On Embracing The Color Wheel

…said the colorblind photographer. :)

It is one thing not being able to see some of the colors on a color wheel and an entirely different thing not to be aware of one at all. Color contrast is something that I try to pay very close attention to whenever I stylize my images. If everything in the image had the same color, or barely any variance of color, you’d get a very flat looking image.

By effectively using a color wheel as a guide for color contrast, you can help guide the viewer’s eyes to an intended target easily and with purpose. For this image here, I was very deliberate in playing off of two opposite colors on the color wheel, both of which I can see perfectly – Blue and Yellow. I made the majority of the corrugated metal wall blue and then added a major punch of yellow to the chair that was sitting in the gap by the parked train engine. I also added some brown to the engine and concrete ground. All of this helps give the eyes a place to go focus and rest as it explores.

It’s a wonderful practice to become disciplined with as it shows true methodology when you share your finalized images.

You can learn more about the color wheel here at Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_wheel

In terms of processing
This is a seven exposure tone-mapped #HDR  image taken with my Canon 5D Mark III and Canon 17mm T/S lens. I created the 32-bit intermediary floating point TIFF in Photomatix and tone-mapped in Lightroom 4.1.

All stylization was accomplished in Perfect Effects 3 by +onOne Software. I applied Cyberpunk to all of the corrugated metal and masked it off of the train, chair and the ground. For the ground, I masked in Thermopylae to give it that nice brown tinge. Finally, for the chair itself, I masked in Havana.

Final touches were applied in Lightroom 4.1.

In album Pic Picks Over The Years (1 photo)

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