Complementary colors sit opposite each other on the color wheel, and a photo that pairs them has a built-in contrast the eye can’t ignore. Here are the pairs that work, 20 examples, and how to shoot and grade them.

• Painter’s wheel pairsBlue and orange, red and green, yellow and violet
• Screen pairsRed and cyan, green and magenta, blue and yellow
• Where to build themLightroom, Camera Raw, Photoshop

In one of our Lightroom tutorials, Aaron has a photo of a woman in a green dress in front of a green background. Nothing is wrong with it. The exposure is fine, and nobody looks at the dress. Then he masks the dress and drags its hue toward purple, close to magenta, which is green’s opposite on the screen wheel. Before he touches anything else in the photo, the dress is the first thing you see.

That is what complementary colors do. Put a color next to its opposite and both look more saturated than they do on their own, and the eye goes straight to the place where they meet. Once you know the pairs you start seeing them everywhere: film posters, sports kits, the blue hour over a city full of orange streetlights.

This guide covers complementary colors in photography from both ends: the pairs, and the two color wheels that give different answers for them; 20 examples grouped by pair; then how to find the pairs on a shoot and build them in Lightroom and Photoshop.

What Complementary Colors Are, and Which Wheel You Are On

Complementary colors are any two colors directly across from each other on a color wheel. Mix the painter’s pairs as paint and they turn a muddy grey or brown; mix the screen pairs as light and they make white. Put them side by side without mixing and each one makes the other look stronger, which is the effect photography cares about. The catch is that “across from each other” depends on which of two wheels you’re looking at.

The painter’s wheel is the one from art class. Its primaries are red, yellow and blue, so its pairs are red and green, blue and orange, and yellow and violet. It’s the wheel most photography articles mean, and the one artists and stylists use.

The screen wheel is the one your camera, monitor and editing software use. Its primaries are red, green and blue, so its pairs are red and cyan, green and magenta, and blue and yellow. The Hue slider in Photoshop and Lightroom works on this wheel, which is why a tool tells you the opposite of blue is yellow when your eye expected orange.

Neither wheel is wrong: one describes pigments, the other light. For a wardrobe or a location, use the painter’s pairs. For anything you do with a slider, expect the screen pairs.

One more pair belongs on the list, though it sits on neither wheel exactly: teal and orange. Teal is a dark cyan, about 30 degrees away from orange’s exact opposite on the screen wheel, so it’s a near-complement rather than an exact one. It’s everywhere in film and commercial work because skin tones are a form of orange, and a face in front of anything teal stands out without any extra work.

Why the Pairs Work

Each color looks more saturated. A red door looks redder against green ivy than against a grey wall. Your eye judges every color against its neighbors, and the biggest difference it can find is a complement.

The eye goes to the smaller color. When one color fills most of the frame and its complement shows up in one small place, that place becomes the subject: an orange life jacket on a grey-blue sea, a blue door in an orange wall.

Warm meets cool. Every pair has a warm side and a cool side. The warm color comes forward and the cool one sits back, so the pair adds depth as well. Blue and orange is the clearest case, which is why it’s the most used pair in photography.

The same contrast makes a pair easy to overdo. Two fully saturated complements at equal size fight for attention, the frame vibrates and there is no subject. Let one color dominate and keep the other small, or soften one of them.

20 Examples of Complementary Colors in Photography

The examples are grouped by pair. Under each grid is what to look for: how much of each color there is, and where it sits.

Blue and Orange

1 · Orange fabric, blue sky

2 · Blue door, orange wall

3 · Blue hour, warm lights

4 · Orange poppy, blue sky

In example 1 the orange fills half the frame against a flat, empty blue, so the fabric reads as the subject with nothing to compete. Example 2 flips the ratio: the wall is the big color, the door is the accent, and the eye lands on the door. Example 3 is the pair a city gives you every evening. Around twenty minutes after sunset the sky goes deep blue while streetlights and many windows stay warm. Example 4 is the simplest version: one warm object, one cool background, and a low angle to keep everything else out.

