TAOP Part Three : Colour – control the strength of a colour

Part 3 Colour

Project: What makes a Colour?

Exercise 1 : Control the strength of a colour

I did this exercise three times.  I used strawberries; then I photographed a deep pink jacket I have, but I decided to work with the following because it also enabled me to do some macro work. I used my 100mm USM lens , with tripod,  on manual at f11, with ISO 200. It was quite a bright day, although not sunny and our conservatory got the best of the light I think.

Here’s how the colour changed as I changed the exposure with consequent change in shutter speed. There are no changes to the raw image in terms of brightness and I didn’t use any sharpness or noise reduction either. No. 2 was the ‘correct’ exposure

No. 1 – 0.4

No. 2 – 0.3

No. 3 – 1/4

No. 4 – 1/5

No, 5 – 1/6

No. 6 – 1/8

I actually like all of them, although I can see how no. 1 is slightly over-exposed. I was also surprised how much the depth of the colour changed.  No. 4 and No. 5 do have less sharpness, and I think that No. 3 which is slightly under-exposed does have the best result in terms of both depth of colour and sharpness.

This was a good little exercise which made me realise how much I can play around with colour by just changing the exposure.

June 2011