That title may seem a little strange or brash, and by no means am I condoning theft. The point I’m arriving at, is that we can use readily available tools to emulate works we draw inspiration from.
If you’re on Instagram, or follow certain blogs of photographers, you’ll see that they seem to have an almost interminable stream of ‘new’ material that they garnish their sites with. This is great for us the viewer, who get to see more from the people we follow, but it does make you wonder how much shooting these guys do in order to produce content each day. More often than not they will, like a pill, slow release the work they do in pieces, and then they’ll often crop photos down, and manipulate them so they seem ‘new’ and fresh. 

This isn’t a bad thing at all, and one of the methods I actually use is to essentially take a color cast from one photo, and utilize it in another.
With the advent of Instagram and filter sets, photos today can be made to look drastically different and convey different moods, just from filters. But what if you don’t have the precise filter? Or what if you have a photo you would like to transpose a color palette from into another? With Photoshop, of course, it couldn’t be simpler. And it’s also quite brilliant because you can use color palettes from photos of famous paintings in your own images.
How To:
Note* While the process is simple in essence, there may be a level of manipulation you need to do to achieve just the look you want, but we’ll address that here also.
Step One
Open the image you want to take the color cast from, and then the photo of yours you’d like to receive it. (The order doesn’t matter and you can open many images at once if you’d like). In the first scenario We’ll use a photo I took testing out my Sony RX100 firing a Nikon SB700 (which worked easily), and taking the color cast from The Dolce & Gabbana Light Blue commercial, taken by Mario Testino and starring David Gandy and Bianca Balti.
Step Two
Select the photo you want to edit. Then select Image>Adjustments>Match Color.
You’ll then be presented with the following screen.
From here select ‘Source‘ and choose the other photo you are taking the cast from.
Upon arriving here, your photo may not look just as you’d like it, but you’ll actually be quite close to the original, and testing out and playing with the three sliders present an ability to fine tune it as you would like.
As another example I took an image of me and my dog Walter, and took the caste from the famous painting, ‘Liberty Leading The People,’ and the results are interesting, and pleasant.
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Thoughts
We recently spoke about culling your photos and how necessary it is. Doing this presents a fun, simple, and effective way to take some of those culled photos, if you like, and make them into something different; something more. And there’s just so much more you can do with Photoshop.
To understand it can take time, which is why we try to bring you the best in simple effective steps. If you’d like a comprehensive breakdown, do check out the Photoshop 101 and 201 by Phlearn, which became available in our store just today!
