Color is made up of three properties: hue, value, and intensity. Hue is the name of the color. Value is the hue’s lightness and darkness. Intensity is the quality of brightness and purity.

Tone:

A visual technique in storytelling is tone, or what is also called brightness. It can set different emotional experience just by either “turning the brightness up or down”. There are two ways to control the visual tone: lighting and exposure.

Lighting is simply how a scene is lit. Does it have high contrast and shadows? or does it have an even low contrast appearance.

Exposure is how much light is allowed into the camera. Are the colors saturated or not?

A character that is not perfectly lit, can impose a feeling of mystery, be imposing while engulfed in shadows. The silhouette can even be perceived as dangerous (the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown).

The same thing can be said about exposure, engulfing a character in darkness while underexposing can emit an emotion of mystery and fear, just like the scenes of The Godfather.

Art direction is also a way to set the visual tone of the photograph of film, and can also be key to the overall tone of the piece. If the story or the intended message deals with a heavy subject matter, the visual range of the tone should be darker. Sometimes there are pivotal scenes in a dark film where contrast needs to be shown (good vs evil), and those for example should have a lighter and brighter tone. Sometimes mixing the two can have a very comedic effect.

Color:

Colors elicit emotions, and have a psychological effect on people. They create moods. There three factors in determining color: Hue (the color itself), saturation (the intensity of the color), and brightness (how light or dark the color is).

For hue, there are many ways to use color. Stories can be told through color. It controls the mood of the characters. A traditional way of perceiving color is knowing that red is anger and creates tension, blue is sooting, and yellow is vibrant…

Most movies with the best visuals however (in my opinion) use either monochromatic colors, or analogous colors (in other words, complementary colors). In either case, there is always one dominant color in the set or scene; that because that color is what the audience will see first, the secondary color creates contrast. A higher contrast can also be created through choosing opposing colors (orange and teal as an example).

In saturation, colors can be desaturated in post to give the image a cold and gritty look. It also becomes reminiscent of black and white photographs.

Brightness can control the contrast of the colors, of how well they are lit. As lighter colorful images look lively and exciting, whereas darker images look dramatic.

When using Hue, value and intensity, the overall emotion and mood in a scene can be controlled. A very saturated red can show tension in a scene, whereas an unsaturated red can emit the emotion of love (Film “Her” as an example).

Cinematographers also use a rule that is called the 60 - 30 -10 percent rule, in which 60 percent of the frame is one color, 30 is another color, and 10 percent is a different color.