Playing with colour

Reading Mary's blog recently, made me think about playing with colour.
She asked how to use the colours from a garden picture in a scarf.

So, this morning I took a few pictures of the front garden. I also needed to find out the number of the lamp post as the light wasn't working last night, so that I could report it.

I selected part of the picture and played with it in Adobe Photoshop.


This is just the cropped image, showing up some of the wonderfiul colour of the cotinus. I really should have taken the photograph about a week ago, once the colour had changed, but before we had a lot of wind, and the leaves started dropping.













From here I went on to play with different filters, starting with crosshatch.
This gives an exaggerated idea of the colour involved.
From this image it is possible to step back a bit, and have an idea of the colours involved.
I might knit from these colours as they are, but would also look at the negative image to find complelmentary colours.








Taking it one step further, I then filtered the crosshatched image with polar coordinates, coming up with this.
Although these are rather dark colours, the image helps to get an idea of the spread of each colour in the image.














The next step is to invert one of these images in order to find complementary colours.
This can equally well be done with any of the other images.

I then take one or more of the complementary colurs, and introduce it in small amounts.
This may be about 1/6th or less of the whole.
See an earlier post of mine about the scarf I knitted for Iris.