Project 52 - Week 15, Exploring Color Contrast

This week's Project 52 is about color in images, specifically contrasting colors. When thinking about the color wheel, the colors that are directly across from each other are considered complementary. These pairs best illustrate the use of contrasting colors in photography. 

Here is the gist of how you can have a little control over color and it's effect on the outcome of your image:  Colors in the color wheel are either visually active or visually passive.  The active colors are the yellow, orange, red and magenta range while the passive colors are the green, teals, blues and purples.  Active colors tend to visually advance when placed on a passive color and passive colors appear to visually recede when placed on an active color. In other words, brighter/warmer colors appear to leap forward and cooler/darker colors fall back.

Now, some people can see it easier than others, but here is an example that I hope will demonstrate this whole advancing and receding thing.  Red is complementary to green so Hermes' red bandana appears to advance in the first image, whereas the brown bandana appears to fall back into the picture in the second. Can you see it?

Knowing how color is seen is just another way to help get an image to tell a story the way you want it to be told.  You can play with color (with planning beforehand or afterwards in editing) to make an object stand out more, or make it blend in so that it's not as noticeable.

In this next series of pictures, you can get a feel for what different colors will do when green is the background. 

This last picture is a great example of something else that results when using  complementary colors . . . When you put something large in an image with something small, the large object, by contrast looks even larger. The same thing happens when using complementary colors - The grass in the image is green, but when you include something magenta, the grass looks even greener.

Next up in this project circle is Pat Corl, Field and Ranch Photography, Greenville TX.
I hope you have a wonderful weekend.  Do something fun!