Red and Green

5 · Red poppy, green leaves

6 · Red hair, green yarn

7 · Red boat, green hillside

8 · Red ivy, green doors

At full strength red and green looks like December, and these examples avoid that in two ways. Example 7 keeps the red small and the green large, so the boat is an accent; in 5 the red fills the frame and the dark green around it holds it in. Examples 6 and 8 soften or shrink one side. In 6 the green is only strands of yarn on a black costume, and in 8 the ivy has gone brick-red rather than pure red, with the doors a pale, faded blue-green. Muted versions of a pair still work, and they’re much easier to live with.

Yellow and Violet

9 · Lavender field, golden sunset

10 · Yellow dress, magenta dress

11 · Yellow dress, purple flowers

12 · Yellow and purple flowers

Yellow is the brightest color on the wheel and violet the darkest, so this pair carries a tone contrast as well as a color contrast. In example 9 the sky is the light and the lavender is the shadow. Example 10 is a near pair at equal size, with the second dress magenta rather than violet, and the plain white background is what keeps the two calm. Examples 11 and 12 put one color large and one small, and in 11 the hat and skin add a second, softer yellow that ties the frame together.

Teal and Orange

13 · Orange boat, cool water

14 · Teal door, orange wall

15 · Orange life jacket, cool sea

16 · Orange sky, dark sea

In example 15 the jacket and her bare arms and legs sit on the warm side, against a cool grey-blue sea. Examples 13 and 14 show the pair at two sizes: a big orange shape against muted grey-green water, then a teal door and an orange wall at nearly equal size. Example 16 is the pair as light rather than paint. The sky goes orange at sunset while the sea stays a cool blue-grey, and the only warm color on the water is the sun’s reflection.

Pairs From the Screen Wheel

17 · Green neon, pink-red glow

18 · Green jacket, pink wall

19 · Pink veins, green leaves

20 · Red light, cyan skin

You meet these pairs most often with colored lights and in editing. Examples 17 and 20 use a big field of one colored light and a small streak of its complement: a green neon sign with a pink-red glow on her shoulder, then cyan light with a red light tube you can see in the frame. Two colored lights and a dark room are enough to try it yourself. Examples 18 and 19 show the pair in daylight with the magenta softened to pink, the quiet version that works in a lot of places where magenta and green would be too much.

How to Find Complementary Colors on a Shoot

You rarely get to paint the location. What you can control is what you bring into it and when you shoot.

• Pick the big color first, then bring the small one. Look at what fills the frame (sky, water, a wall, a field) and bring its complement in something small you control: a jacket, a prop, a towel, a bike. Keep it small; a 70/30 split or even 90/10 is easier to look at than 50/50.
• Use the light. The hour after sunrise and before sunset gives you warm light on anything the sun touches and blue in every shadow and in the sky, which is blue and orange with no styling at all. Overcast light is neutral, so the pair has to come from the objects.
• Soften one side. A rust-colored jacket against a teal sea works as well as a pure orange one and looks more natural. Faded paint, dusty roads and overcast skies are muted colors, and they still make their complement pop.
• Check the wardrobe against the location. For a portrait, ask what color the background will be and dress the person in its complement. It’s the cheapest way to make a plain location look designed.

Complementary Colors in Lightroom and Photoshop

Every editing tool is built on the screen wheel, so this is where the second set of pairs comes in. Panel and tool names below are for Lightroom Classic 15, Lightroom 9, Camera Raw 18 and Photoshop 27, checked October 2026.

Warm highlights, cool shadows

The Color Grading panel in Lightroom, Lightroom Classic and Camera Raw has wheels for Shadows, Midtones and Highlights. Push the Shadows wheel a little toward blue or teal and the Highlights wheel a little toward orange or yellow. Light and dark areas sit next to each other all over a photo, so this puts a complementary pair into every edge. Blending sets how much the two overlap, and Balance moves the point where one hands over to the other.

Keep the saturation low. Pushed hard, skin goes orange and teal shadows turn green, and clipped orange highlights are the usual sign of too much, so check the face before you check the mood. Color Grading in Lightroom and Camera Raw is our PRO course on exactly this, with eight RAW files to practice on.

