If you thought the fountain in this photograph was illuminated by colored lights, think again.
The color came from magic that I conjured up in my camera. It’s a triple exposure, with each shot made through a different color filter. Ah, the sensational Tricolor Effect.
Silvery spray from a water fountain, billowing white clouds, dazzling white daisies– all beg to be photographed. But it’s sometimes fun to be unconventional and turn the whiteness into color. Or, even better, go to the n step and turn it into a fantasy of multicolored hues.
Before the fun comes the theory
Before I go any further, I need to give you a bit of color theory. Don’t run away–this is not very technical, just enough information to enable you to understand what happens when you do the effect. Suppose you put a red filter in front of your lens when you photographed that fountain. You’d get a picture of red water, not because the filter added a red color, but because– true to its name– it filtered out all the other colors.
White light is actually composed of the primary colors red, green, and blue. If you remove two of the colors, you’re left with the remaining one. So if you put a red filter over the light source, it will remove the green and blue components, and everything will be bathed in red light.
Any object that reflects red–and that includes white objects–will appear red; objects that have no red in them will look black. The same thing happens in the camera. Put a red filter over the lens and objects will appear red or black, depending on whether or not they reflect red light. You use a red filter to remove green and blue, a blue filter to remove red and green, and a green filter to remove blue and red. So far, so good.
Putting theory into practice
Now let me show you what happens when you make a triple exposure of the whitish water of that fountain. Make one exposure with a red filter over the lens, another with a green filter, and a third with a blue filter. Because the spray is moving, different areas of water will be in front of the lens each time you shoot.
In the resulting picture, the spray that was in position when you used the red filter will be red; the spray that was in position when you used the green filter will be green, and so forth. Some areas of water will have been imaged with all three filters, and those areas will be rendered normally–in this case, white. And if there had been houses and trees in the background, they would also have been rendered in their normal colors.
But in my photograph, you can also see droplets of water that are yellow, magenta, and cyan. No, I did not use additional filters. What happened is that areas that were imaged with just two of the filters took on a color that is the combination of those two colors. Magenta is the result of exposing the spray through red and blue filters. Cyan is the result of blue and green, and yellow is, surprisingly, the result of exposing through red and green.
Enough theory–let’s have some fun!
That’s it for color theory. Now I can get down to the specifics of doing the tricolor effect. To make it work, you’ll need special “sharp cutting” filters– filters that will not let any other colors of light through. A good combination is filters designated 25 red, 61 deep green, and 38A blue. You can also use 25 red, 58 green, and 47 blue. These filters are essential if you want some areas of the scene to be rendered naturally; not critical if you want to be more outlandish.
If you already have red, green, and blue filters, play with those. If you’re going to buy filters, acetate (gelatin) filters are less expensive than glass or plastic ones but they must be handled with care. You can hold them in front of the lens instead of screwing them on, but be sure to keep your fingerprints off the central area.
For most of these effects, you want to be sure nothing except your subject moves, so put your camera on a sturdy tripod and use a cable release or self-timer. It’s also best to use a prime lens rather than a zoom lens to eliminate the danger of the focal length changing when you change filters. It goes without saying that your camera must be capable of making a triple exposure.
What about determining the exposure? Simply set the film-speed dial to three times the film’s ISO (for example, with ISO 200 film, set the dial to 600) and rely on the camera’s through-the-lens metering system to determine the exposure through the filters. Generally, it’s best to use aperture-priority mode to keep the depth of field constant for each of the three exposures. Of course, you don’t have to worry about depth of field when shooting those distant clouds. However, if you’re shooting water or other rapidly moving subjects, you’ll want to switch to shutter-priority mode.
Speaking of photographing clouds, when using this technique with clouds it’s best to wait a few minutes between exposures to give them a chance to move and change their appearance.
To photograph this large, grayish sculpture, I used a zoom lens and changed the focal length between exposures.
I took the camera off the tripod for the picture of a field of white flowers and moved it a little bit between each exposure. When doing a handheld multi-exposure, try moving the camera horizontally, vertically, or diagonally, but not all three.
Another variation would be to use two filters instead of three, but if you do this, don’t expect any areas to be rendered in their natural colors. (I guess we could call it the bicolor effect.) Since you will be making a double–not triple–exposure, base the exposure on doubling the film’s ISO setting instead of tripling it. I made this photograph of Queen Anne’s Lace with just red and green filters, moving the camera a great deal between the two exposures. The yellow flowers are the result of the blending of those two colors. Color theory rears its pretty head.
Be adventurous and experiment with other color combinations. Shoot dark subjects instead of light ones. Photograph patches of sunlight and shadow, waiting a few minutes between shots to allow the light pattern to move. Use a different sequence of color filters; instead of shooting red, then green, then blue, try green, blue, red, or blue, red, green. The results will be slightly different, but equally exciting.
In Photoshop:
- Begin with three pictures of the subject. Each should show the subject in a slightly different position because the subject moved, you moved the camera, or you changed the lens focal length.
- Use one photograph as the background, then copy and paste the other two pictures onto it. This will put each image on a separate layer.
- Use a paintbrush at about 75 percent opacity to paint color onto the white areas of each picture. Use red on one layer, green on another, and blue on the third. The values of each color should be about 250.
- Change the Mode of each layer to Lighten.
- Flatten the layers.
- You may want to make adjustments with saturation and brightness to get the precise effect you want.
