Now you can visit the world’s museums online!
Imagine being able to see artwork in the greatest museums around the world without leaving your chair. Driven by his passion for art, Amit Sood tells the story of how he developed Art Project to let people do just that.
El Cielo de Canarias / Canary sky – Tenerife from Daniel López on Vimeo.
Beautiful time lapse photography by Daniel Lopez.
Enjoy!
View more of Daniel Lopez images here.
How red is red? That depends in part on its context. We see colors in relationship to other colors in our field of vision. The appearance of any one color is modified by the presence of other colors. (This is a perceptual effect, not a physical effect; while we experience it, we cannot measure it physically.)
Once you identify the elements in play, you can predict the effect. Simultaneous contrast can occur between any one or multiple components of the three elements of color – luminosity, hue, or saturation.
Place dark colors next to light colors and the dark colors will appear darker and the light colors will appear lighter.
Place cool colors next to warm colors and the cool colors will appear cooler while the warm colors will appear warmer. (Additionally, complementary hues increase each other’s saturation.)
Place saturated colors next to less saturated colors and the desaturated colors will appear less saturated while the saturated colors will appear more saturated. (Additionally, the desaturated color will appear to contain a cast of the saturated hue’s complement.)
Want to make a color appear lighter? Make it lighter or make surrounding colors darker or both. Want to make a color appear warmer? Make it warmer or make surrounding colors cooler or both. Want to make a color appear more saturated? Make it more saturated or make surrounding colors less saturated or both.
Contrast (or lack thereof) is the engine that drives color dynamics. To intensify a visual effect, increase the contrast in the appropriate components of color. This effect is intensified between adjacent colors. It is further intensified if one color surrounds another, partially or entirely. (If a color dynamic is particularly intense it may create the visual appearance of a line separating the two fields of color. Op artists often use these effects to create highly dynamic visual effects that appear to pulsate or move.)
Color management doesn’t yet accommodate these kinds of perceptual effects. Standard color correction strategies don’t tend to address them. But you can incorporate them into your color adjustment methods for greater precision and/or expression. All you need to do is take note of them and make appropriate compensations to achieve the result you desire.
Try setting half an hour a day for your creative life. If you did this everyday for one year, you’d give yourself 182.5 hours, roughly the equivalent of 4.6 work weeks. As you can see, it really adds up.
Many find it helps to pay yourself first in the morning. Get up early and get more time for yourself. One advantage to setting time aside in the evening is that the amount of time you spend can often be extended. Try both. Monitor your energy, Strike a balance between what’s practical and what’s ideal for you.
Set up a space that’s ready for you to be creative (even if this is a User setting on a portable computer) and keep it organized, so you’re ready to go when you get your time and you don’t waste it organizing.
Finally, when you’re able, take a trip for a long weekend or week of total immersion. Trips can add many more valuable hours to your creative life, as well as new stimulation, new material, and a fresh perspective.
The biggest challenges are starting and sticking to a plan. Start now. You’re sure to miss a day here and there, just don’t make it a habit. Instead, make a habit of taking some time for yourself.
Listen to more creativity tips here.
Learn more in my creativity workshops.
One of the most distinctive features of a visual artist’s use of color is their use of saturation.
Many photographers are often asked, “Are you a black and white or color photographer?” (Curiously other visual artist’s are rarely asked this question.) While many people who ask it don’t mean it to be, it’s a loaded question. There’s often a latent assumption that you can’t do both well. In fact, work with one can strengthen work with another. Moreover, the question suggests that black and white (and shades of gray) are not colors, when in fact they are very specific colors – neutral colors. And, the question does not address with any specificity how a photographer uses more saturated color. Curiously, this question is rarely asked of painters and filmmakers. A more useful question might be, “How saturated is your palette?”
There are essentially six distinct levels of saturation – neutral, semi-neutral, reduced saturation, fully saturated, highly saturated, and super-saturated.
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It was December 2005. We had just made the long crossing of the Drake Passage to Antarctica. On the horizon were enormous icebergs. It was our first view of big ice. We all rushed to deck and began to photograph. I found myself standing shoulder to shoulder with Seth Resnick. He was using a long 300mm lens. I was using a wide 28mm lens. We both looked at each other and then looked again. Our approach was so different we were astonished. “Let me see your camera!” we both said simultaneously and quickly traded cameras. We laughed out loud. With one quick glance, we realized we were seeing in entirely different ways.
It was February 2007. We found ourselves in the very same situation. Again, we had crossed the Drake Passage to Antarctica. Again, there was big ice. Again, we hurried to deck. Only this time, Seth appeared with a wide 14mm lens and I showed up with a long 100-400mm lens. We grinned big grins. We had influenced each other.
It was January 2010. Once more, we had crossed the Drake Passage to Antarctica. There was more big ice. Again we raced to deck. This time we both carried two cameras, one with a wide lens and the other with a long lens. We smiled and nodded knowingly at one another. As a result of sharing the same experiences and the results we produced from them, we had learned to become more versatile and see in more varied ways.
Sharing experiences with other visual artists can be extremely stimulating and rewarding. The resulting growth comes in unexpected ways at unexpected moments. In situations like these, I’ve come to expect the unexpected. Especially with Seth!
What opportunities can you make to share experience and vision with other artists?
