before/after.
So, here’s Andie Bigg’s version of the same scene:
Photo by Andie Biggs
Whoa! The greens and blues are pleasing and the photo doesn’t look depressing or apocalyptic! It evokes a fairly dreamy mood and all in all is a 💯 edit. Knowing what was possible, I went back to Lightroom and tried to replicate the color palette. And here’s what I ended up with:
better…
It’s still not perfect (I swung too much in the other direction and made the greens too green) and there are elements that I could not figure out how to do (for example, Andie managed to keep the flowers yellow and the sky has a really beautiful dark to light gradient in the upper left corner) but it’s definitely better than the previous edit.
To achieve this look, it was mainly a matter of fiddling with the HSL sliders. For the hues, I made the yellows more green and the greens more aqua, and I made the blues more aqua as well (to get the sky to look nicer).
If you weren’t already, hopefully this post will inspire you to think more carefully about color in your future photos!