Cee’s Compose Yourselve Challenge – Colour Basics

This week Cee walks us through the colour chart, starting off with warm and cool colours;

Which Colors are Warming and Which are Cooling

The color wheel below will give you a quick idea on which colors will give you that warm, cuddly feeling and which colors will make you want to put a jacket on.

Borrowing Cee’s Colour Wheel

You see that the warm colors are red to yellow-green.  If you want to warm up a photo, add a little bit of orange or yellow to your photo.  You can do this with the white balance on most post-processing software.  You can even change your camera settings to help.  I usually wait until I do my post-processing because it all depends on the feeling I want from the photo once I decide to edit it.  – CCYC for more details.

The assignment – 3 warm and 3 cool coloured photos

The first image is slightly tricky, as there are a lot of blues and greens which do make it more on the cool side of the palette, however the warm hues that dominate the image in the sand and the grass give it more of a warm toned image. The rest are all definitely warm tones, the soft yellows and the warm pinks all say summer warmth to me.

Now the next group are all cooler tones predominantly blues and greens. The last two are the same image the colour is slightly warmer due to the lime green prominence (Even with all the pops of blue), but the B&W is all cool tones.

So I guess everything is not always so straight and easy, sometimes an image is slightly more warm than cool or vice versa. You can always change the tone of an image in PS with a warming or cooling filter too.

That’s it for this time……….

-Julz