Zim: Today on the podcast, I'm welcoming James Freed. I first met Jim when we were both at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. He was studying illustration, and I was a photography major. Today, Jim is a draftsman and a painter with a strong foundation in architectural design. He runs his own exhibit design firm and has been teaching art and design since 1995. He's currently an associate professor at Santa Rosa Junior College, where he teaches design and drawing.
He also leads workshops, including as a visiting artist at the Donkey Mill Art Center in Hawaii. Jim works out of his home studio in Sebastopol, California, drawing much of his inspiration from nature. I've invited him on to talk about how color affects photographic composition.
Zim: Hey James, welcome to the podcast.
James: Hey Zim, how's it going?
Zim: Good. So how's the weather there in California?
James: It's raining.
Zim: Rain's good for California.
Zim: Absolutely. Okay. My question to you is this. What is the first thing you tell your students when it comes to color and the importance of color theory?
James: The most important thing to keep in mind with color is not just the color, but the value of the color. So how light or how dark that color is, how it relates to the other colors in the scene, and how it harmonizes with the other colors in the scene. You have harmony, contrast, and value, a hierarchy of colors.
So you want to be able to have a color setup where the color that you want to have mostly featured is the most prominent and that it creates a mood. If you're going for a happy mood, what kind of colors should you be putting in your painting? So when we think about a happy mood, we think about warmth and reds and oranges and yellows and warm light. So if we're creating a realistic painting or trying to make a realistic scene, you want to convey a sense of warmth, a sense of comfort and ease, that golden hour type of light that you talk about in photography, very similar in painting.
Zim: On the opposite spectrum of warmth is usually cooler colors, right?
James: Yes.
Zim: What do those convey?
James: Cooler colors can convey more serenity, a quiet look at nature, trees, and rivers, and sky. The cooler colors on the spectrum are blues and greens and violets, while the warmer colors are yellows, oranges, and reds. And the way that those are used in combination with each other helps create the mood or the scene.
Color is also going to be contrasted with the other colors that are featured in the scene. When I was at Art Center, we had a wonderful teacher named Judith Crook. She taught all of the color classes, and she always emphasized that warm light makes cool shadows. So if your scene is lit by the sunshine, you've got warmer light on the objects and the scene around you, the shadows are going to be on the cool side of the spectrum. So they're going to be in the blues and the violets. And that's something that always stuck with me, and it's something that you can play around with both in painting and photography.
Zim: So was she saying that you should warm up your shadows or make it cooler to make it more realistic?
James: So if you're looking at trying to create a realistic scene that is lit by sunshine, then making the colors of the shadows cooler will help you do that.
Zim: This is really interesting because a lot of photographers are not noticing that when you're standing in the shade, everything is a little bit cooler in color. And it's funny because when you're experiencing things 360 degrees, X, Y, and Z axis, you don't notice that that is happening because your brain is already adjusting to that. As a painter, and you're actually creating the scene, you actually have to notice that that is happening. So I think it's really interesting that Judith taught you to see the world a little bit better.
And this brings up another thing, which is you are actually mixing colors and creating the scene, whereas photographers were just reacting to the thing that's in front of us, but it is important to keep track of the fact that this is happening.
James: Yes. Painters build color relationships from observation using pigment, and photographers discover and shape existing color relationships. So we're both tasked with understanding and seeing what color is there. I have to mix my paint to make that happen. You have to shape the color relationships that you're seeing and focus in on what you want.
Zim: And actually, to a great extent, up until now, we've had not a lot of control over how those colors are rendering. But with Lightroom, I can make those blues a little bit more blue or the warms a little bit more warm specifically. And I think we're getting into a stage where we can begin to control our images a lot more like the way a painter does.
James: Yeah. And some of the things that you can control, sometimes if you don't really understand how color works, you can take it to too much of an extreme. And some of the things that I've seen, especially with beginning photographers or people that haven't had that much experience using color, is the tendency is to oversaturate colors for an image.
