yellow on blue, taken with pureshot, edited with distressed fx — (c) silviogulizia

How to Hack Your iPhoneography with Colors

Here are a few tips about colors combinations that can help you to create stunning photos

Have you ever thought colors could be a tool to hack your iPhoneography? Yeah, nor do I. Colors are indeed a great instrument to improve the look and feel of your pics. Let’s start speaking about primary colors. Did you remember them? I suppose you heard about them a long long time ago in a far far away classroom, and maybe can’t bring them back to your memory. Here’s a help.

Primary colors contraposition on the left, analogous colors on the right. Taken with Hipstamatic

There are three primary colors: red, blue and yellow. Don’t confuse them with the RGB (red, green and blue) colors model you are used to in the web, this is another story. So, given this three colors, you can create lots and lots of special composition just using them all together or simply two of them. Focusing on primary colors will enable your pics to look great.

In the “wheel of colors” below you will find primary colors at the peaks of a triangle. Between primary colors there are the so called secondary colors, combinations of primaries. So, orange is yellow+red, green is yellow+blu and purple is blue+red. You can get wonderful photos combining two opposite colors, i.e. one primary with a combination of the other two primaries. So, look for:

• yellow on violet, or viceversa;
• red on green, or viceversa;
• orange on blu, or viceversa.

Keep in mind that most color groupings don’t look so good when shown together. For this, opposite colors are also called complementary colors, as they will complete one the other.

The color wheel

There’s a third level of color composition and it’s known as tertiary colors, that basically are generated mixing one primary with one secondary color. So, to combine colors in your image, keep in mind the simple wheel or look for a more completed one. For example: the more one color is near red, the more opposite color will be between yellow and blue, i.e. more or less greenish.

Red on green, taken with Pureshot and edited with Vsco Cam

To refer a color in relation to another one it is used the term analogous color. For example: taken red, red-orange will be analogous of red. Often to use an analogous color instead of a complementary colors provide a better look and feel. So for example try to mix green with orange, analogous color of red, green’s complementary. Or put yellow on cyclamen, analogous of purple, yellow’s complementary. As Adam Dachis explain on LifeHacker, the split color, as the analogous of one opposite color is called, will enable you to get the more helpful combination in a lot of situations.

Yellow on cyclamen, taken with Pureshot and edited in Vsco Cam.

If you’d like to be a master of colors, try to combine colors touched by a square applied on the wheel, so for example combine orange and violet with yellow and blue.I think it’s hard to get there, but it’s very useful to focus on simpler compositions.

Fortunately, nature is very rich of this combinations of primary and complementary colors, so I could find examples for this post very soon, looking around here and in my camera roll. All you need to do is to be used to get an eye open on colors before hitting the shutter. You can practice on colors combination with Adobe Kuler app (free), just shooting pics with the app or importing your own better photos to get conscious of which kind of colors combination did you use so to try to re-use that in an other occasion.

this is a personal project with two goal: learning how to better shoot with my iPhone and improve my English. Every feedback and correction is welcome.