How to Get Great Color in Photographs

Photography is an art form studied by photographers and admired by art enthusiasts. The best part of the craft of picture taking is the ability to capture the essence of a time and place. Follow the steps to get great color in your photographs.

Instructions

Difficulty: Easy

Pick the Right Time

1. Capture pictures during glorious light, which is the perfect time to take pictures. Know that the time occurs for 60 seconds or less a day, if at all. Understand that glorious light usually occurs sometime 15 minutes before or 15 minutes after sunrise or sunset.
2. Realize most people lose half of the potential shots because they wake up after sunrise. Get up at 3:00 a.m. to capture great color in photographs. Leave by 3:30 a.m. to get to the location by 4:30 a.m. Set up by 5:00 a.m. Wait for the 6:00 a.m. anticipated sunrise.
3. Eat dinner at 4:00 p.m. to begin shooting by 6:00 p.m. Take a great sunset photograph.

Develop Perserverance

4. Know awe-inspiring colors do not happen every day. Plan to capture the colors only once a month, decade or lifetime. Set up the camera and prepare every day. Expect nature to change by the minute.
5. Understand that it takes patience to capture a good sunrise. Know that taking a photograph of a sunrise or sunset is a waste of time most of the time. Use a GPS to predict sunrise and sunset times at a virtual horizon anywhere on Earth. Set up the camera and wait for the right photograph.
6. Know that light and color determine the quality of pictures, not the subject.

Take Pictures at Night

7. Photograph at night to get wild colors. Realize that eyes have much less sensitivity to color at night. Understand that film and digital cameras keep the same sensitivity. Expect photos made at night to have more vivid colors than what you would see under the same conditions. Realize that the lighting difference makes getting wild colors easier.
8. Take photographs before the sky completely darkens, approximately half an hour after sunset, to capture the sky instead of a black spot. Expect the night time sky to have funny colors from street lights that are miles away.
9. Take pictures of any artificial or neon lighting. Understand artificial lighting adds wild colors. Realize the lighting may be an object in the photograph or a source of illumination. Know that each kind of light, fluorescent, mercury, tungsten and sodium yields a different strange color in photographs. Use color differences to your advantage.
10. Recognize effects of substances. Discern sodium from other substances because it looks orange or yellow to people but looks orange or gold or yellow in photos. Distinguish tungsten which looks white to the sight but appears orange in photographs unless you use an 80A filter, Tungsten film or tungsten White Balance. Expect mercury to appear bluish-white to the individual but show up as green in photos. View fluorescent as white but see it as greenish light in a photo.

Follow Day Into Night

11. Wait for the minute-long sweet spot when sky and land have the right balance as day dissolves into night. Learn when conditions are most breathtaking.
12. Set up the camera. Take shots of a landscape each minute during and after sunset, as an assignment. Watch changes from minute to minute. Observe how some images are much stronger than others within the same sequence. Pay attention to the change during shooting. Play the photos back to get another look at subtle differences.
13. Photograph the landscape either before or at sunset until the sky is completely black. Stop at approximately an hour after sunset. Try the procedure to photograph a sunset. Realize that the sunset looks different each second. Pay close attention.

Use the Right Technique

14. Set saturation on digital cameras to a setting that looks right. Select "plus" on SLR cameras. Set Canon point-and-shoot cameras to "vivid." Know Casio cameras are already saturated, so leave them on "0."
15. Be aware that exposure is challenging with digital cameras. Know that the smallest overexposure demolishes saturation.
16. Look at the image on your LCD to determine correct exposure. Ignore single-channel histograms. Be sure bright reds are red and are not starting to blow out toward pink, orange or yellow. Use Photoshop later to lighten the image if a lighter image is needed. Be aware you will never get highlights back If you lose them.
17. Underexpose pictures and lighten later if needed. Forget about recovering overexposed color images; it is impossible.
18. Print on the glossiest paper possible.

Tips & Warnings

• Avoid sleeping at sunrise and eating at sunset. Capture the only light that shows things the way photographers like to see objects. Go out and get colorful pictures of nature the hard way.

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