Haley Hilton - Color Assignment - Chief

This is a picture of one of my horses. His name is Chief and he is an awesome ride. As a horse he is comfortable and consistent. He is cautious and clipped in his step so as to not stumble and harm the rider. He is powerful and strong, and the very nature of how he saunters lets off an air of wisdom and maturity. To me, somehow this image really captured that. The tone combined with the closeness of the image is slightly daunting and uncomfortable. Sort of the way one might feel up close and personal to a large horse. In contrast to this though, the focus of his eye, and the expression found in it that can only be described as submissive, develops the calm vibe I was looking for.

I wanted to use colors that were fairly natural to his environment. His warm tones mixed with the sun pulling through in the background brought a really comfortable and peaceful vibe to the image. After sorting through various tones and toying with the colors in the image, I decided I wanted to make the image monochromatic. I felt that this was the most direct way to accomplish the assignment of showing a color relationship.  

Once I went into photoshop and made it monochromatic I quickly found that I didn't like that there wasn't enough contrast in the image. I still wanted to keep the theme I had initially started with, but I needed to find a way to make it more dynamic. The best way for me to do this was to adjust the hue and saturation levels in the picture. I went to the curves tab in the control panel of photoshop and adjusted it to be an S curve. This meant that the bottom half of the curve was down while the top half of the curve was up. This brought in shadows where shadows were needed and highlights where highlights were needed. Together this brought in the exact contrast I was aiming for.