When one colour is enough

This shot of blue sky and clouds reflected in the glass facade of a high-rise office block is full of colour, but it’s just one colour in various shades – and it still works. You don’t need many different colours to make a ‘colourful’ image. A single colour works fine, often better.

In fact, you can often improve the impact of an image my removing superfluous or distracting colours. I could perhaps reduce the impact of the yellow-tinted office light upper right, though I really don’t think it has a lot of impact here.

If I did want to make it less conspicuous, though, the ideal tool would be the HSL (hue, saturation, lightness) palette you get in just about all image editors. Here, you can use an eyedropper tool to select the colour you want to subdue and then adjust its hue to be closer to your main colour’s, or reduce its saturation so that it’s almost colourless, adjust its luminance (brightness) value, or modify all three.