I am passionate about creating from your deepest self, working from your own vision and to find all the right elements that help you translate your way of looking at the world into strong story-telling pictures.
I wrote an entire class about it....Your Vision Your Story
As colour is such an essential ingredient to a personal style and it can make or break your story, I thought I'd explain a bit more about how to find out what your personal colour palette is.
I used Photoshop for this tutorial and I have taken screenshots to help you get the same kind of result
First of all, I go to my portfolio and choose the picture that I feel conveys my vision better than any other picture (this time mostly concentrating on colour of course). In my case this picture is 2048 pixels wide.
This is the picture I chose for this tutorial. First I open this picture up in Photoshop and then I create a new document under file-> new
A new window will open and you can see I made a document that is 3000 pixels wide and 2000 pixels high. I changed the background colour to colour code 353535. The orientation of this file is horizontal as you can see. Click on Create
Next we are going to move our photo into the document. I select the rectangular marquee tool and then right click on the photo, I select duplicate layer and then I change the destination document to my new untitled-1 document. Press OK
Now that the picture is on the grey background (You could of course also choose white, it depends on your preference and the type of pictures you are taking), we can start making a moodboard
It is a lot of fun and not as hard as you would think. First (and this is really important, so please don't forget this otherwise you can't align your swatches later), is create a new layer (Layer->New-> Layer or simply by clicking on the icon on the bottom right of my screen next to the trash can or by typing the shortcut ctrl+shift+N and cmd+shift+N on a Mac
Now select the rectangular marquee tool whilst having the new layer selected and draw out a small rectangle under the picture. Whilst the selection is active go to your paint bucket tool, change the foreground colour on the bottom left to white and then click on the rectangle to fill it with white.
Now you need to duplicate this layer as many times as the amount of swatches you would like to have. To duplicate the layer you can use the short cut Cmd+J (which is what I always do) or on Windows Ctrl+J.
Select the move tool and select the second layer, move the rectangle to the right and Photoshop will align it. The select the third layer, move the rectangle to the right next to the one you did before and so on until you have all your white rectangles under your picture. Don't forget to select the correct layer when moving it. Photoshop does a brilliant job aligning the rectangles (at least it does in my version of Photoshop)
Here you can see all my little white rectangles. Switch from the move tool to the paint bucket tool and then click on the foreground colour in your tool panel on the left of your screen (a few steps down from the paint bucket tool). Click on the foreground colour and then hover over your picture to sample the first colour that you would like to have in your swatches. I chose the darkest shadow of the tree trunks. Then with the paint bucket tool still active and with the first rectangle layer selected click the paint bucket on the rectangle and voila...your first colour swatch is there. Repeat the procedure for every single layer and keep sampling different colours in your picture
You should end up with a nice colour swatch board like this
After I was done with the swatches, I added my logo as you can see and made a new text layer on top using one of the sampled colours for the text.
I then clicked file-> export->Save For Web (legacy) and saved this as a high quality jpeg file. And this is what I ended up with.
Now that you have this colour swatch board of the picture from your own port folio that matches your vision best, you can start to examine the colours more closely. As you can see I have a tendency to like earthy tones and muted colours...muted colours are colours that are not fully saturated, they have a bit of grey in them).
What is equally important in this picture is the absence of some colours, which are bright primary colours, but I also tend to avoid cyan and magenta. Whenever I use these hues, I just don't feel happy with the results.
This is a really fun and helpful way of discovering your favoured colour palette, which is such a key element in discovering your own vision and developing your own style
My colour palette will be different from yours and might even be massively different, but what matters is that you find out which colours convey your vision and the story you want to tell in your photography best. If you are a wedding photographer, these will probably not be your colours, but even in wedding a photography a certain type of toning used consistently will make you stand out from the rest
| I would love to know what you discovered through this exercise. Tell me all about your colour palette in the comments below |
If you consistently use the same type of colours, your port folio will look more cohesive, it will look like thought has gone into it and that there is a purpose behind it.
If you want to discover your own vision, develop your own style and find out what story telling elements will help your convey your story, you can learn this in my upcoming class : Your Vision Your Story
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