A Softer Image

I photographed Erin in the late afternoon, so we got some “buttery” late light. Often this can make images look more yellow. Instead of compensating for this while shooting, I decided to wait until post-processing to correct the color. This is something that’s very easy to do as soon as you get the hang of figuring out what a photo has too much of. The original:

You can easily see that there’s too much yellow. As mentioned in our first Colorful Thursdays, complimentary colors help to neutralize their opposites. So by adding the complimentary colors to yellow, we’re able to make it look like this next version:

Still not quite right, though. We have too much red. I went back into Photoshop and tweaked it a little more to add red’s complimentary color. I also adjusted the contrast. Here’s the result:

We’ve got richer, more realistic colors. All this by just adding the opposite color! One tip: the color wheel that we’ve previously discussed is not quite the same system as what Photoshop uses (and not what many artists use). Next week when we talk about how to do this retouching, we’ll talk about the color wheel that includes cyan, magenta and yellow as the primary colors. For more information, read this article on the different color wheels.