My latest article for Outdoor Photographer magazine, The Digital Zone System, appears in the March issue, which is just hitting newsstands and mailboxes now. Click here to read it online.
I’ve been using Lightroom since Adobe released the beta version in 2006. Over the years I’ve learned many shortcuts, and in this video I share some of my favorite tips – things I use all the time to streamline my workflow:
Stay Connected
Landscapes in Lightroom Course
Photographer’s Guide to Yosemite App
In this article, you showed an image of the color blue being divided into the 11 zones. I would like to see the rest of the colors of the color wheel, where are they placed in the digital zone system? Can you direct me to a resource that has this information?
Mar, I don’t know of a place where you can see all the colors of the color wheel and how they relate to the Zone System. But that’s not really how the Zone System works in relation to color. For the Zone System, the hue doesn’t matter, only the brightness of a particular hue matters.
So if you were to look at a color wheel that showed all the different hues from red to magenta to purple to blue to cyan… and so forth around the wheel… every color would be Zone 5. That is, assuming that the color wheel showed each color as a medium red, medium blue, etc., rather than a light red, light blue, or dark red and dark blue, etc. Zone 5 is, by definition, a medium color, whether that color is gray, red, purple, blue, or green. And a medium color is, by definition, Zone 5. A light red might be Zone 6 or 7, depending on how light it is. A dark red might be Zone 3 or 4, depending on how dark it is. A light blue might be Zone 6 or 7, while a dark blue might be Zone 3 or 4.
In other words, in the Zone System the hue and brightness of a color are treated independently, and the Zone System is only concerned with the brightness of a color, not its hue.