I´m Joshua Cripps, ask me anything

Learning with Experts Ask Me Anything (AMA)
43

Me too!!

And, I’m sure you’re right. There’s probably a lesson to be learned by photographers who have happy feet.

As long as I know you’re not trying to avoid me, I’m happy to wait for that chance encounter on a trail somewhere. :laughing:

44

Hi James,

Thank you so much. A big a-ha moment for me was when I reprocessed an image from years ago that I thought had potential but I never really liked the results I was getting from my processing. In doing the reprocessing I realized the colors in the original image clashed with one another. I made a few tweaks to the image via the HSL adjustments and all of a sudden the photo felt harmonious and I really liked it! What happened was that over the years I had developed a more refined sense of what colors worked together and which ones didn’t. That helped give me more confidence to adjust the colors in my photos to make them work with each other.

Nowadays my approach to color is more refined than those early days, although I think it’s fairly simple. Basically, there are a few techniques I use when approaching the color in my photos:

  1. First, I’ll adjust WB and Tint until I feel I’ve struck a good balance between warm/cool, and green/magenta tones. No technical process to this, just what feels right. A trick I like to use if I’m having trouble with the global color is to put the saturation at 100. This makes it really easy to see what the dominant colors are, and if I need to make adjustments. Then I’ll move the saturation back down to a more reasonable level.

  2. Next, I will use the HSL tools to adjust individual color ranges to create a harmonious color palette. A lot times it’s things like making oranges a bit more red, and blues a little less cyan. I use a basic color theory approach here to tweak the colors into complementary sections of the color wheel.

  3. Finally (and perhaps most importantly), time. After I finish editing an image, I’ll get away from the computer for a bit and let my eyes rest. Even if it’s just a short period, like 20 minutes, I find that gives me a visual palette cleanse. Then I’ll look at the image again and see if any color casts or weird color balances or intensities jump out at me. If so I can make the appropriate tweaks. Honestly I can’t overstate the importance of this little break.

Hope that helps, and thanks for the question!

Josh