Alright folks, let me walk you through my little adventure, I’m calling it “tokyo cyan”. Been messing around with some color palettes and photography lately, and this one kinda just… happened.
So, first things first, I started with a photo I snapped on a trip to Tokyo last year. It was raining, classic Tokyo, and the neon signs were just bouncing light everywhere. I really wanted to capture that feeling, that electric hum of the city.
The initial image was alright, but it was missing something. It was too… normal. Needed that extra oomph.
I hopped into my usual photo editing software – I’m not gonna name names, but it’s a pretty popular one – and started playing with the color curves. That’s where the cyan really started to creep in.
- First, I messed with the blues, pushing them up a bit. Then, I started playing with the greens, subtly shifting them towards a more teal-ish hue.
- Next up was the shadows. I wanted to really emphasize the depth of the image, so I darkened them significantly. Then, I added a touch of cyan to the shadows, just a hint.
- Highlights were next. I didn’t want to lose all the detail in the brighter parts of the image, so I kept them relatively untouched, maybe just a tiny bit of desaturation to keep them from being too overwhelming.
The key, I think, was not overdoing it. It’s easy to go overboard with these things, and suddenly you’ve got a picture that looks like it belongs in a bad sci-fi movie. I kept tweaking it, stepping back, looking at it with fresh eyes every few minutes. It’s like cooking, you gotta taste it as you go.
I also played around with the levels, boosting the contrast a little. The goal was to make the neon colors pop even more against the dark, rainy background.
After the color adjustments, I did a little bit of sharpening. Nothing too crazy, just enough to bring out the details in the signs and the raindrops.
Finally, I added a very subtle vignette. Just a slight darkening around the edges to draw the eye towards the center of the image. It’s a trick I picked up ages ago, and it still works like a charm.
The result? Well, I’m pretty happy with it. It’s not a perfect photo, but it captures that feeling I was going for. That feeling of being lost in the electric labyrinth of Tokyo, surrounded by light and sound.
It’s amazing what you can do with a little bit of color tweaking. Give it a shot yourself! Find a photo you like, mess around with the color curves, and see what happens. You might surprise yourself.
Anyway, that’s the story of “tokyo cyan”. Hope you found it interesting. Let me know what you think, and maybe share some of your own color experiments!