Read Seth Resnick’s images and version of our story here.
Find out about our Digital Photography Destinations workshops here.
Deke McClelland shows you how to use stacks to remove moving objects in a scene.
This is a game changing technique I emphasize in all of my field workshops.
It will open up new possibilities for you, change the way you shoot, and raise your success rate.
Learn more from Deke McClelland here.
Read more in my digital photography and digital printing ebooks.
Learn more in my digital photography and digital printing workshops.
Terry White demos ways to make Content Aware Scale and Content Aware Fill more selective. Both new miracle features usually succeed or fail epically. When either fails, try these two techniques.
Find more great content from Terry White here.
Learn more with my digital photography and digital printing ebooks.
Learn more in my digital photography and digital printing workshops.
To better see color within an image it can help to abstract it. By de-emphasizing an image’s representational qualities you can more easily direct your attention to the color relationships within it. In short, you can see them better because you’re not distracted by other concerns.
Using Photoshop, there are many ways to modify an image in order to better reveal it’s color structure.
You can blur an image. Blurring an image reduces detail so that you can more easily see the basic composition and the color relationships within it, without getting hung up on the details. (Duplicate the background layer and apply the filter Gaussian Blur.)
Blur an image substantially and you can reduce an image to a field of color. Compositional elements are significantly downplayed, leaving pure color. (Duplicate the background layer and apply the filter Gaussian Blur with a stronger setting.)
Pixellate an image and you can reduce an image to blocks of color. Composition is eliminated while contrast between colors is more pronounced than in a flat field of color. (Try Filter: Pixellate: Mosaic. This works best for lower resolution files or copies of files.)
Average an image and you can reduce all the colors in an image to one. (Duplicate the Background Layer and apply the filter Average – found under Blur.) This often confirms the dominant color in a composition. Well balanced color photographs containing a variety of hues tend to average towards gray.)
While accents and other important colors can also be used, the dominant color is an excellent choice to further analyze color relationships in an image using Blend Modes. With this technique you can see the variety found in the separate components of color within an image – Luminosity, Saturation, Color, and Hue. (Change the Blend Mode of the averaged layer to the desired color component.)
With a Blend Mode of Hue, all values in an image will be driven to the same hue. This will help you see variety in luminosity and saturation more clearly.
With a Blend Mode of Saturation, all values in an image will be driven to the same saturation. This will help you see variety in luminosity and hue more clearly.
With a Blend Mode of Color, all values in an image will be driven to the same hue and saturation. This will help you see variety in luminosity (the tonal structure) more clearly. (This variant is often the most useful as it is the easiest to interpret. With repeated analysis of many different images, you’re likely to note that images with less variety in hue and saturation (particularly neutral ones) will require more luminosity contrast to have impact. By the same token, images with a great deal of variety in hue and saturation will often appear overly harsh with excessive contrast.)
With a Blend Mode of Luminosity, all values in an image will be driven to the same luminosity. You’ll eliminate contrasts in value which will help you see variety in hue and saturation more clearly.
This type of analysis will better reveal the color relationships at work within an image. You can use the information you’ve gathered by analyzing color relationships in an image not only to better understand it but also to make predictions about how you might improve them.
Increasing contrast in one or more of the elements of color (hue, saturation, luminosity) will increase separation in a composition; conversely, decreasing contrast will create greater unity.
Typically, well structured images use a large amount of contrast in one color component, a medium amount of contrast in a second component, and a small amount of contrast in a third component.
Read more with my color theory ebooks.
View more in my color DVDS.
Learn more in my digital photography and digital printing workshops.
Graphing color can help you identify colors more specifically and understand relationships between color better. One way to graph color is to use the Color Sampler Tool in Photoshop in combination with the Apple color picker.
To access the Apple color picker choose Photoshop: General Preferences and change Color Picker from Adobe to Apple and click OK. To see the new the color picker click on Set Foreground Color or Set Background Color icon in the Tool bar.
Unlike the Adobe color picker, the Apple color picker is a color wheel. Creating and using color wheels to describe color and plot color relationships is a time honored tradition dating back to Leonardo DaVinci. Some of the most famous color wheels were created by Newton, Goethe, and Munsell. The Apple color picker is an additive color wheel where complements are defined as red and cyan, green and magenta, and blue and yellow.
You can sample any color in an image and find its position on the Apple color wheel. Using the Eyedropper Tool, sample a color in a composition. Then click on the Set Foreground Color icon. The Apple color wheel will appear and a small circle will plot the sampled color. You can make a record of this chart by taking a screenshot of the color wheel (caps lock, Shift, Command, 4). This will create a PDF document on your desktop, which can be opened in Photoshop.
You can combine multiple sample points into a single chart by taking multiple screenshots, opening them in Photoshop, and combining them. Drag the Background layer from one document into another and give it a meaningful title. Make sure the two layers are registered with one another. Then, mask off everything on the top layer except the circle identifying the color on the color wheel, the triangle identifying it’s luminosity on the slider to the right of the color wheel, and a portion of the color bar above the color wheel. You’ve just graphed the two colors on the Apple color wheel. You can do this with as many colors as you desire.
Once colors have been graphed you will be able to identify a variety of relationships between colors, both colors that exist in a composition and colors that do not.
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