High Contrast Photo Magic

Lifehacker points out a simple trick for achieving high contrast photographic magic. Essentially you make a copy of the Green color channel then overlay that on the original picture. Make it slightly transparent  and you'll get an effect that ups the detail and contrast at the same time. Check out a step-by-step in the video below.

What color channel wizardry do you rely on?



Note: In Paint.NET you'll find this under the "Adjustments" menu then "Color Accent." Make "Duplicate" layer then select the top layer and open the "Color Accent" tool. Crank "Green" to 100 and click "OK." Then click the "Properties" button for the layer and set it to "Overlay" and slide the transparency to about 50%.

Be Wary of Unintended Emotional Connections

If you are one of the people who owns (or owned) a Windows computer, you've probably seen the Blue Screen of Death at some point in your life. Basically it means that your computer has failed completely and has to be turned off to recover at all. 

So, even though the color combination of white text on a blue background should be soothing, according to the colors that are there, the experience of most people will be to associate this color combination with aggravation and frustration. 

Learn Some Color Theory

There is a good article here on some basics of color theory. Last week I posted about how color can be interpreted differently in different cultures. But how should those emotional interpretations be used in your presentation?

If you are using a color like red or orange, you probably don't want to make that your background color - even if it communicates the emotions of your work, it's can still be overwhelming in large quantities (except when it's not).

Any color used to exclusion will become overwhelming and lose its impact. Be judicious in your color use to maximize the emotional impact.

Color in Culture

Over at Slides that Stick they point out that it's important to take into account the culture of your audience when selecting a color for your presentation. If you want to represent eternity to a Western audience you would use black, but for a Japanese audience you would use green.

I think the most important thing here is to avoid being offensive, though. We wouldn't put a picture of a baby with a black background because of the death and mourning connotations. But that same picture in South America would be inappropriate with a green background, or with a white background in a Hindu setting.

Kuler for color themes

Garr Reynolds over at Presentation Zen kicked out a cool review of a web tool called Kuler which you can use to create a color theme for your presentation. If you have a photo at the core of your presentation, you can extract colors from it to create a palate for the other elements in your slide. As you can see in the picture, it makes for a nice effect.

I can think of a few times when I had to fiddle with the colors of a slideshow and this would have been nice. I think this would be more useful if you are doing a series that has one, central image, or if you have some branded artwork that you want to integrate into your presentations.