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Design How-To: Find the Colors in Your Landscape
Cool down a hot image by picking the right accent colors for the scene. See how type and border colors can have a dramatic impact on your layout.
Written by John McWade on March 26, 2004
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This story is taken from "Before & After" Magazine.
Creativepro.com readers can subscribe to "Before & After" at a discount. Click here to learn more.
When shooting a natural scene that will be used in a travel brochure or magazine layout, you don't have that much control over the colors that appear in the photograph. Yes, you can apply filters and muck around in Photoshop, but if the goal is the capture the real personality of a landscape, why mess with Mother Nature?
What you can do, however, is choose surrounding colors wisely. Accent colors for borders, type, and other layout elements can have tremendous impact on the photo itself, making its tones appear hotter or cooler accordingly.

In this feature from "Before & After Magazine," see how you can select colors from within a "hot" scene and the "cool" it down by selecting tones from the color wheel to complement the image.
We've posted this story as a PDF file. All you do is click this link "How to Cool Down a Hot Skyline" to open the PDF file in your Web browser. You can also download the PDF to your machine for later viewing.
To open the PDF, you'll need Adobe Acrobat (5 or higher) or Adobe Reader, which you can download here:
To learn how to configure your browser for viewing PDF files, see the Adobe Reader tech support page.
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Cannot open PDF.
I have been unable to open 4 out of 5 of your posted PDFs in the last month or so. This is disappointing since the subjects were of great interest to me.
Need Repost
Please repost this article. The pdf, according to Adobe Acrobat 4.05 (Windows) and Adobe Acrobat 6.01 (Mac), is corrupted.
Thank you.
Very Good and informative article.
It is a a very good an informative article, but I feel that it is too short and needs some explanation with some more examples.
There was an error opening this file :(
Can this be reposted? Im very interested in the subject... Thank you! :)