And if that's something that you're actually looking for and that you want your image to convey, then that's fine. If it's something that you automatically go to, to just kind of pump up the red or pump up the blue, it can be a little not harmonious. In order to achieve harmony with color, you have to be careful about how much saturation any certain color is providing, and a beginner's mistake is to oversaturate all the colors, and then you don't have that nice balance and harmony.
Zim: Beginners are oversaturating their colors because I see this a lot. I think it's Instagram with all those filters that you can use, but that's just me.
James: I think it's also an attraction because color is really fun and you can play with it, adjusting those sliders, and people get into it, and they start seeing these really bright colors come up or really saturated colors come up, and they think it looks cool. It can, depending upon your intention.
But something that was drilled into me at Art Center, again, was as artists, we have to have an intent. What is our intent with our image? Anybody can learn how to draw and paint and just record what's there, but the true artist has an intention behind it. You're trying to achieve something. Learning how to use your tools to do that is really important.
Zim: I think you hit the nail on the head, which is intent. I ask all the time with my students, what are you shooting? What are you trying to show the viewer? And I think clearly this comes out with color as well and color choice.
One of the things I also try to encourage people to do, and it's something I actually learned from one of my participants, is to let it marinate. As we're doing edits, we're sitting there at 2 a.m., we're just editing it back and forth, back and forth. We've lost track of what we're doing. She said, you know what, sit back and let it marinate. And very often what I find is when I come back 24, 48 hours later, things look a lot different. And so that helps me keep the image in check, so to speak.
James: Painters do the same thing. I'm always telling my students that when you get stuck on a painting, instead of trying to force it, just put it up on the wall and walk away. Come back a few hours later, come back the next day, take a look at it, and you'll see it with fresh eyes.
You know, the same thing is true about color. Color can really create a lot of attention in a scene. And one of the things that can help color dominate a scene is highly saturated color, so color that is at its strongest version of that hue. And that really pulls your visual attention in.
The next thing is warm versus cool colors and that interplay that happens between those. Warm colors tend to advance in the scene visually, so they tend to come forward to you, and cool colors recede.
If you think about the color of the horizon on a blue sky day, everything fades and gets less and less contrast the further away it gets in the scene. And colors that attract the most attention—red—and you see this throughout art history and photography. It's a real attention grabber.
Think about, I'm old school, I think about Tom Selleck riding around in that red Ferrari with the background of the Hawaiian islands and Magnum PI.
Zim: Oh my God, you are old. Who is Tom Selleck? What's Magnum PI?
James: Oh, come on. Google it, folks. You know, yellow and orange are just right up there. We use yellow for high visibility for signs, traffic signs. Orange, traffic cones. Again, high value contrast.
James: Going back to looking at how the darkness or the lightness of a color in a scene makes our eyes really see it. So when you have something really dark against something really light, it really draws your attention, sometimes even stronger than just the color.
We were taught as illustrators that little accents of red in a scene can control an entire composition. So you can direct the viewer's eye in the scene by adding in a little red or a little stronger color or a little more visual contrast. Now we've used this for centuries. Photographers can do that too. And then complementary colors intensify attention. So if you have a red and you put it next to a green, it's going to sizzle visually. So what I mean by complementary is that you have colors that are across the color wheel from each other. So if I paint a red and then I look at green, if I put these two colors next to each other or in close connection with each other, it's going to optically sizzle. And that's something that painters have played with for as long as we've been painting.
Zim: So one of the things that you just said was high value contrast. What do you mean by that?
James: Well, high value contrast is any place in an image where you have a very light value next to a very dark value. And that automatically will make the viewer look at that spot in your painting or in your photograph. And you can use that to control how you direct the viewer into your scene.
Zim: That's really interesting because here's a fun trick that everybody should be thinking about. Adding a little bit of contrast to your image, generally speaking, will make it feel a lot sharper. So you all should be thinking about creating a little more contrast. If you don't have it in your scene, you can probably pull that up in Lightroom.
James: Yeah, I really like the Lightroom toolbox for that reason. And you can play with contrast. You can also use the luminosity slider to help play with that. And it's a little more subtle, but there's lots of tools within Lightroom that can help you with that.
Zim: So now I'm really curious. How do painters create more emphasis? Are you putting certain colors next to each other to create emphasis? And what is that decision-making process?
James: So the answer to that question is absolutely yes. And that decision-making process goes back to how we are trained as painters to work with color mixing based on the color wheel relationships. So for photographers or folks that are familiar with the color wheel, it's a tool that was developed by Isaac Newton that places colors in a circle based on their relationships to each other and how you mix them. And in painting, we have three colors that we start with that are primary colors that can't be mixed from any other color. So those are yellow, red, and blue.All the other colors are mixed from that. So you can think about those as the primary colors. The secondary colors are orange, violet, and green. So those are mixed from the primaries. And when you put colors that are directly across the color wheel from each other together in a scene, it creates optical contrast between those colors. We call that a complementary relationship. Complementary colors would include blue and orange, violet and yellow, red and green. Anytime those colors are put next to each other, it creates this optical sizzle. One of my teachers used to call it the sizzle. It can really intensify not just the value contrast, but the color contrast in the scene and definitely draws your attention.
The other thing is that isolating color in an overall neutral scene can really increase the power of the image. So you can think about an overall, maybe a darker scene that has a little bit of light in it, and in the light area there is a strong color, and that is your focal point in the scene. It can create really rich, strong images.
Zim: Now that we've talked about how color can pull the viewer's attention and also create tension, visual tension in the image, what about balance? How does color change the visual balance of an image?
James: Well, again, it goes back to color relationships. Saturation reduces subtlety and compresses the value relationships, but if you can have less saturated colors and then focus in and have one more highly saturated color, that can start to give you a little asymmetrical balance.
And being able to recognize that in a scene and seeing where you can frame your scene to incorporate that, I think is a great thing to look at. And we have a little bit of control over that in the post-process as well.
Zim: So earlier you were talking about warm versus cooler colors. I was just looking at an image that was really astonishing. There were all these warm colors as the sun was setting at the same time, which is just something I've very rarely seen. Above it, there were still a lot of these cool colors.
Zim: It looked very unnatural while standing there. It looks even more unnatural as I'm looking at the image, and I can see where people think that it's all post-processed, but it is there. And so even though it doesn't look natural, it was, and that can create a lot of visual tension in the shot as well, because we're not used to seeing those types of colors together.
James: Yeah, and there's sometimes I've seen things in nature, especially sunsets, can do this. If I try to paint it as strongly as the contrast that I'm seeing it, nobody would believe me, and it would look really garish. And that's just nature being nature.
I think as artists, we want to start to ask the questions, what is the mood that we're after in our scene? And again, it goes back to intention. What is the focal point of our scene? And then what's the emotional temperature that we want to imbue to the image?Do we want it to be an overall warm scene? Do you want it to be a cool scene with a little bit of warmth in one area to capture our attention? Those are all things that you can think about and start to frame with your viewer. And then extreme shifts in those things can kind of break the trust.
So like I was talking about with a sunset, if you have skin tones and natural colors that don't look natural in the scene and that's not your intent, it can start to feel a little strange.
Zim: The other thing I want to talk about, aside from balance, is movement and motion, visual movement and motion. If you put certain colors in the frame, is it going to move your eye more quickly in one direction or the other?
James: Oh, sure. Again, going back to contrasting colors. So if you have reds with greens next to them, or reds with blue greens next to them, then you're going to draw your viewer's eye to that area. And if you can have that going into the scene, that will again draw your viewer's eye into that scene. So it's all about how you frame it.
Zim: So in other words, if we put something with a lot of color contrast, like a red and green, in certain parts of our frame, your eyeball is going to go there much faster.
James: Absolutely.
Zim: Okay. All of these visual arts that we pursue are all about seeing. And I think if the artists that really train their eye to see well can know when to capture it and push the shutter, or know when to frame the scene and paint it the way that you're seeing it.
James: Absolutely.
Zim: I think that is so interesting because in the photo department, I don't recall us having that many conversations about color. Either that or it just went right over my head, which was highly possible. I mean, I was in my early twenties, right? And it really affects the way we're viewing images. So I think what Jim is saying is extremely important. When you are out there composing images, this is something I think that everybody should be paying attention to, is how colors work with each other. You can change your angle up a lot of times to make that happen. POV.
James: POV, yes.
Zim: Point of view. Although we're reacting to what's in front of us, we choose what angle we're shooting from. Light and dark, that's pretty easy. Color is going to be a little bit harder, but it is available if we just simply look at the scene.
Zim: Is there anything else you want to add with regards to that?
James: Yeah. And when you're thinking about editing in color, like if you're in Lightroom, it's not necessarily about correcting the color. It's about orchestrating the color. So again, keeping in mind that harmony and your intention. So as you're creating changes, think about how that affects the whole image and not just the one area that you're overly concerned about.
Zim: That's a great piece of advice. And this is the other thing too, is we're orchestrating the image. I think people have lost track of the idea that color is both emotional and color is subjective. The way you see blue and I see blue are two different things. We may be looking at the same exact object, but if we walk away and have to recreate those colors, we're going to create two different colors because we see it differently, just simply because it's also emotional.
James: Yes.
And we had a conversation, I get into this with my girlfriend all the time. We were talking about what color to paint our laundry room. And she had some very insistent ideas about naming the colors that we were looking at, and I had different names for them. So color is subjective sometimes when you're looking at, especially in the field.
Zim: Actually, color is not subjective sometimes, it's subjective all the time.
James: All right, I'll acquiesce to that. It's subjective all the time, and it's really dependent upon what else is going on in the scene and what else is happening in the atmosphere. That's why I like to say start with value. Start with looking at the value relationships first, the lights and the darks. That's going to lead you to a much stronger image than if you're just automatically going right for the color.
Zim: That's interesting because I definitely look at value pretty quickly after I'm editing an image. However, a very interesting thing too is that Adobe has organized Lightroom in the order that they think you should be editing in. And they have the color balance at the very top. The very next thing is exposure. So that's interesting that you think we should actually be doing exposure first.
James: Yes, I think you should. But that's me, I'm a painter, that's how I was trained. A lot of the times when I'm working on a series of paintings, like say I'm actually writing and illustrating a children's book right now, and to make the images the strongest that they can be, we start off with grayscale images. So when I'm making a book dummy and creating my drawings that are going to be paintings later on, I always start with a black and white mockup before I go to full color.im That way I can organize the values and the relationships of those values in the scene and know what my focal point is going to be before I go to color. Because if you start with color, you can get too wrapped up in the color, and no matter what you do, the color is not going to save the drawing. The drawing has to be strong compositionally and with value before you add the color to it.
Zim: That's really interesting because a lot of people out there say that you cannot learn composition by shooting color. I very much disagree with that because I'm teaching that all day long. But on the other hand, I think there is some significant merit to what you're saying.
Zim: And I think by using black and white, we can begin to focus our intention, constantly thinking about what it is we're shooting and what it is we're trying to convey. And it can help us figure out what our subject is very quickly.
James: Yeah. And it's just a way of thinking about creating the image. And after a while, you can train yourself, even if you're using a camera, to see the value relationships.
Zim: Okay. Anything else you want to add with regards to color?
James: Yeah. I think painting teaches me to invent color relationships, and photography teaches you to recognize them. And I think both are ultimately about seeing and how you see the world and how you open your eyes and really look and see what's in front of you.
Zim: And that's what I love about photography.
James: It's really learning how to see, and not just so you don't bump into stuff when you're walking down the street. It's learning to see value relationships. It's learning to see… One of the things that I think is wonderful about photography is that it can also capture time and movement a lot easier than you can in a painting. Painters can do that too, but just with a little camera movement, you can create a sense of movement. And if you have this idea and you see that first and then you go to create it, then you're really taking into account all of those elements that you as the artist can start to learn how to use and to control.
Zim: Jim, thank you so much for joining me today. It was such a pleasure and so insightful.
James: Thank you, Zim. It's always great to talk with you.
Zim: So that's it for part three. Next week, I'll talk about visual balance. I hope that was helpful. Until next time, keep on shooting.