Some different flowers

Tim Tucker · Sep 9, 2016

Here we go again, Tim's off on one...

I'd just like to show you something. Just look at the images and ask, "why does the same thing look different depending on the ground it's against?"

Brightness is a property of colour. Therefore contrast is not separate from colour but inseparable from colour. It's not about a separate black and white element in your images but part of the way colour works.

Things are not absolute.

Here is the orange from the flower in your second image. But I've isolated it and placed it against a different grounds at the extremes of the scale available:

Yes, it's exactly the same orange in both middle squares.

Now you may look at it and say that contrasting against black brings out the colour. I would say that the colour is 91% saturated and 87% bright anyway, do you really need to contrast it against the extreme of scale to make it look bright and vibrant?

I would also say that against the white you could use a brighter and less saturated colour and make it look better than the more vibrant colour against black. At 81% saturation and 95% brightness:

Does it really change much against the black compared to the white?

Here it is again against colour, the same orange. This time though I've placed it against the same hue with the same saturation. Only the brightness varies. This is purely to show how changing the relative brightness between two colours affects the impression of colour. Yes, you may say, but in digital editing it's done all the time. Many of the common sliders equalise the values through an image. You bring shadows up and highlights down towards the same range of brightness, you bring colours towards the same range of brightness. I'm just trying to give visual examples of how levels of brightness and distribution of contrast affect colour:

So the point? It's not a case of how can we edit the image, but how we can light it to bring the variations in brightness between colours that would make them stand out more. Editing alone doesn't really do this, but I think illustrates how balance can affect colour, open them in separate tabs and flick between the two:

jcdeboever · Sep 9, 2016

Tim Tucker said:
Here we go again, Tim's off on one...

I'd just like to show you something. Just look at the images and ask, "why does the same thing look different depending on the ground it's against?"

Brightness is a property of colour. Therefore contrast is not separate from colour but inseparable from colour. It's not about a separate black and white element in your images but part of the way colour works.

Things are not absolute.

Here is the orange from the flower in your second image. But I've isolated it and placed it against a different grounds at the extremes of the scale available:

View attachment 127308

Yes, it's exactly the same orange in both middle squares.

Now you may look at it and say that contrasting against black brings out the colour. I would say that the colour is 91% saturated and 87% bright anyway, do you really need to contrast it against the extreme of scale to make it look bright and vibrant?

I would also say that against the white you could use a brighter and less saturated colour and make it look better than the more vibrant colour against black. At 81% saturation and 95% brightness:

View attachment 127309

Does it really change much against the black compared to the white?

Here it is again against colour, the same orange. This time though I've placed it against the same hue with the same saturation. Only the brightness varies. This is purely to show how changing the relative brightness between two colours affects the impression of colour. Yes, you may say, but in digital editing it's done all the time. Many of the common sliders equalise the values through an image. You bring shadows up and highlights down towards the same range of brightness, you bring colours towards the same range of brightness. I'm just trying to give visual examples of how levels of brightness and distribution of contrast affect colour:

View attachment 127310

So the point? It's not a case of how can we edit the image, but how we can light it to bring the variations in brightness between colours that would make them stand out more. Editing alone doesn't really do this, but I think illustrates how balance can affect colour, open them in separate tabs and flick between the two:

View attachment 127311

Pretty cool my brother.

zombiesniper · Sep 9, 2016

Nice set.

Tim Tucker · Sep 9, 2016

jcdeboever said:
Pretty cool my brother.

Just to add that it's not about assigning any sort of meaning in words but just understanding changing relative brightness changes the appearance of colour.

jcdeboever · Sep 9, 2016

Tim Tucker said:
jcdeboever said:

Pretty cool my brother.

Click to expand...

Just to add that it's not about assigning any sort of meaning in words but just understanding changing relative brightness changes the appearance of colour.

I get it. I used to sell automotive paint and was an expert color matcher. NB ow, how that crosses over to photography is another thing.

Gary A. · Sep 9, 2016

Damn, I wish I had Tim Tucker tutoring me.

jcdeboever · Sep 9, 2016

Gary A. said:
Damn, I wish I had Tim Tucker tutoring me.

Shoot, both you guys have probably forgot more than most people know. I am pretty blessed with this motley crew chiming in regularly.

Tim Tucker · Sep 10, 2016

jcdeboever said:
I get it. I used to sell automotive paint and was an expert color matcher. Now, how that crosses over to photography is another thing.

I think it comes with the approach you take to colour, rather than hard and fast rules. The biggest mistake I see many people make is that they think in too absolute terms. That is if you want the orange to look more orange then you directly edit the orange. But this is not really the case, if you want to make the orange look more orange then you really need to exaggerate the difference between it's properties and the properties of the colours around it. It's the visual difference between colours that make them stand out and not the colours themselves.

The second part is that many of the common editing tools all work in one direction and often lead to an almost 2D understanding of colour. Colour in nature, and also a photograph, normally consists of many variations in saturation and brightness, and is never usually a constant across an area. Which is unlike my earlier examples, (and the 'vibrating' colour in the last is happens only a particular balance of brightness and hue). So the example below is probably more representative of real colour.

For instance if we take yellow, (probably the most abused of colours), and see what happens. Now this is not so far removed from the truth. I have taken a 100% saturated and 100% bright yellow at the left, the same yellow for both graduations. With the top graduation the yellow remains 100% saturation and only the brightness changes, in the only direction it can go - 0%. White does not exist in saturated colour because it exists only at 0% saturation. So the top slice is what happens when you push saturation with contrast. It is the way I see many yellows, as dirty and contrasted against black.

The bottom graduation is a constant 100% brightness but the saturation fades to 0%, really the effect of using brightness rather than saturation, as it shows the range of bright yellows and not saturated yellows. Again it's just about seeing the effect that varying brightness has on colour. With no reference to yourself, I also think that many photographers only see colour in terms of saturation because it is the colour tool at their disposal, and can't really see the difference between saturation and brightness. Here it is: