Changing the Time of Day

“The warm color is lovely, but it does not work with my design.
I need a deep blue sky and neutral colors.”

—A Designer Facing a Design Dilemma

Imagine This Scenario

You’ve started a project. You’ve worked out the color scheme, and are well into the design process. Then, your client sends you this photo of the Empire State Building and requests that it be included in the layout. You want to accommodate the request. But, there’s a slight problem. 

Golden Light

The image, awash in the glow of orange light, does not work at all with the color scheme of the piece. You’ve designed the page around a cool color palette. The warm glow of the setting sun is lovely, but it’s incongruent—and would look completely out of place—with everything else on the page.

Give Me the Color of Midday, Please
Is there a solution? Is it possible to turn a photo taken under the warmth of late afternoon light into a photo that appears as if it was taken at midday? I’ll let the image speak for itself.

There you have it. The look of an autumn day where the air is crisp and the sky is an azure blue. In fact, it was exactly that kind of day, just a few hours earlier before the sun began to set.

The Takeaway
The ideal way of working is to have all the photographs finalized before starting the design process. But things don’t always work out that way. It’s not unusual for things to change in midstream. In fact, changes should be expected.

Fortunately, there are solutions. Digital color retouching provides the designer with options that designers of yesteryear* never had—the ability to change the color of any or all of the elements in a photograph. And amazingly, it’s even possible to change the appearance of the time of day a photo was taken.

So, when you’re thrown a curveball with a last-minute photo request, rest assured. It can be resolved. If the colors in the new photo don’t jive with your design, they all can be changed.

*By “yesteryear” I’m referring to pre-1990s when photography was film-based.

Photography & Retouching: Martha DiMeo 2020
Interested in licensing this photo? Contact me with the details.

A Musical Interlude For Your Enjoyment
Continuing the theme of blue skies, enjoy a little jazz while you work. Here’s Ella Fitzgerald singing Blue Skies. (She does it like no other.)

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