How to Tone a Photograph
Photographers, graphic artists, and designers routinely use colored filters to apply tones to photographs. The most commonly used colored filters are warming filters (for warm orange tones) and cooling filters (for cool blue tones), but you can use the full range of filters to enhance contrast between elements in a photograph, draw attention to certain features in the image or simply apply a color cast for artistic effect. You can even use tonal filters in black and white photography to enhance the brightness of similarly colored objects in the scene.
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Instructions
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Analyze the light of the scene you are intending to shoot. A light meter may help to determine the color temperature (the orangeness or blueness of light), but you can also use your naked eye. Look for an area in the scene that should be white--such as snow, a white building or a road sign--and note the color under the scene's lighting conditions.
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Choose a color filter to balance or enhance the lighting of the scene. For instance, night shots under tungsten lights (most street lights) will appear warmer, or more orange. This effect can be neutralized with a cooling blue filter. Alternatively, the same filter can be used underwater to exaggerate the blueness of the water.
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Screw the filter to the front of your camera lens. The filter will have threads that match the threads on the end of your lens (the same threads that are used for lens hoods or other types of filters). Screw the filter clockwise until it is snug against the lens.
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Disable the automatic white balance of your camera. Digital cameras analyze the tone of photographs and automatically apply adjustments to neutralize any color casts. Since your are using the colored filters to intentionally induce a tone, you must disable the white balance.
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Look through your camera's viewfinder, which collects the light coming from the lens. Because the filter is placed directly over the lens, the image will appear with the same tone through the viewfinder as on the final image.
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Tips & Warnings
Tonal filters block a portion of the light spectrum, which limits the amount of light coming into the camera. You will need to reduce the shutter speed to compensate for the loss of light. If you are using a tonal filter at night, this means you may have to use a tripod to minimize camera shake.
References
- Photo Credit Telescope color filters image by Jim Mills from Fotolia.com
