As we live in the digital era, as photographers we need to be familiar with digital photo coloring as part of the photo coloring techniques. As a photographer; your soul cannot stay away from color. Without color you cannot produce great works in photography. It doesn’t mean you cannot produce great works in black and white photography; black and white originates from color that looses its color saturation.

The world is full with colored objects; the colors which change according to the light all day. As photographer; you have to be able to capture those colors into photography works which the color results are as beautiful as the original one.

Therefore as photographer; it is essential to have knowledge about coloring – digital photo coloring; that will help us producing great photos. Fortunately we live in digital era; the era of digital camera. With digital image; we can edit the colors by utilizing image editing tools such as Adobe Photoshop; something that you cannot do with film – analog camera.

Warmth and Cool Color

Photographers have their own terminology regarding the color; “warmth” and “cool” color. The ‘warmth and cool’ color terminology is referenced to the light color; the color that changes a long day and the source of the light being used. Mostly all the light contains a unify color spectrum. In the morning and afternoon; the spectrum color predominantly contains yellow and red which its light character has a ‘warmth’ tone.

Photography Flash light also tends to produce a bit cold blue. The objects which are under the shadow of the sun light that receives only the bounced light not exposed directly to the sun; will evoke a ‘cold’ tone.

Both cool and warmth color tone photos are beautiful depends on what you want and what the situation is. A close-up photo and landscape photography frequently look better with a bit warmth effect what we can get by using warmth filter on analog camera.

A cool color tone can be changed to warmth color tone by utilizing a ‘warmth’ filter or by editing its color balance on the computer using Adobe Photoshop.

Neutral Light Color

Auto white balance in digital camera is designed to adjust automatically to colors; temperature and different lights to produce a nearly close to neutral color. However, auto setting is not what you want in some cases. For example on landscape photo; some photographers prefer to retain its neutral character from the light. Sunrise and sunset have ‘warmth’ color and red / yellow character that frequently evokes a wonderful silhouette panorama.

If you prefer to keep neutral light; do not let your digital camera correct it automatically. Use suitable predefined white balance, for example on the landscape use ‘daylight’ setting or maybe cloudy for unclear sky but it’s better to wait until the sky is clear and use ‘daylight’ white balance.

Color Space

If we have accustomed to analog camera; we need to be familiar with digital photo coloring and its technical things if we want to change to digital camera. Things like color space that identifies colors that can be reproduced by devices like digital camera, color printers or monitors.

The manufacturers try an effort to make standard so all different digital imaging devices can produce the same consistence color. All digital cameras and desktop printers mostly use sRGB color space. It can reproduce a lot of colors and becomes standard to mostly peripherals. Cameras; printers; scanners might have their own ‘color profile’ that each has characteristic in handling the colors. You need to know this ‘color profile’ if you want to utilize color management in your software.

Adobe RGB

For some devices, gamut terminology is complete color varieties that can be produced or recorded by a device related to color space. Even though sRGB is commonly used in digital photography, there is still another color space that has a wider spectrum of color space; Adobe RGB. This color space is useful for photographs that will be printed for books or magazines, where printing ink CMYK (Cyan; magenta; yellow and black) can produce variety of color with wider range for some spectrum area. Adobe RGB gamut can increase wider color spectrum to print. Mostly DSLR camera can record images using adobe RGB. But it is not recommended since the result will look subdued for computer monitors and portable color printer.

Bit Depth

Bit depth refers to numbers of data bit to record each pixel on a photo. The more bit depth, the wider the tone range can be recorded and the color tone transition is smoother on the picture. Commonly a picture is 8 bit or maybe 24 bit color. There are three channel color in each picture; Red; Green; Blue that contains 8 bit data each. The terminology 24 bit is derived from this composition. As general this bit depth is suitable. But by manipulating the image color, frequently it creates an annoyance effect. Therefore recording the image in 16 bit color will produce a smoother tone. For this purpose you need to use DSLR camera with RAW format and you need image editing tools such as Photoshop.

Suggested readings:

• Lighting photography
• Reading image histogram
• Rules of thirds