Some of these examples include Vanity Retouching, Shadow/Highlight edits, and more; however fixing color issues resolved more issues than anything else. This is one of the first steps in preparing an image for more drastic effects yet to be added.
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| The yellow in this shot washed out the reds, blues, and browns. Take note of the clothes and carpet to see how dramatic this seemingly subtle difference makes |
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| Red affected everything in this image. Correcting for it helped the clothes, skin, and background seem realistic and striking |
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| This shot started without any striking color, but zeroing in on the red of the bench pain and accentuating it gave the image a spirit, or "Gestalt", that wasn't present previously. Now the age and neglect of the bench is palpable, and the image has a message, or meaning that it didn't before |
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| Close shots of flowers are common. Even though they are often beautiful, their nature is often benign and it can be tricky to get a flower image to stick in a client's memory. I have noticed that too often in post processing the flower gets desaturated in an attempt to achieve a classic, timeless look. However, people usually admire a flower for the color, and the small details that make it unique. Definition of those details is lost or visually reduced once the image is desaturated or covered in a sepia filter. |
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| This is a very old image, one of the first I took with my (then) new digital camera. The content is less than spectacular, but I have found it a very satisfying or even entertaining image to work with in terms of Color Management. The image is of a friend's painting extremely close. The appeal of both the painting and the image capture is the three dimensionality of the paint on a two dimensional surface. Accentuating the color differences in this mostly red image draws out the three dimensional aspect of the painting. |
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| Green is an interesting color to work with when it is beyond dominant in the image. This is one of my favorite examples of the rare case that green in the only impressionable color in the image. The impulse is to draw out the greens to an unrealistic extent. In this image, handling Shade/Shadow expertly went hand in hand with Color Management to achieve the desired effect. |
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| This is an image in which the incandescent lighting of the streetlamps mixed with the natural, overcast light to sublime effect. The camera's confused white balance brings out an unnatural orange in the foreground and mixes it with an unnatural blue in the background. The serendipitous nature of the shot made Color Management of this image tricky as well as the most important feature in this shot. I could have chosen to eliminate the blue and tone down the orange in aid of reaching a more realistic, natural finish. However, that would have killed the allure of the image, taking the "Too-Hot" and "Too-Cold" and revealing a lukewarm result. |
Color Management's function is to recognize how colors within an image work together, which are dominant, and which are merely distracting. When I started photography in ernest, I was working with black & white and found color photography to be an unwanted challenge. With the proliferation of digital images I began experimenting with color- rather blindly groping towards a balance or harmony I enjoyed with composition driven B&W photography. After taking several courses in architecture school that focused on the fundamentals of color I achieved nothing short of a fetish for color photography.
I am somewhat dismayed to see desaturation and sepia becoming prevalent not only in the desires of the public but also in the experimentations of photographers. My personal belief is that a "classic" look, which I assume to be the goal of these experimentations does not need to be achieved at the expense of our colorful world.
However, if that is what they want... I can do that too:
