Choosing the right colors for your shoots can be a significant challenge. Whether you're struggling with gel selection, backdrop choices, or combining colors without creating visual chaos, understanding color harmony is the solution that will transform your approach to creating images.
Coming to you from John Gress, this informative video breaks down the six types of color harmony that can guide your creative decisions. Complementary harmony uses colors opposite each other on the color wheel, creating natural visual appeal. Monochromatic harmony employs a single color and its various shades, while analogous harmony utilizes neighboring colors on the wheel. Split complementary uses a base color plus two near-opposites forming a triangle, triadic harmony spaces three colors evenly around the wheel, and tetradic harmony uses four colors in a square or rectangular arrangement. Gress emphasizes that these principles apply to everything in your frame—from wardrobe and backgrounds to props and lighting. The beauty of color harmony is its flexibility, allowing you to create cohesive images regardless of what elements you're working with. You can apply these principles with natural light situations just as effectively as with colored gels.
The video also tackles a crucial misconception about mixing colored lights. Unlike the elementary school lessons about mixing paints (where yellow and blue make green), mixing colored lights follows different rules based on the RGB color wheel. When overlapping blue and yellow light, the result isn't green but rather a neutral tone. Gress demonstrates this concept through practical tests with various gel combinations, showing how red and green light create yellow, while magenta and yellow produce red. He explains that opposite colors on the RGB wheel cancel each other out, while non-opposite colors blend to create the color between them on the wheel. This understanding is essential when working with multiple light sources and gels, as it allows you to predict the resulting colors and create intentional effects like cyan, magenta, and yellow shadows from red, green, and blue lights.
Gress showcases several practical applications of these color principles, including a setup with magenta backlights and a subject wearing blue to create analogous harmony. Another fascinating technique involves creating rainbow effects by strategically placing red, green, blue, and yellow gelled lights around a subject. Where these colors overlap, they create secondary colors, resulting in a complete spectrum effect. While these techniques might seem experimental, they're valuable learning experiences that build skills you can apply to future client work when creative challenges arise. Check out the video above for the full rundown from Gress.
