Color is pretty darn important to most people, and for most photographers it is probably the most consistent element to deal with. But, most people don’t really know how the aspects of color work. Again, the following ideas are universal and don’t care if you buy Sony Alpha DSLRs or Panasonic camcorders. Light is light, color is color.

Of course, it turns out that color is also light. You probably know that color is visible light as we see it reflected off of things. This fact leads to color having three primary attributes:

1. Hue (also called Tint)
2. Saturation (also called Intensity, or Purity)
3. Luminosity (also called Brightness, or Value)

If you’ve ever been in a photo editor (or manager, like Lightroom) and seen HSL or HSB, those are ways of managing color based on those 3 principles (there are two other common managements, RGB and CMYK which deal with light in different ways, but that’s another post).

So, weirdly enough, the best visual example of how hue, saturation, and luminosity work together is the color mixer from… Microsoft Paint!

The main field is hue (pure colors formed by different wavelengths of light), and saturation, the slider on the right is luminosity.

As you might notice, Luminosity/Brightness/Value is the basic gradtion of white to black, which is the foundation of black-and-white photography (and also Notan theory design). This aspect of color is so important that it’s beyond being just a subset of color and counts as its own design principle. The gradation from light to dark (referred to by the fancy-schmancy term “chiaroscuro” in the art world), is the primary source of visual contrast and drama in a scene. Luminosity is the single most important aspect of color to a photographer, then followed by hue and saturation. But, if the light ain’t there, the color usually won’t help much.