Color Contrast Color contrast is an effective compositional element in color photography, just as tone is in black-and-white photography. Colors with opposite characteristics contrast strongly when placed together.
Color isn't always about having bright reds and striking blues. It results from creating color contrast in your photos and using complementary colors whenever you can. In this article, I'll show you how.
Color Contrast in Photography
In a black-and-white photo, the color palette is restricted to white, black and shades of gray. To create contrast, the photographer pits lighter elements against dark, sun against shadows.
Itten's Color Contrasts
Johannes Itten was one of the first people to define and identify strategies for successful color combinations.
-Color contrast - subjective judgment on the apparent luminous difference or intensity of two colors when placed close to one another.
-Color conversion filter - see CC filters.
Color contrast is a big favorite of mine. Possibly it is because, when one finds scenes of significant color contrast, it is often so easy to create good images.
With color contrast there are a few differences. The photographer isn't necessarily looking at light and dark. The entire photo can be equally lit and still have a lot of contrast because a lot of colors have distinct characteristics.
Ensure Proper Color Contrast - Some designers think that improving the color contrast of a site means that they are limited to a black and white color scheme. It doesn't.
Not only do we have the complete freedom to choose black-and-white rendering at anytime, but now we also have very precise control over color contrast after the fact. This is a relatively recent development, even relative to the digital revolution.
It is either a good idea to surpress as many different colors as possible (resulting in monochromatic pictures when going to the extremes) or to make use of color contrasts by looking for complimentary colors - red, green & blue.
This gives me the rich golden tones from the artificial lighting, and even though the yellow color is more pronounced than I saw with my eyes, the color contrast with the cobalt blue is beautiful.
since the topic is on "backgrounds", i would as well like to share the importance of considering color contrasts between your subject and its background.
S-curves will increase contrast (in this case color contrast = saturation). We are not going to touch the Lightness Channel (L) and therefore we are not changing the brightness or sharpness of the picture.
A bright animal on a dark background is an obvious choice, but also look for color contrasts that can be taken advantage of in conversion. Take, for example, the cheetah image on this page.
We especially liked the Circular Polarizer that eliminates reflections on glass and water, enhances clouds, and selectively enhances color contrast, the HT 4-Point Star lets you adjust the look of the star patterns in specular highlights, ...
I moved around the iris until I found a dark background for the color contrast I wanted. With the camera on a tripod set at the level of the flower, I positioned my hand-held flash to the left and slightly behind the iris.
A scene may seem very interesting, but if the composition relies on color contrasts, often times when it is rendered in grays, it falls flat. An orange and a blue hue can have the same value, or darkness/lightness.
This is a particular problem for this subject matter because compression artifacts are typically found in areas of high tonal and color contrast, like the bright colored light of fireworks bursting against an inky black sky.
Along with charting color uniformity and consistency, gamma can also catalog color contrast in a numeric form. While gamma correction may describe still photographs, it most often refers to images on computer movie screens.
This seemingly simple bit of glass, which screws on to your lens in a rotating mount, performs a host of remarkable photographic feats, including darkening blue skies, removing reflections, and increasing color contrast and saturation.
the warm gold and red tones are quite desirable; particularly when married with apparel of a similar color set, as shown in this portrait to the right. For a photo that "pops", color contrast is also heightened, ...
Shooting color film lets me use layers and channels in Photoshop to select different channel mixer effects in different parts of the image. This lets me get the equivalent of having shot different parts of the image through different color contrast ...
I also used the black background as this would offer some very distinct color contrast/resolution between areas within the flower head itself. To view a much larger picture of the test shot click here.
This helps to create a clean look. Also helping to make a clean look is the use of separation between buttons. Most designs use space to separate buttons, but a bevel, single line, or background color contrast will also look nicely.
And it is not only white objects that will appear cyan, all color captured under such a light will shift equally towards cyan, and a picture taken under such conditions will have a cyan color cast, which lowers the overall color contrast of the ...
Both methods also provide no means of altering how color contrast is rendered without once again falling back on the use of colored filters over the lens when shooting in the field. Not really what we are after with the promise of digital.
Thus, a so-called N-megapixel camera that produces an N-megapixel image provides only one-third of the information that an image of the same size could get from a scanner. Thus, certain color contrasts may look fuzzier than others, ...
 See also: Color, Contrast, Light, Image, Photograph
  
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