Developing a personal style by taking Control of Colour By Ingrid Popplewell
Lomagnupur Mountain Iceland This excellent workshop on Taking Control of Colour run by David Rosen, consisted of three 2 hour Zoom sessions on 3 successive days with 6 participants (one of whom was in Perth in Australia!) David started by talking about colour in photography and how it contributes to the success or otherwise of both representational and fine art photography. He explained how he has been influenced hugely by cinematography where colour grading is very sophisticated in its purpose to create a desired emotional response in the audience. He shared the work of 5 photographers where a consistent colour palate contributes significantly to their style. Technical points We discussed the technical side of colour management in the computer and camera software. David talked about the different colour spaces, sRGB, AdobeRGB and Prophoto and their significance and how to work with them. We then discussed Basic Colour Theory: the meanings of hue, saturation, luminosity, shade, tint and tone and ways of combining colours. We were shown how to create a fill layer in Photoshop and fill it with a colour from our image and then blend this layer with the original image. This allowed subtle manipulation of the colours without the introduction of a ‘new’ colour. The blend mode and opacity can be changed for the desired effect and can be applied locally rather than globally by the use of a mask and brush to either paint in or paint out the effect as desired. July 2022 Volume 7 Issue 5
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