Understanding Colour

By Paul Tyler

This month we look at colour.

I hope over the last two months you have understood that having a great camera, good quality film and enough kit to sink a battleship doesn't guarantee great photographs. The Question I have been trying to answer is "Why don't my pictures look like what I see through the viewfinder?" You have to understand how they see and react to light. What your camera sees was covered last month and what your film sees in respect of light, the month before.

Please don't think because I am covering colour this month I am going to discuss the colour of the models dress. No, colour is far more fundamental to good photography than that. Always remember when you view a scene with your eyes, your brain compensates for a multitude of different things. Your camera and film will not.

I will also cover colour composition and how it can be used imaginatively to improve a picture.

Now below you see three colour wheels. Those of you that do your own processing will know all about the colour wheels and how they work, so your are excused. From a photographic point of view all colours are made up from the primary colours below. Forget all about what you were taught at school that blue and yellow make green. That's additive with paints. Here we are painting colour with light. The easiest way to remember it is this. With paint you mix all the colours together to get black. With light, black must be created by there being no light. So black is the complete absence of light. White on the other hand is all the colours mixed together. (Shine a white light at a prism and you get all the colours shining out).

So why is it important to understand the colour wheels?

OK a quick example. Any professional will sympathise with this scenario. You are shooting a wedding. It is a beautiful sunny day and the bride waits expectantly on the lawn outside the church for you to take your pictures. Her dress is a dream of pure white and cost thousands of pounds. Her mother paid a fortune for her own outfit which is the subtlest shade of pink. You take your pictures! You have them processed. All that green grass reflected in the bottom of the dress so it has just a hint of being green. The printer knows the dress was white so has to compensate as your eyes do. He does this by subtracting green from his printing process, not a lot just a bit. The prints look great. White dress, smiling bride. Oh no! The brides mother turns up at your studio with her pink suit. She shows you the suit is a different colour to the pictures. By subtracting green the opposite colour would start to show delicately. So by reducing green to make the brides dress white the mothers oh so subtle pink outfit will start to look more mauve than pink.

Look at the colour wheel, remove green and magenta will replace it. Take out 5cc green and that will add 5cc magenta. Understand that colour film can ever only be a compromise of the true colours of the scene. Obviously in glamour photography things never get this hairy, but colour reflection does need to be thought about. Your brain compensates so you don't notice the colour reflection, but the film just sees what it sees.

Your beautiful model is standing next to this wonderfully bright red material that you have found, it's exactly the right colour. So remember the red will show in her flesh tones and if the colours are pulled around when processing to bring her flesh tones up correctly, that will change the shade of red. "You don't process your films", I hear you say. No, but somebody has to and they will have the same problem. A golden Rule: A bad picture cannot be made into a good picture when printing it. (Although I have seen some crap improved on by an excellent printer.)

If it's general holiday type processing then understand how that works. The Machine that processes the print basically looks at the image and takes all the colour information together and prints the picture trying to find a central point of grey. (I really don't want to get involved in processing and printing here.) All makes of film are different so the machine will have been set with your particular films bias's before it starts. The machine expects each picture to have a good myriad of colours and when it does, this grey central point works fine. If your picture has a major single colour bias then this system falls down.

So what I am saying is get your colour casts right on the film in the camera and printing is a doddle. Don't be like the brides mother and expect film to act exactly as your eyes and brain does.

Lighting colour casts have been dealt with in the series "Home studio" in past issues, so I will not cover those.

Using colour there are three major effects you can achieve. These are shown below.

Click for full size image
Low Key	High Colour	Contrast

As you can see by deciding on a style the mood of the picture will be set. Low key almost has a dream like feel to it. The model thoughtful and introspective. The other two pictures speak for themselves.

Think about what you want to achieve and know what your film can achieve and you'll be closer to producing that perfect picture. The temptation all through this article has been to go into detail about how your film will react to certain exposures and the many differences between print and slide film, but I will save that until next month. See you then.

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