There is an important difference between true color photography and merely photographing with color film. You can treat color as no more than another quality that enters the frame, or you can consciously look for the relationships between colors, alter your viewpoint, composition and even select what you photograph on the basis of color values.
More than most other visual qualities, color needs a trained eye if it is to be caught and used as a point of interest for its own sake in a photograph. The reason for this lies in our easy acceptance of colors. Almost too easily, we often respond to colors around us subjectively, without really thinking about them. This is fine for the enjoyment of color, but in order to select it and compose with it in a camera's viewfinder, it is important to know how different colors interact and which hues are common and uncommon.
Perhaps because most everyday scenes tend to be subdued in color, intense hues always attract attention. Unlike painting, in which the choice of color and its richness is entirely under the artist's control, most photography is a matter of capturing scenes and incidents as they appear. The relative rarity of a flood of color makes it a natural subject for the camera.
What makes a color strong? If the end-result is to be a photograph, there are a number of factors, and some of them offer the photographer a choice. More than anything, however, color intensity depends on how true the hue is. Pure colors are not tainted with black, gray or white, and the purest of all are those that are not mixed with any others. Color film itself works by mixing three pure colored dyes - cyan, magenta and yellow. These are known as primary colors for just this reason - most other colors can be created by mixing them.
