Experiments With Isolating Color

Experiments With Isolating Color

by William Lulow

I was working with a student the other day and we were talking about how to isolate a specific color when doing a photograph. The easiest way to do it would be to come across a scene in nature where a color is naturally on its own like in the image below:

Here, the color was already isolated, but it stood out to make an effective composition, shot with normal AWB (AutoWhiteBalance) which is the setting I use most of the time as do most of us. 

Another method of isolating the color is to use Photoshop in post-production to do it:

Here, we are getting the separation desired  from the warm skin tones to the gray of the cityscape. But this method just combines the color with the monochrome in the same image, achieved by masking the subjects, inverting the mask, then bringing down the saturation of the background to zero. 

But another, perhaps more effective way to produce a similar image involved shooting indoor (tungsten) color film outdoors and lighting the subject with a tungsten bulb. Today, the effect can be simulated digitally by changing the white balance of the DSLR to “tungsten.” It produces virtually the same effect as you would get from using indoor color film in a daylight situation:

In this image, the natural skin tones stand out against an overall bluish background made by setting the WHITE BALANCE of the camera to “TUNGSTEN,” while lighting the subject with a tungsten bulb. 

So, three separate techniques to make a certain color stand out in a photograph. 

In the days of film, we would often have to do things like wrap fluorescent bulbs with magenta gels in order to have the colors reproduce correctly. Here is an example:

In this shot, the fluorescent lights were under the cabinets and had to be wrapped in magenta gels so they wouldn’t reproduce as a green color. The lights on the back wall were okay reproduced as a yellow color. 

With interiors of large spaces such as this atrium, wrapping fluorescent bulbs with gels was impossible. So the image was created by “popping” the strobes (which are balanced for daylight) every twenty seconds or so with a long exposure of about 15 minutes, in order to build up enough density:

So, light has many qualities and the various Kelvin color temperatures of a light source can be used to make a visual statement. These images were made using Kodak Ektachrome sheet film, balanced for daylight with an ISO (ASA) rating of 100, hence the need for long exposures. The camera was a Wista 4×5 field view with a 90mm Schneider Super Angulon, f/8, wide angle lens. Exposure here was approximately 15minutes at f/22 with electronic flash “popped” every 20 seconds or so. There were 2 flash units set up on each floor connected by radio triggers. 

I will talk a bit about color temperature in a subsequent blog piece.