The Ultimate Guide to Color Theory, in Just 12 Minutes — Photography Visual Patterns by Pat Kay

Summary

HSL

Hue

• colour selection without the tint or shade.
• Basically a colour that you select and is presented on a scale of adjacent colours next to it
  Saturation
• Intensity of a colour
• It helps with making a more intense/vibrant colour or less saturated/muted colour
  Luminosity
• it controls how bright or dark a colour is
• it adds white to a particular colour. By doing it so, it makes it lighter and less aturated
• it adds black to a particular colour. By doing it so, it increases richness, saturation and makes it darker

Colour Temperature

It refers to whether colour gravitates towards warmer or cooler tones (usually towards blue or orange).

RGB

• stands for Red, Green Blue
• It is one of the colour spaces
• mixing colours in RGB space, you can create white colour, because your screen has a light that projects those colours.
• essentially, all colours become lighter instead of darker

Colour Psychology

• Colours have different meaning for different people and that can be due to
  • culture they are from
  • background they grew up in
  • branding
• the feel of a colour and emotions associated with it are subjective for every person and have different meaning

Colours and emotions associated with them

Red

• danger

• passion

• excitement

• love

• energy
  Orange

• creativity

• hapiness

• friendliness

• confidence
  Yellow

• warning

• optomism

• prosperity

• joy
  Green

• health

• nature

• freshness

• luck
  Blue

• calm

• serenity

• trust

• reliability
  Purple

• luxury

• wealth

• virtue

• comfort
  Black

• sophistication

• power

• authority

• evil
  White

• clean

• pure

• simple

• innocent

Colour Wheel

Colour Harmony

• A grouping of colours that together they look visually appealing to an eye

Analogous Analogous Colour Harmony

• three or more colours that are evenly spread apart from the key middle colour on a colour wheel
• it can be found in nature, especially in sunsets or gradients of the sky, or ocean’s texture

Monochromatic Monochromatic Colour Harmony

• single key colour and accents of it with different saturation and luminosity
• easy to find in read world and can be easily achieved in post production

Complementary Complementary Colour Harmony

• colours that are opposite from each other on a colour wheel
• complementary colours supplement each other
• they help to create a colour contracts that is appealing
• commonly used in movies and photography
• the most common one is teal and orange

Highlights

hue is just color selection plain and simple it is pure color without the tint or the shade some people like to complicate this a little bit but simply it’s just the color that you’re selecting and most of the time it’s presented on a scale of adjacent colors next to it (View Highlight)

saturation refers to the intensity of
color so once we take a color do we increase the saturation and make it more intense and more vibrant or do we make it less saturated and more muted and understated (View Highlight)

luminosity which refers to how bright or how dark a particular color is what we can do is we can add white to a particular color to increase how bright it is but doing so will also decrease how saturated it is
as well conversely we can also take that same base color and add black instead to it making it darker and also increasing the richness of its saturation as well (View Highlight)

temperature refers to whether colors in general are cool or they are warm cool colors gravitate towards the color blue and warm colors gravitate towards the color orange (View Highlight)

unlike in primary school when you would mix finger paint together the colors that you would mix together back then would become darker and they would become more rich whereas in the digital space actually the opposite is true in the digital space we work with a color space called rgb and that doesn’t actually work this way you might have heard of rgb before or you might have heard of srgb as the color space before what this means is
that because we work on screens when we’re taking digital photographs and we’re looking at monitors and what have you the screens actually project light at us each color red green and blue is an individual light and when the lights are combined together they equal more light until you get eventually white (View Highlight)

olors have different meanings for different people depending on what kind of culture you’re from depending on what kind of background you have depending on external factors like branding and how submersed in that particular brand you are and what that means to you things like upbringing things like environment a whole bunch of external factors can change the overall subjectivity of what these colors mean to you (View Highlight)

red is the color of danger passion excitement love and energy orange is the color of
creativity of happiness friendliness and confidence yellow is the color of warning optimism prosperity and joy green is the color of health nature freshness and luck blue is a color of calm serenity trust and reliability purple is the color of luxury wealth virtue and comfort black isn’t a color it is a contrast but it can be seen as having sophistication power authority and being evil and white can be seen as clean and pure simple and
innocent (View Highlight)

olor harmony is simply the grouping together of colors in ways that
look visually appealing and there are some ways that are more appealing than others (View Highlight)

the three color harmony groups that we have commonly in photography are analogous monochromatic and complementary (View Highlight)

analogous rule is three or more hues that are evenly
fanned out from a key middle color on the wheel you can often find these color schemes in nature especially in things like sunsets or gradients of the sky or the texture of the ocean and so so much more (View Highlight)

onochromatic which uses a single key color and accents it with colors of a different saturation and different luminosity this is super super easy to use in photography both to find in the world and to edit in post-production (View Highlight)

the complementary color harmony rule takes a key color and supplements it with the opposite color on the wheel this creates a color contrast which is quite appealing and because of the contrast stands out quite a lot now you’ll see this color harmony group in film in movies in photography pretty much everywhere nowadays and the
most common color selection from this particular group is teal and orange right now (View Highlight)