Color Toning for Mood
You can impart a lot of feeling into an image just by choosing the color palette in which you want to work.
Blue can promote feelings of coolness, hipness, clarity and more rational thought.
Reds, on the other hand, induce feelings of excitement and/or danger and bring on an adrenaline rush with thoughts of blood and violence. It’s no small surprise that red is the color of passion, intensity and excess.
Greens are conducive to thoughts of earth and growth. As most living plants utilize chlorophyll (which is green) to synthesize energy, they take on it’s green color. It is natural to associate this color with growth, sun, water and life.
By adding elements of a particular color to your photographs, you could be directing the viewer into an emotional realm you feel appropriate to your image.
In these two images of bearded men, one has been tinted with a warm (yellow) tone and the other a cold (blue) tone. The emotional response to them is immediately obvious and distinctly different, illustrating the point that colors of a photo set, or at a minimum, enhance, the image’s emotional impact.
