When first learning about photography, you’re taught things like composition according to the rule of thirds. But there’s way more than that. Do you know that some photographers compose by color? And more importantly, there’s the 3 color portrait photography rule. Do you know what it is and how too apply it? Well, since you’ve got your brand new camera, we’ll tell you all about it! Dive in with us for this quick tip!
The 3 Color Portrait Photography Rule
What’s the 3 Color portrait photography rule? Essentially, it means that you’re working with three main colors in the scene: the subject’s skin, the background, and the wardrobe. This makes the image much easier on the eyes to digest. And there are a myriad of ways that you can make this combination.
Many photographers have used this method over the years and work to make things contrast as much as possible.
Let’s think about the colors of the rainbow: Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, and Violet. But then there’s also white and black. In between all of those colors, you’ve got so many different combinations. But the scene should key in on making those colors stand out a lot from one another. In the photo on the left, Asta has a white top. The green shorts help her stand out from the background as does the blue bike. Her skin color is another color and the street are other shades. This photo is a much more complex use of the rule. But at no point do you see colors starting to blend in with one another. There’s hard contrast between them all. That helps create a more natural contrast in the image.
In this portrait, though, the colors are much different. Susan’s skin is white, her hair is a bright orange, and her outfit is green; so too is the background. However, the green background is shaded with black and blue. That brings us to our next really important tip: lighting. Lighting can fix all of this really easily.
Lighting
Here’s an essential tip from a guide that we made previously. It has to do with white balance and then using the lighting in the scene or off-camera lighting:
To make this easier, I like to manually white balance my scenes. So I typically start at 5500K Daylight or 3200K Tungsten. Otherwise, I mess around and choose a specific preset on the camera. But if you’re using a flash, most of them are balanced to daylight. When you add a gel, it makes the color from the flash completely different. Placing a gelled flash correctly can make your subject really stand out in the scene.
Making it Creative
The finally, the biggest part of all this is to make it creative. Take your colors and add different lights to them. Perhaps gel those lights too! In the photo above, you can see how the blue hue of the light completely changed the way that the portrait looks. The background is one shade of black with other colors interspersed. Then Maika’s outfit is one color that’s been doused with blue. Their skin is another color. So the three work effectively together to create a portrait with contrast and character.
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