Looking to Change Your Tone?
Filters don’t get enough credit; they work really hard to try to satisfy all the elements of a photo. However, sometimes it’s just not enough. If you choose the wrong one, no one will be fooled into believing there could be a professional photographer behind your phone – and let’s be real, isn’t that the goal?
Apps that allow editing photos beyond filters are exciting. One of the most fine-tuned aspects I’ve come to love is the ability to edit different tones. There are three separate tones (more simply described as levels of brightness within an image) that should be taken into account while editing. These include shadows, midtones and highlights.
It’s important to pay attention to these aspects when adjusting for contrast, as the brightness compared to one another is important. However, I find the real creative fun begins when tones are changed by adjusting the hue (the colour of the tone) or saturation (the intensity of the colour).
Many people have an eye for the correct filter to get a desired effect, but why do some of them look horrible? There are apps out there that provide more control over tonal adjustments, but using them takes practice. At first, finding midtones in colour photos can be challenging. Over time, your ability to predict where the boundaries lies between highlight and midtone and between midtone and shadow will improve.
These boundaries can make it difficult to predict how a photo is going to change when the colour of a specific tone is adjusted. For example, a filter that is intended to change the hue of midtones by giving them a blue tint will have a different outcome than one that is intended to adjust the hue of only the highlights in the same image. This would especially be true if the image contained significantly more highlights than midtones (or vice versa). Similarly, a filter intended to add hues would vary depending on the original colour of the photo. For example, adding hues of red to a photo that is predominantly blue would likely produce “cooler” colours than adding a red hue to a predominantly green photo.