Contrast + value

You may have heard that Winters look best in high contrast. Or, Winters have high contrast in their personal coloring.

But what does that mean, exactly?

High contrast = items with vastly different values

*typically one very light value and one very dark value

But what do we mean by value???

Value is how light or dark a color is.

Value is typically represented by a grayscale of 10 shades going from darkest (black) to lightest (white).

Do not think of black and white as colors here - think about them in the context of lightness or darkness.

Any color can be represented on the value scale.

Think about when you turn a photo to black and white with a filter. The colors go away, but the dark and light areas of the photo are in the same place. The value of the colors remained.

So ' high contrast' means a light value color is paired with a dark value color. Plotted on the value scale, there would be a great distance between the two.

To create a high contrast ensemble, we want to have dark tops paired with light bottoms, and light tops paired with dark bottoms.

If you are burnished/sultry/dark Winter, most of your best colors will be dark in value. This means many of your tops will be dark value, and many of your bottoms will be light value.