3695 - Not Everything's Lavender


Harmonizing colors is also problematic, and I don’t mean that from an ethic point of view. I’m unscrupulous as far as that goes.

No, you’ve got two problems to solve.

The first one is, that you have to find a standard, a color towards which you intend to harmonize your images. That sounds easy, but believe me, it ain’t. Basically you have to try processing every single image, and only then do you know where your target color is.

One reason for that is, that not all images are mallable to the same degree. Some can be changed in amazing ways, some seem to resist even small changes.

Of course you can throw away what tries to resist, but then you may have to give up on images that you really like for different reasons, for instance their composition. You don’t want to do that, and therefore the color standard is set by those images that are least mallable.

The second problem is, that you can’t work with color temperature alone. Lavender is not the only color. Even in tight compositions there is the green of the stems, and you soon recognize that you want to harmonize that green as well. And then there are the other flowers. Yellow and red, sometimes pink, and all that is under a blue sky that you want to look natural. The same can be said about the color of the earth.

It’s a processing nightmare. I’ve never in my life spent as much time with images as I did with these. Each of them has been changed over and again. I did it not to make all look equal (they are not), but instead to make them seem plausible. I think I did succeed to a certain degree and definitely to the best of my abilities, and if not that, at least to the end of my patience 🙂

By the way, in case you wonder, the second image of this post is not lavender. It is some kind of salvia, a flower that is also grown here, although to a lesser extent.