Thoughts on Understanding Color in Photography (Book Review)

Basic color theory and good illustrative examples. Check it out at your local library before buying a copy.

This is a collection of thoughts about—rather than a full-fledged review—of Understanding Color in Photography by Bryan Peterson. TL;DR I wasn’t thoroughly impressed.

On the very first page of the first chapter, the author introduces the reader to “Light and the Science of Color” in a very simplistic way. That’s clearly intended to make the material accessible to a wide audience, and he continues in this vein through the subsequent chapters on “Exposure and Color” and “White Balance and Color Temperature.”
The most useful parts of the book were the insets containing practical tips on things like “Capturing Realistic Skin Tones” and “Learn[ing] to See Color.” Unfortunately, the books contains only a very few such insets.
The bulk of the book comprises two meandering sections on “Color and Composition” and “Color and Mood” which could best have been summarized as one or two blog posts. In fact, 9 Tips for Using Color in Photography, by Heather Joy Milne, and A Simple Guide to Understanding Color in Photography, by Judit Ruiz Ricart, are good, succinct examples that are equally useful.
The book contains many striking illustrative photographs, which the authors insist repeatedly are not heavily post-processed. Each is annotated with equipment and exposure details, as well as a short narrative describing the circumstances of the shot or calling out the relevant color details. This is by far the book’s best quality.
I appreciated too the short chapter at the end of the book on how—and how not—to use Adobe Photoshop. Not being a professional creative myself, I enjoyed learning something new here.

Overall, being a book of basic color theory and a lot of illustrative examples, Understanding Color in Photography is worth a look. Pick it up from your local library and thumb through it before buying a copy.