Color Theory for Photographers
ART-40732
Color Theory for Photographers
9 Weeks | No Prerequisite | Hybrid (Live Online and Online Asynchronous)
Discover how color can transform the way you see, compose, and refine your photographs. In Color Theory for Photographers, you’ll learn to harness color relationships, contrast, and psychology to create more meaningful images. By understanding concepts like memory color, harmonious palettes, and the subtle interplay between light sources and subjects, you’ll gain the ability to use color as a powerful visual language that resonates with your audience.
Course Details
Over the course of this class, you’ll explore practical techniques for enhancing mood, guiding the viewer’s eye, and adding depth through carefully chosen hues. From capturing vivid flowers and dramatic weather scenes to dealing with complex surfaces like glass, water, or metal, you’ll experiment with both camera and editing techniques that bring out the best in each composition. Assignments encourage you to draw on both new and existing images, helping you apply color theory to a wide range of photographic scenarios.
By the end, you won’t just understand color in theory—you’ll know how to apply it in practice. You’ll gain insight into cultural symbolism, subjective perceptions, and the way color can influence how your work is received. With this foundation, your photographs will move beyond the ordinary, embracing color as a key ingredient in your creative expression.
What You'll Learn
- Utilize color theory principles to create impactful photographs during capture and editing.
- Understand and apply fundamental concepts like the color wheel, harmonious and discordant relationships.
- Recognize how different types of contrast influence mood and visual emphasis.
- Employ knowledge of saturation, simultaneous, and extension contrast to enhance compositions.
- Integrate memory color and subjective color/timbre into your creative decision-making process.
- Analyze and control color psychology to evoke desired emotional responses.
- Adapt your approach based on challenging subjects like glass, water, metal, flora, and fauna.
- Apply cultural and symbolic meanings of color to strengthen narrative quality.
- Develop nuanced editing techniques that shape mood, depth, and clarity in your images.
- Refine your compositional skills with confidence, enabling you to produce dynamic, memorable photographs.
Course Information
Equipment/Software: Fully adjustable DSLR camera, prosumer camera, or digital camera. Image editing software.
Flexible Enrollment: This is an elective course for the Photography: Images and Techniques Professional Certificate but is open to all students, even if you are not enrolled in the Certificate Program.
Academic Calendar: The Academic Calendar shows the open enrollment dates and term start dates for each quarter. Courses do not necessarily start on the first day of the term.