Orange Beer

“What is wrong with your beer?” he said. “It’s orange!”

And I thought: yes, indeed, why?  I mean, beer is usually a yellowish brown.  But then I remembered: brown and orange are really in the same family of colors – only brown is darker.  Try it: choose a nice brown color in photoshop.  Now drop on a curves layer and brighten it. As it brightens, you’ll see it go in stages from brown, to light brownish, to an orangish, to a yellow.  Mess with it a little more (darken the shadows), and you’ll get a true orange – even red, if you take it far enough.

When photographing beer, if the strobe hits the bottle dead on (in this case from beneath), it’ll light it up – essentially lightening up the browns in the beer.  In beer the browns are already warm & on the orange side, so it lightens them up – to a full orange.

The photo to the right/top of this post is the exact photo that started this.  Note the hues of the oranges – the closer to the light source, the more yellowish it is – the higher up, the darker – until the neck of the bottle draws light in to itself again.