When working with color harmonies and brightness and saturation of the colors in your scene, you want to pay attention to the dominant colors. These will be the main colors that comprise the harmony, and usually the colors of the primary subjects of the image. It works well to focus your efforts of increasing saturation and brightness to these objects/colors as that is where you want the attention of your viewer to go. As an example, the image to the left of the Kofa mountains, cholla cactus, and yellow flowers is utilizing an analogous color harmony from yellows to reddish orange colors. The scene also has green of the brush and small bits of blue sky in it, but these colors, which are not part of the analogous harmony, are intentionally left darker and less saturated. The real saturation and brightness is carefully applied to areas that are receiving more light and is utilized again to create more depth and dimension on those particular objects.

Tips For Treating Each of the Colors in the Spectrum

Yellow. This color is usually very vibrant in nature usually existing in the form of light, like in the brighter parts of the sky around the sun, or where direct light is hitting objects, and then also in certain types of flora. Yellow is usually a great color to hit with some brightness and saturation wherever it appears. I usually prefer to shift the color yellow in skies slightly more towards orange.

Orange. Similarly to yellow, appearing often in skies and in flora, it is also generally associated to objects in a scene that are very bright and thus can take more brightness and saturation. I usually try to avoid allowing colors in the orange range from becoming too dark and desaturated as it turns brown. This is especially important for skies, and I avoid it at all costs. It is just not a pleasing color to see in a sky.

Red. This color tends to appear as the most saturated on camera sensors and thus is very easy to blow out. Be careful of this. When red is present in skies, I pay extra attention in only applying saturation very selectively as described in the techniques above. Red in flora looks great when given an extra punch of saturation. Red also looks nice when it's darker, as you are out of the muddy brown color area.

Magenta. This color is powerful, and is a good color to use to create the illusion of a more colorful image overall. I see this overdone quite often, and I personally choose to use it in very subdued, darker, less saturated tones. It's a great way to get a blue sky to look a little more harmonious with warm/red clouds and light, and it is also a great color to use for night and twilight scenes. Just keep it more subdued. No Barney-purple skies. Repeat after me. No Barney-purple skies!

Blue. A tricky color that can be very difficult to reign in, especially in primarily blue skies. Pay extra attention to not allow variations of blue in blue skies, in other words, allowing the combination of teal-blues, blue-blues, and magenta-blues, unless on the magenta side, some colorful light otherwise exists and motivates the presence of magenta in the blues of the sky. I put extra care into making blue very consistent in blue skies that do not have edge of day color. Handle blue in water very carefully. It can look great when it's brightened and saturated, but I find it needs to be present in the first place to handle bringing it out further. Adding blue to water that is otherwise colorless can work well, but in very subdued levels.

Teal/Turqoise. A color that does not show up much in nature generally except in glacial/snow melt waters, or in seawater in certain parts of the world. In these scenarios it's a fantastically beautiful color and I always love to feature it in images when ever I come across it. I take extra care to not allow this color to show up in open sky as it is too much of a departure from the context of nature(discussed later).

Green. A color that is abundantly present in nature. I find greens usually look the best in analogous color harmonies such as in forest scenes or waterfall scenes where the greens can be mixed in with yellows, teals and blues. I tend to prefer a very slightly blue-ish green in forest scenes, and find that adding just a touch of blue to them can make them look really nice, as opposed to going with more of a yellow green. Yellow-ish greens tend to look a little more drab and sickly. Instead limit yellow greens to the highlights of green flora. Something I also take special care in avoiding is green in skies. This can happen in skies where the warmth of the color of the sun transitions to the blue in open sky. This can be avoided by shifting the warm colors more towards orange and the blues of the open sky slightly towards magenta.

The Context of Nature

Once an image is captured, we do have decisions that can be made in post processing to modify colors for better balance and adherence to color harmonies. When approaching the processing of colors of a landscape scene, something that is important to keep in mind is a term I call the ‘Context of Nature’. The context of nature tells us two things. First is that the colors in nature are presented to us as reality, and because of the nature of their existence, are harmonious in their own right. A grouping of colors found in nature is beautiful, regardless of its level of adherence to any particular color harmony and quite often color palettes inspired by nature are often used in the design world. Second is that any alteration to a color in nature done in post processing will eventually begin to remove the reality from the scene. And while in the scope of ‘Art’, any of this is acceptable, the unspoken ‘rules’ of landscape photography would result in an image losing its identity as a ‘landscape’ photograph at an unspecified tipping point, which is largely determined by the viewers own personal tolerance for what is acceptable to them. We have to keep this in mind when working with colors in post processing to create more harmonious color combinations, and determine when an alteration has gone too far. Of course this is largely dependent on an individual's own personal taste. Again, in the scope of art, do what you want, but in regards to landscape photography, and the context of nature, this sort of thing can have a negative impact, and you might find viewers of your images saying things like, 'this looks a little ridiculous'. Finding a balance with making alterations to colors while maintaining the context of nature is a highly refined skill that takes time to develop. A good example of this is shifting the blue of a sky slightly towards magenta. A certain subtle amount of this is generally accepted by viewers, but making a sky all out purple(barney-purple), strays too far from the context of nature, and a viewer may find themselves distracted when looking at the image, wondering why the sky is purple when they have mostly known skies to be blue.