🌈 The Case for Muted Color

Photography tips and techniques.

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The previous topics were Color Contrast and Color Harmony. We continue with ways of exploiting color in photography with today's topic - Muted Color. Sometimes less is more - and the impact of the image can be enhanced by de-saturating the colors - all or selectively.

The image may already have powerful visual elements and having one more i.e. color can be a distraction. So de-saturating the colors during editing make senses in an image like the picture above. The tonal contrast, the sun's flare from the left, the beautiful arched door with its shadow and the careful composition of the people in the frame are all very compelling elements - so just a hint a little color is enough.

Converting an image to black and white is the extreme case of the above technique - often used in strong portraiture. Adding a slight tone to the black and white picture is a way of bringing an element of color back - in a different way and evokes a different mood. Edits like these are fairly simple to do. If you want, $10/month will get you Adobe's powerful photo editing programs (Lightroom + Photoshop) that are very popular among professional photographers. If you took a photo with the phone, a bunch of filters are probably there in your favorite photo editing app.

Sometimes Nature does the work for us. Here, the background colors have been muted on a misty spring morning such that the bright new leaves stand out in the foreground.

The wind picked up on an overcast day at the Niagara Falls, casting a veil of water droplets. The optical effect of an overcast sky is low contrast and low color fidelity. But the flying curtain of water added to that - so much so that color information was completely lost - as you can see in the unedited shot above. The Canadian side looms in the distance in this monochromatic shot. The image below is with editing.

So long!
Anand

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