Here’s a fun idea for a weekend project: take pictures of smoke, think about what they look like, and then add color during post-processing to transform them. Photographer Geoff Jansen noticed that one of his smoke photos looked like a rose, so he added some red and green and ended up with the photo seen above. It’s the second creative rose shot we’ve featured today.

Image credit: Smoke-11 by geoffjansenphoto and used with permission

Did you know that you can use Photoshop’s Match Color feature to turn old paintings into “filters” for your images? James Delaney of Unfocused Brain explains,

Adjusting your photographs to get the color ‘just right’ can be a chore. Think about this: The Old Masters of painting spent years of their lives learning about color. Why let all their effort go to waste on the walls of some museum when it could be used to give you a hand with color correction?

Simply load both your photo and the painting (or whatever image you’d like) into Photoshop. Make sure your photos is the active window, and then go to Image->Adjustments->Match Color. Select the painting as your source, and tweak the sliders to suit your taste. Whenever you find a painting you like, keep them in a directory to slowly build up a collection of “filters”. You can also mimic the look of different films by using film photos as the source!

Improve your photography with classical art [Unfocused Brain]

Color — the much-hyped but largely ignored photo sharing app — is back, and this time it’s built entirely around Facebook. One of the main reasons for the app’s failure the first time around was the fact that the photo sharing relied on proximity, a huge problem for new users when no one around is using it. Now, founder Bill Nguyen is trying to avoid the “ghost town” problem by harnessing the power of Facebook’s social graph.

The proximity-based photo sharing feature that attracted so much buzz will still be present in the app, but a new feature called “Visit” will help liven things up. When browsing any of your friends’ photos, you can choose to “Visit” with that friend. If they accept the request, their camera will turn on and you’ll be able to watch a live video stream. A link to the stream is also published to Facebook, allowing other friends to join in and watch the broadcast.

The app currently in an invite-only testing phase, but you can request an invite over on the Color website.

Color (via TechCrunch)

Color is simply how our brains respond to different wavelengths of light, and wavelengths outside the spectrum of visible light are invisible and colorless to us simply because our eyes can’t detect them. Since colors are created in our brains, what if we all see colors differently from one another? BBC created a fascinating program called “Do You See What I See?” that explores this question, and the findings are pretty startling.

For example, examine the two rings of squares below. Each ring has one square that’s a different color than the rest. See if you can detect the square that’s different in the left ring:

In the English language (and most languages), there are distinct words for “green” and “blue. Therefore, it’s very easy for most people to detect the blue square in the right ring, but difficult to detect the slightly different green square in the left one.

However, when scientists visited a tribe in northern Namibia that has a completely different way of grouping and naming colors, they found that the exact opposite was true — the tribe members picked out the slightly different green square easily, while struggling to see the blue one.

Furthermore, researchers are discovering that there are many other factors that influence the way people perceive colors, including memories, moods, and feelings.

It’s interesting to think that different people looking at the same photograph may “see” the same wavelengths but perceive different colors.

(via Boing Boing)

Here’s another nail in the fail coffin for the much-hyped but not-very-popular photo-sharing app Color: TechCrunch reports that Color received a staggering $200 million acquisition offer before it had even launched, but the company turned it down and raised $41 million in venture funding instead. Things haven’t been going so hot for Color since then, while Google saved itself $200 million and has a couple photo-sharing apps in development that are generating some buzz.

Image credit: Money Hand Holding Bankroll Girls February 08, 20117 by stevendepolo

Here’s a helpful tutorial by Tutvid that teaches how to give your photographs dramatic colors using only Adobe Camera Raw. If you’ve started shooting RAW but haven’t played around too much with ACR, this video is also a great primer for becoming familiar with the different panels and sliders.

(via Fotografia)

A while back we suggested that for a photo project (perhaps on a rainy day) you can collect things of a certain color in your house, arrange them neatly, and then take a picture. An even easier place to do this might be your local supermarket. Designer Marco Ugolini and photographer Pedro Motta teamed up for a project titled Per Color that features baskets of color shot in a Brazilian supermarket.

I see the supermarket space as a space of manipulation. The attempt, in this action, is to subvert this structure of power. The pictures have been taken in collaboration with Photographer Pedro Motta, in a supermarket in the same neighbourhood of the art center. None of the products have been bought after the shooting. [#]

You can visit the project page over on Ugolini’s website.

Per Color (via Photoblog.hk)

Image credits: Photographs by Marco Ugolini/Pedro Motta and used with permission

In March 2011 we reported that an iPhone photo sharing app called Color had raised a whopping $41 million in funding before it had even launched. Sequoia Capital, one of the most prominent VC firms in Silicon Valley, invested more money in Color than they had originally invested in Google. Now, just three short months later, Color is still struggling to find users while its less-funded competitors are leaving it in the dust.

Its two main competitors, Instagram and PicPlz, raised just $500,000 and $350,000 of funding — much more reasonable amounts for photo-sharing apps, we must say — but are adding users by the droves. Earlier this month Instagr.am signed its 5 millionth member. For people in the tech and business worlds crying “bubble”, there seem to be quite a few similarities between this situation and with startups that existed back in the dot-com bubble. Investors are pouring money into startups in search of the next big thing, but the companies that survive are the ones that spend money wisely and offer a great product.

Despite having 5+ million members and roughly 100 million photos, Instagram only has four employees and only recently acquired the instagram.com domain name (they started out at instagr.am).

Color, meanwhile, spent $350,000 to buy the Web address color.com, and an additional $75,000 to buy colour.com. It rents a cavernous office in downtown Palo Alto, where 38 employees work in a space with room for 160, amid beanbag chairs, tents for napping and a hand-built half-pipe skateboard ramp. [#]

In response to the general public’s disinterest in the app, Color has decided to admit defeat and “reboot”. The company recently fired co-founder Peter Pham, and is working on a new app that focuses on group messaging, recommendations, and local search (replacing the idea that had originally raised $41 million).

Luckily for the company, it’s changing course while there’s still time and money, unlike Webvan (called the largest dot-com bust in history), which burned through $1.2 billion in two short years before declaring bankruptcy in 2001. Given the market (photo sharing vs grocery), however, Color may be seen as the Webvan of the photo sharing space unless they can figure out a way to survive. Consider this: back in 2005, Yahoo acquired all of Flickr for just $35 million.

(via NYTimes via TechCrunch)

Image credit: Webvan Delivery Van by Mark Coggins

Now here’s something we haven’t seen before: Flickr user Damon Hair made this cheap DIY color checker using mat board, foam core, and paint swatches matched with pantone colors from a local paint/hardware store.

Image credit: gretag-ish color checker by damon.hair and used with permission

Here’s an idea for a quick photo activity (perhaps on a rainy day?): pick a random color, walk around your house and collect things that match that color, neatly arrange them, then take a picture.

(via Things Organized Neatly via Laughing Squid)