Editing Autumnal Colors

Editing Autumnal Colors by Michel Charlebois-Rehmat

Autumn is full of photo opportunities. Whether you’re just a casual shooter with your iPhone, or you’re an amateur photog with a DSLR, you’ll want to make sure you really capture all those fall colors in all their glory.

Sometimes simply shooting an image isn’t enough to really capture its best colors, or to make the image stand out the way you want. In those instances, you need to do a little post photo-shoot editing to help enhance the colors and areas you want. And with all those brilliant reds, oranges, and yellows at this time of year, to make things pop, you’ll need to understand more about color balance.

Cyan/Yellow

When you want to edit the yellows in an image, it’s also important to pay attention to the cyan at the same time. Yellow and cyan balance one another in images, so removing some of the cyan can really make your yellow pop. This is especially important in photos that have a lot of yellow and orange tones already; adding more yellow to try to brighten things up will only serve to make the entire image seem jaundiced. By removing a cyan or two, however, you get the look you want, without turning the picture muddy.

Magenta/Green

While you probably don’t pay a lot of attention to the pink tones in your autumnal photos, they are there, and they help support the other fall colors. Just like yellow balances with cyan, the magenta in your pictures balances with green. Removing a point or two of green from your photos will deepen the pink tones.
On the other hand, however, if you’re shooting pictures of leaves on grass, and want to sharpen the contrast, consider removing a magenta from the image. This will make the grass brighter, contrasting more cleanly with the leaves.

Red/Blue

The true red and blue tones in your images also balance each other out. These ones are a little trickier to play with in autumnal images, because you so often see things like pumpkin patches or bold leaves against a blue sky. Remove too much blue, and your sky washes out, add too much blue and it dulls your pumpkins.

This is why you want to balance the other colors first, and touch these last. You may also want to freeze most of the image, and only adjust the reds and blues in small areas to sharpen the colors of specific things like a pumpkin or a child’s costume, rather than adjusting these tones in the entire image.

Always add or remove one point of color at a time until you’re satisfied, particularly when working in the red/blue field to help get the balance just right.

Brighten Your Autumnal Pics

With a little practice at color balancing, you can create some fall photos that really capture all the glory of these beautiful days. Adjust your colors with care, and show off your autumnal neighborhood to its best effect.