In Photoshop, a Color Balance adjustment layer does the same job with sliders. Their labels, Cyan to Red, Magenta to Green and Yellow to Blue, are the three screen-wheel pairs, and the Tone menu switches between Shadows, Midtones and Highlights. In one tutorial Aaron adds cyan and blue to the midtones (the shadows made the photo too dark) and red and yellow to the highlights, then drops the layer to about 60 percent, because, he says, he tends to overdo color.

Change one color to its complement

To turn the green dress purple, select it first. In Lightroom, Lightroom Classic or Camera Raw, create a mask with Select Subject, then subtract the skin with a Color Range mask so only the dress is left. Drag the mask’s Hue slider until the dress reaches the magenta-purple range; with Use Fine Adjustment unchecked the slider covers the whole wheel.

In Photoshop, a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer does the same: choose the color’s range from the menu at the top, which starts on the whole image (Reds, Yellows, Greens, Cyans, Blues or Magentas), then move Hue. Either end, +180 or −180, lands on the exact complement on the screen wheel. A recolored dress still throws its old color onto the skin and the ground, so mask those too, or keep the change small enough that the mismatch doesn’t show.

For an exact match to a color already in the photo, our free tutorial Complementary Colors in Photoshop samples it with the Eyedropper, finds its opposite, and recolors the background to match. Adobe’s free color wheel at color.adobe.com has a Complementary harmony too, but it gives the painter’s-wheel complement: pick red and it comes back green.

Cancel a color cast

Complements cancel each other, and that’s what white balance is. The Temperature slider runs from blue to yellow and the Tint slider from green to magenta, two screen-wheel pairs, so a photo that’s too warm gets a little of the cool complement. Aaron’s brush version, from a portrait he edited using only the Brush tool: paint the complement of the cast on a new layer at low saturation, set the layer to Soft Light, and the cast fades. He had to lower the saturation because the layer also lightened the photo.

Pick a text or graphic color for a photo

For a photo under a headline or in a layout, sample its main color with the Eyedropper, then add 180 to the H value in the Color Picker for the screen-wheel complement, or use Adobe’s color wheel for the painter’s. That gives you contrast in hue, but text also needs contrast between light and dark, so check it with a contrast checker before you use it.

Split-Complementary and the Other Harmonies

Complementary colors are one of five harmonies; our guide to color theory in photography covers the wheel and the other four. Two of them are worth knowing here, because they are the fallback when the pure pair is too loud.

• Split-complementary. Take a color, find its complement, then use the two colors on either side of that complement instead: on the painter’s wheel, blue with yellow-orange and red-orange. It keeps the contrast and loses most of the tension.
• Analogous. Two or three colors next to each other on the wheel, like orange, yellow-orange and yellow. Calm, with almost no contrast; add one small complement and it comes alive.

The PRO course Color Theory and Composition in Photoshop works through complementary, primary, secondary and analogous schemes on real photos, including a shirt recolored to its complement so you can watch the image change.

Common Questions About Complementary Colors

What are complementary colors in photography? Two colors opposite each other on a color wheel, used together in one frame. Side by side they make each other look more saturated and pull the eye to the point where they meet.

What are the best complementary color pairs for photos? Blue and orange is the most used, because it’s also warm against cool, and teal, orange’s near-complement, flatters skin. Red and green and yellow and violet work best with one color muted or kept small.

Why does Lightroom say the opposite of blue is yellow? Editing software uses the red, green, blue wheel, on which blue and yellow are opposites. The painter’s wheel, with its red, yellow and blue primaries, puts orange opposite blue. Both are right for what they describe.

Can complementary colors be subtle? Yes, and they usually should be. A muted pair, rust against slate blue or pink against sage green, has the same effect at a lower volume. Most of the 20 examples above use one soft color and one strong one.

Shoot One Pair on Purpose

Take one jacket in a complementary color to one location and photograph it at different sizes in the frame, from filling it to a dot in the distance. Use the painter’s pairs for what’s in front of the camera, and expect the screen pairs once you touch a slider. By the end you’ll know how much of a complement a photo needs, which is the part no wheel can tell you.

Header photo by Frank Flores for Unsplash+.