How To Match Colors

Are you familiar with the color wheel? Color is such an important and integral part of our lives and it may help you to enhance your photographs even further!
Basically, the color wheel is a circle with complimentary colors positioned across one another.

That means that a color on one part of the wheel will enhance the one opposite to it, if they’re placed together.

Why is that important? It means you can use this theory to put emphasis on your subject in the photo!

This is an image found on Cosmpolitan.com : they’re writing about ways to mix colors in your outfit, but the same can be applied to photographs!

For example, if you’re shooting in front of a red brick wall, why not use a blue outfit? Or if you’re shooting a field of hay, then a purple dress will surely look gorgeous. It all comes down to mixing and matching. I’ve used the color wheel principle on several occasions and it always worked!

Reds and green work well together, so I made the subject stand out by picking a rich red dress. In this way the subject becomes the main point of interest at the first glance.

I knew I wanted to take photos in the blue-green sea and thus the orange dress was the perfect choice! Do you know that in today’s mainstream cinematography entire movies are color graded in orange and blue tones? It’s because the human skin is on the orange spectrum and the blues make the actors and actresses stand out, ”pop” from the background.

Of course, color theory doesn’t only apply in styling, it’s also great to know if you’re working with curves and color adjustments in Photoshop.

You can find a good little introduction to color theory here to get you started!

How do you work with color? Let me know in the comment section!

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About the author
Hi! I’m Isabella and I’m a photographer, blogger and applied arts graduate. I love spending my time creatively, or watching movies, drinking tea, playing with my cats and hanging out with friends.
Find me here isabellabubola.com or on Facebook and say hello!