How To Understand Color To Create More Impactful Photographs

Whether you’re picking clothing combinations for a shoot or sitting down to edit your shots in Lightroom, understanding how colors work together and how to manipulate them can have a huge effect on the impact of your images. This insightful video gives you a detailed understand of how to use color in your photography.

Jamie Windsor’s understanding of color is based on a genuine appreciation of well-known photographers, drawing heavily on the art world to explain how and why color theory works. It was a pleasant surprise to see the work of Jon Tonks included at 8:07, simply because he and I went to school together in the UK together a couple of decades ago. The photographs that went into his book Empire is well worth checking out and you’ll notice that Tonks’s eye for color is considered carefully throughout most of his work. Looking through his archive you’ll find distinctive palettes, despite being predominantly documentary photographs.

Particularly valuable is Windsor’s explanation of the difference between the Hue Saturation Luminance and Calibration panels function in Lightroom and why you would want to use one set of sliders over the other. I'm not sure that I've seen this explained before, certainly not so well. Let us know in the comments below if you've anything to add to his explanation.