Lots about Color Grading in Photoshop

You can tell a story with the colours in your picture. In a previous post we talked about complementary colours.

This clip shows you a lot about colour grading and complementary colors.

Complementary colours are pairs of colours which, when combined, cancel each other out. This means that when combined, they produce a grey-scale colour like white or black. When placed next to each other, they create the strongest contrast for those particular two colours.

To see what the opposite colour is for, for example a skin tone, have a look at your colour wheel. Here you can find the colour wheel on the Adobe site.

Watch the movie and play around with a picture and try to create another colour grade.

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Basics: the colour wheel

It probably comes as no surprise that colours give your picture more impact. The tricky part is: how to use colours? 

So, speaking of colours: there are three categories:  

Primary colours: red, yellow and blue
Secondary colours: green, orange and purple
Tertiary colours: yellow-orange, red-orange, red-purple, blue-purple, blue-green & yellow-green

One way to give your pictures more colour depth, is to use the colour wheel. A colour circle - based on red, yellow and blue - is traditional in the field of art. Sir Isaac Newton developed the first circular diagram of colours in 1666. The idea behind the colour wheel is that complemantary colours give a strong image by using both warm and cold colours. 

Complementary colors are opposite each other on the colour wheel. So for example you can use red and green or blue and orange. By using those opposite colours you add more depth to you photo. 

There is a great blog which explains the use of colours in the foreground and background of your photo. You can also watch this video on Youtube from Serge Ramelli. He postprocessed a great sunset image using the technique of colours to add depth to his picture.

Another way to add colour to your image, is to use colours in the same range. If this aroused your interested, make sure to check out this cool guy: Aaron Nace from Phlearn. He has a really quick and interesting explanation on the use of the colour wheel in this video. More interesting stuff can be found on his site. 

Now go out there and be colourfull!