Unlock the Secret to Stunning Photos: Master the Colour Wheel NOW!

Have you ever wondered how some pictures just have that wow factor with their incredible colours?

Welcome to Coffee Break Photography with me, Rich Dyson from Edinburgh Photography Workshop. Grab your coffee and let's discuss the colour wheel and its impact on enhancing your photos.

So, have you ever wondered how some pictures just have that wow factor with their incredible colours? The secret is this nifty little thing called the colour wheel. It might sound a bit technical, but trust me, it's a game-changer for your photography.

Let’s take a quick trip back to the 17th century. Picture this: Sir Isaac Newton playing around with prisms and discovering that white light splits into a spectrum of colours. He then mapped these colours into a circle, creating the first-ever colour wheel. Pretty cool, right? This simple diagram laid the foundation for understanding colour relationships and harmony, which are super important in photography.

When colour wheels were first used, it was by painters and artists. They could combine three colours, red, yellow and blue, to create many other colours. For example combining yellow and blue paint, will produce a green paint colour.

I live in the beautiful Scottish city of Edinburgh, and that was the place where the first colour photograph was taken by a guy named James Clerk Maxwell. He argued that the primary colours suggested by Newton were wrong and he proved this by taking three photographs. One used a red filter, the second a green filter and the third with a blue filter. When he stacked the three negatives on top of each other, the combination of the three different filters replicated the complex colours of a piece of tartan.

As photography uses the RGB system, for the rest of this video I’ll concentrate on the RGB colour wheel and not the RYB version.

I’m going to show you in Adobe Photoshop how we construct a colour wheel. I’ve created a disc with twelve different segments and I am going to add in to three of the segments, the three primary colours; red, green and blue.

If we look at the red colour first of all by selecting it with the colour picker and then clicking on the colour, we can see it has a value of 255 for the red channel and zero for the green and blue channels.

Selecting the green sehment with the colour picker and then looking at the colour again, we can see that the green channel has a value of 255 and red and blue are set to zero. And similarly if we looked at blue it would have a 255 value in the blue channel and zero for red and green.

Now we will create what are known as the secondary colours. This time we are going to set the red and green channels to 255 and leave the blue channel set to zero. This combination creates the colour yellow. Doing the same thing but with green and blue channels creates cyan, and when we mix blue and red in this way we create the colour magenta.

We can complete colour wheel by creating tertiary colours. The first box next to red sets the red channel to 255, but this time, the green channel is further away, so we are going to set the green channel to half of 255, which rounded up becomes 128. This combination of red and yellow produces orange. The next box is next to green but further away from red, so this time we’ll set the green channel to 255 and the red channel to 128. This combination produces a colour we call chartreuse. Repeating the same principle as we work our way around the wheel we create the remaining colours of spring green, azure, violet and rose.

The colour wheel shows us how different colours relate to each other. There are complementary colours that sit opposite each other on the wheel and analogous or  harmonious  colours that are next to each other. Understanding this can totally transform how you use colours in your photos.

Now, how does this magical wheel apply to photography? Let’s dive in.

A big part of using the colour wheel in photography is creating colour harmony. By knowing which colours complement or work well together, you can make your images more visually appealing. For instance, pairing complementary colours like blue and yellow can make your photos really stand out, while analogous colours like blue and violet give a more harmonious look.

When planning your shots, think about the colours in your scene and how they relate to each other. The colour wheel can help you make more deliberate choices about what to include in your frame, enhancing the overall composition of your photo. It's like having a secret weapon for better pictures!

Even in post-processing, the colour wheel is your best friend. Programs like Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop let you adjust the hues and tones in your image. With the colour wheel in mind, you can make smart decisions about which colours to enhance or tone down, achieving the perfect mood and style for your photo.

The colour wheel is an awesome tool that can take your photography to the next level. By understanding and using it, you can create stunning visuals that captivate your audience.

If you enjoyed this video, please give it a thumbs up and share it with your friends. And don’t forget to subscribe to my channel for more photography tips and tricks. I also send out a monthly newsletter with all the latest news and exclusive offers, so be sure to scan this QR code to sign up. Thanks for hanging out with me today. I’m Rich Dyson from Edinburgh Photography Workshop, and this has been Coffee Break Photography. See you next time!