Winding up the color

A couple of days ago I went for a walk in the snow and had my iPad ready for inspiration photos. When I have time, I love to work with the color in my images and I find it really helps with my perception of light and color. As an extra plus, I get totally absorbed into another world and the stress drops away. If you’ve never played with imaging programs I heartily recommend it for all these reasons.

When I first came to photography we had to either set up an expensive darkroom or pay for costly developing and printing. It was an expensive pastime reserved for the wealthy or paid professionals. Today we never have to print the images and ask a professional to manipulate the color, we can do it in a few clicks and save them in a file. It’s all free and available. Amazing!

There are hundreds of photo apps you can try out and I’m sure you have a preloaded one on your phone, iPad or camera. Basic apps will at the very least be able to convert your photo to sepia or black and white. More fancy programs give much more flexibility, allowing you to change the color cast from blues to yellows, toggle to vivid or dramatic and change the light and exposure. If you’ve never done this it will open up a whole new world.

At the same time you can crop the images and find a better composition. I will certainly use some of these color ideas and that blue composition for my latest batch of paintings for Skyway.