PHOTOGRAPHER’S JOURNEY.com

It’s Friday, so this post is purely for fun.

If you are like me, then you not only admire the works of great photographers, you admire the great painters. Well, I came across a fun method for giving your photos a color scheme similar to that in your favorite painting.

Up front, full credit for this idea goes to James Delaney. But here’s how it works:

1. Choose a painting. I found a good source of painting images here.
2. Choose your image. The image you choose should at least have similar base colors as the artwork you are trying to match.
3. Open Photoshop.
4. Open the image of the painting.
5. Open your photograph and make certain it’s the active window.
6. Choose the Image menu and go to Adjustments, then Match Color
7. Choose your painting as the source and adjust the luminance accordingly.

Voila! That’s all there is to it. It’s not for every image - but it works. Thanks to Photoshop’s powerful match color tool we get a new way to see some of our images.

Here is what I did with a painting by Edward Hopper and a photograph of a barn I took:


You can’t do this in Photoshop Elements or earlier versions of Photoshop. Adobe introduced the “match color” tool only in the CS series.

I know this is a little gimmicky, but it is fun. And you can play with different images to get different looks.

What I think is interesting is that by applying the color schemes found in great paintings to our own photographs, we can learn to see color a bit differently… a bit like the artists did. That is not a bad thing as an instructional tool. Color theory is an extremely important and often under-appreciated aspect of photography. So even if you have no desire to alter your images to achieve a famous painter’s color scheme, I do think there’s some benefit in playing around with this technique since it essentially allows a very interesting form of art study.

I certainly don’t recommend converting all your images this way! But as an instructional tool, it’s pretty cool. Try it out and let me know what you think.

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