Mastering Color Photography: William Eggleston's Techniques for Photographers

Learn the Methods Behind Eggleston’s Iconic Use of Color and Transform Your Photography

Photograph an Old Car with an Eggleston color scheme tweak in Photoshop. Photo by Matthew Bamberg

William Eggleston, best known for his work with color prints from 35mm film negatives, has his place cemented as a master of 20th-century photography.

Indeed, he is one of my favorites. In his 80s, the master, based in Memphis, continues to create magic in mundane snapshots by using entire gamuts of color to record the details of everyday life that people often take for granted.

Creating Eggleston’s color schemes when developing film negatives is an elaborate process of combining three separate negatives with cyan, magenta, and yellow on one of each layer of emulsion paper.

In this article, I intend to give you a bit of background about Eggleston’s compositions, subject matter, and postprocessing techniques, which include a multi-step method for recreating his color schemes in Photoshop.

After working hours tinkering with Photoshops color channels by exchanging colors between a RGB to CMYK col…