Primary Color

Artist Statement

For the original, unedited image, I went outside into my backyard. At first, I wanted to take a photo sitting on the bench with the sun in the background, but the composition didn’t seem very interesting and I wanted more trees in the background than the setting provided. I switched the camera to portrait mode and began playing around with that, and settled on an image where the sun was still very visible in the background. I also wanted the blue sky to be visible, as well as lots of my sweatshirt. In planning ahead, I wanted to use the sunlight to emphasize the color yellow, the sky for blue, and change my sweatshirt to red—this would fulfill the primary colors. From a burst of photos, I chose the one with the best composition.

Editing was fairly simple, and I didn’t encounter many technical difficulties or confusion about photoshop’s different tools along the way. First, I applied a filter to the original image. It made the lines of the image slightly less sharp. After, I began to change the color of my sweatshirt from grey to red using the brush tool on the ‘color’ setting. I then tried to make that look a little more natural by using the blur tool on the edges of the sweatshirt after. Using the brush tool again on the ‘color’ setting at a very low opacity, I colored over the sun and the sunlight with yellow. I added a very light gradient layer fading from yellow into a transparent section to emphasize this as well. Lastly in photoshop, I reduced the green of the trees and grass in the background, trying to make those colors more uniform to emphasize the primary colors present in the image. After converting the image into the Photos app, I made a few more edits just within there: first, I decreased the light very slightly to make the brightness less overwhelming. Using the select color feature, I increased the saturation of the blue in the sky quite a bit to make it more noticeable. I decreased the saturation of the red in my sweatshirt to make it blend into the image more naturally. Finally, I increased the saturation of the yellow in the image (and decreased the saturation of green and purple slightly).

The photo is meant to connect to my personal concentration of portraying literary devices through photography. Since spring is finally starting to show up, and the weather has become warmer, I decided to represent the brightness of spring by personifying it, portraying personification. I thought primary colors, the prompt to create the image, would fit nicely into this especially because of a bright blue sky and golden sunlight connecting to warmer weather. Originally, I wanted to do a lot of photo editing for this image, but after emphasizing the color in the image I didn’t find it as necessary anymore—the image was already quite strong and while the connection to my personal concentration was less obvious, I was happy with it.