The Photographer's Eye: Graphic Guide

PASTEL

For pastel, we have to slice down into the color cylinder to a lower, brighter level—whiter if you like. Here, we slide the lower section out and see these pale hues. That’s the technical view, but for photography, we need to look for conditions like this one—a foggy day on a Pennsylvania farm, where the pale atmosphere softens all the colors. As you can see from the cylinder, the result is more about brighter than about less saturation, which was the case on the previous pages. The gray wooden building is certainly unsaturated, but the browns and the greens still have their colorfulness. Pastel colors can be just a part of an image, but here they suffuse the whole picture. A note about processing: the low dynamic range in a scene like ...