Using tones outside of your comfort zone


 

Recently on his blog, Bruce Percy posted images that appear brighter and with a pastel palette. I enjoyed this departure from his normal style.

[…] our edits can be rather narrow in their tonal range, just like our vocabulary is narrow when we first learn to speak. We have to move outside of our comfort zone at some point, but this can be difficult if we’re not really aware of what’s out there and how luminance levels in the far brighter and darker regions of our images may serve us.

He goes on to advocate pushing luminance, or any parameter of our image editing, to an extreme and then coming back until it looks right. Advice I have also heard from others, including John Paul Caponigro and Vincent Versace. Bruce Percy’s posted images remind me of Stephen Johnson’s challenge break away from our bias formed from a lifetime of seeing Kodachrome images and explore the complete latitude of RAW files.

Read the article at www.brucepercy.co.uk.