Use and Control Colour to Elevate your Landscape Photography
Colour, or color if you reside on the other side of the pond, feeds into the entire landscape photography process. Using it intentionally and with thought can quickly elevate our images to the next level.
Style
Colour is one of the first things to strike us when we look at an image. This is particular true if the colour is designed to make a statement or the photographer has just made a complete hash of it, like some of those horrible HDR’s where it looks like someone threw up all over the page. It can make or break an image.
How you use colour in your landscape photography is an important part of what gives you your style. Do you prefer big vibrant colours? Do you use more muted tones? Are you a black and white person?
It does not really matter and no one way is better than the other, but what is happening with the colour is something we need to think about and not just let happen by chance.
So how do we start controlling the colour?
Planning
The first part comes right at the start during the planning phase. Photography is all about storytelling so when planning a shoot I will first decide what kind of story I want to tell. Colour has a big impact on story. Big vibrant saturated colours create a story of hope and happiness whilst more muted, subtle colours have a more thoughtful, down beat, artistic feeling. Colour is directly linked to our brains and affects our emotions heavily. A photographer can use that to their benefit to take the viewer on an emotional journey through an image.
The type of story I want to tell will then guide the location I choose to shoot. The weather also has an impact on colour. Sometimes I will head out intentionally chasing a story. For example, whilst in a happy mood I decide I want a big colour sunset type shot. The weather looks good, there is a chance of a colourful sky, so I head outto the beach. After spending some time to find a good composition, it is then time to wait and hope the sky plays ball. Sometimes the effort will not pay off, but often it will. It is a satisfying feeling when intent and action come together and the story is told.
On other occasions it is not possible to be in control of where the shoot is happening. It becomes necessary to adapt the story to the landscape and conditions in which we find ourselves. That is exactly what happened to me in the Peak District last week. The location was set due to meeting a friend and the weather was forecast to be typically changeable (for a British summer). The shoot went well and colour helped to drive the story of the day starting with a desaturated drought shot; through to a monochrome rain shot; to a bleak black & white image from the windy Peak; before heading through some extreme clouds and into a sunny colourful sunset at the end of the day.
Watch the video here — https://youtu.be/bsMlvi_RBxI
Compose with Colour
Placing some striking colour into an aspect of a composition can take a photograph from a good shot to a great shot. A blue sky compared to a big colourful sky is an obvious example and it is true of the foreground and mid ground too. Take British moorland as an example. It is covered in heather and most of the year it is an uninteresting browny green colour. But every Autumn/September time it flowers and turns the landscape into a stunning and vibrant pinky purple colour that can turn a composition.
We can take this a step further by using good light. We all know about the golden hour but having the warm light hitting a scene will enhance the colour of everything, without creating nasty highlighted area that are present during the middle of day. The same is true of rocks, sand, buildings, trees and pretty much everything else.
When good light is absent, a scene will be much less vibrant and colours will be dull and flat. When faced with such conditions long exposure can come to the rescue. Combinging the more subtle colours with a long exposure can produce a beautiful ethereal, fine art feel that make the most of the muted and calm colours and tones in the scene.
Black and White and Monochrome
Black and White is an interesting area of landscape photography. To get the best images it is really important to try and decide at the time of shooting if the final image should be black and white, rather than just using it in post to rescue a bad image. It does not mean the image needs to be captured in Black and White, just have it in mind for the final composition.
Black and white can be used when there is a really interesting composition but the colours are dull and actually detract from the image. Even in those dull colours, interesting tones are present that will work well in black and white. Grey tones can also be post-processed much more aggressively than a colour image to really add drama to a black and white photo.
A black and white image is monochrome but a monochrome image is not necessarily black and white. It just means we are working with the varying tones of one colour. Monochrome images are difficult to plan but can produce massively attractive images when they occur naturally. Often it will happen in cloudy or foggy conditions and provides an opportunity to create something more unique.
Post-processing
Adobe Lightroom and other modern editors provide a massive amount of control over the colour. Within the software, several adjustments are available to change the colour and transform an image.
White Balance
White balance is the first in the list. This is also the first time I have even considered white balance. When shooting in RAW white balance can be completely changed in post-production without any reduction in quality. Setting the camera to auto white balance will be accurate most of the time. Adjustments can then be made to match what you experienced at the time or to match a given style.
Vibrance and Saturation
Vibrance and saturation both effect colour, but they do it in slightly different ways. Saturation changes all of the colour in the image. It is straightforward but can be very tempting to add too much. Like contrast, a good tip is to dial it up to where it feels right, then dial back a bit to end up in the right place.
Vibrance on the other hand is smarter and only affects the middle colours so the changes are often more subtle. In the majority of my landscape images I add about 20 vibrance and 10 saturation and that gets me near to where I want to be.
HSL
The HSL panel gives control over hue, saturation and luminance. It provides massive control over colour in an image. It is through HSL that many of the presets out there are built around. It certainly creates the opportunity to make an image look unrealistic or stylised. I do not use HSL very often but it can be handy when you want to control individual colours. With a sunset, boosting the overall saturation can take certain colours like orange and yellow overboard. By using the HSL panel to dial those individual colours back again, the image can be balanced out. I try to keep things fairly natural so any changes I make in the HSL panel are mostly very subtle.
Grads and Brushes
Software grads and brushes give control over the colour in individual parts of the image. It can used especially to give control over the sky or the ground separately and is a very useful tool for colour.
NIK Collection
One bit of software I would massively recommend is the DxO NIK collection. It is collection of photo editing plugins that has changed hands on a number of occasions, including Google’s, but now rests with DxO. Silver Efex Pro is the pick of the bunch and is a way to convert and edit black and white images. The toners alone, that mimic old dark room toners like selenium and sepia, make the NIK collection a worthy investment.
Printing
When it comes to printing we are really just looking to control the colour so they match the screen version as much as possible. I have posted a video on Printing before but three good tips to control the colour are:
- Add about a 3rd of a stop exposure in Lightroom before you print. This extra brightness will help compensate for the fact there is no backlight on paper and stop the image looking a bit dull when it comes out the printer.
- Use the best paper possible. This is particularly important for reproduction of saturated colours. Canson Premium High Gloss is the best I have found for this and holds more colour than pretty much any other paper I have tried.
- Calibrate your monitor — I’m going to be making a video about this soon.
Thinking about colour throughout the landscape photography process will assist every aspect of what you are trying to achieve. This includes composition, exposure, perspective and many other things. Colour is something most of us are lucky enough to experience everyday so we can easily take it for granted. Using it carefully and intentionally however will see your photography elevate to the next level.
Watch the video:
First Man Photography is a landscape photographer documenting the journey on YouTube. New videos go up every Sunday. If you enjoyed this article please give it a clap so more people can see it. Thanks
