Design How-To: Find the Colors in Your Landscape
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When shooting a natural scene that will be used in a travel brochure or magazine layout, you don’t have that much control over the colors that appear in the photograph. Yes, you can apply filters and muck around in Photoshop, but if the goal is the capture the real personality of a landscape, why mess with Mother Nature?
What you can do, however, is choose surrounding colors wisely. Accent colors for borders, type, and other layout elements can have tremendous impact on the photo itself, making its tones appear hotter or cooler accordingly.

In this feature from “Before & After Magazine,” see how you can select colors from within a “hot” scene and the “cool” it down by selecting tones from the color wheel to complement the image.
We’ve posted this story as a PDF file. All you do is click this link “How to Cool Down a Hot Skyline” to open the PDF file in your Web browser. You can also download the PDF to your machine for later viewing.
To open the PDF, you’ll need Adobe Acrobat (5 or higher) or Adobe Reader, which you can download here:
To learn how to configure your browser for viewing PDF files, see the Adobe Reader tech support page.
This article was last modified on January 3, 2023
This article was first published on March 26, 2004
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