White is the combination of Red, Green, and Blue in equal amounts. Or the combination of Cyan, Magenta, and Yellow in equal amounts. What you will notice is that the secondary colours, are the colours that are used for your printer inks. When you mix inks however, they don’t come out as you would expect as with mixing light. When mixing C (Cyan), M (Magenta), & Y (Yellow) inks, you would have expected to get black, but end up with a dark muddy brown. Hence why we have a separate black ink, often referred to as “K”. (CMYK)

 

So you might well ask, What use is this to me as a Photographer? Well quite a lot actually, probably more important to a monochrome photographer than the colour one. This chart enables you to know how to boost specific colours, remove casts, boost clouds in monochrome, choose the right colour filters and more. It’s a vital tool in the photographers arsenal, when both taking and processing the results of your efforts.

 

From the monochrome photographers point of view, it’s a great tool for moving emphasis to certain parts of your image. For example, take the basic darkening of a blue sky to show up your clouds, you would choose a filter opposite blue on the colour triangle to darken it. For example;- a yellow filter would therefore darken your blue sky, showing up the white clouds. I have also used green filters in the past, to lighten tree foliage on panchromatic film, a bonus side effect being, it darkens the sky as well. It gives a more linear response from your film. So from this we can determine a few simple Rules:-

 

To lighten a colour in monochrome you add it in filter form.

 

To darken a colour in the tonal range of your image, you choose the filter colour that is opposite it on the colour triangle, and add that.

 

By juggling the sliders during the colour to mono conversion process you can usually see the result in a preview window, as to how it will convert.

 

For more extreme results, people have used orange and even more severe red filters, to achieve the dramatic results that they want, usually with sky’s.

 

Of course these days, we can photograph stuff all in colour, and during the photoshop conversion process to monochrome, we can add emphasis to red, green, or blue, to give us the result we want. This saves us spending a fortune on optical filters. However without knowing which colours to boost or darken, you are working blind! Guesswork wastes hours, it’s a good idea to try and memorise the colour triangle over time, it will help you a lot.

 

The Colour Triangle can help you choose the right colour filter to apply in photoshop in the form of a photo filter adjustment layer. With time, you will be able to judge what colour cast there is on an image you created, or printed. When you look at the triangle, you can choose the appropriate colour filter to use, and just vary the strength till it looks correct on your “calibrated screen”.  Example:- If you have a slight red cast on an image, look at what is opposite red on the Triangle, (cyan) then add a cyan filter layer above your image layer to correct it. You may need to adjust the filter strength though.

 

I say calibrated earlier, because you will be wasting your time and making wrong adjustments if it is not calibrated! You will end up changing an image probably that’s correct, and does not need adjustment in the first place! This will result in casts on images,  or incorrect projection on somebody else’s computer or projector.

 

For colour perfect pictures I cannot emphasise enough, the importance of a calibrated screen. If printing, create a print profile as well, to ensure what you see on screen, equals what you get on paper. At this point I should say, remember the image you view on screen is projected light, but the image seen on printed paper is reflected light. There will always be some difference between the two.

 

Enjoy your Photography

 

Kevin James