Pink Daylilies and Magenta Colors

From “Color in the Daylily Flower” in The Illustrated Guide to Daylilies by Oliver Billingslea:

“Color is evaluated by the visual sense of light reflected or transmitted by the flower. The term hue is the specific or family name of a color; value is the lightness or darkness of a color; and intensity refers to the brightness or dullness of a color.

“Modern hybrid daylilies have a remarkably diverse color range, especially considering that the wild types from which they have been bred were found only in shades of yellow, orange, fulvous (dull reddish-yellow), and rosy-fulvous. Today, the only colors notably lacking are pure white and pure blue — colors which hybridizers are avidly pursuing.

“The outer portion of the segments, excluding any contrasting edging, is considered the basic color of the flower. The present color range of daylilies includes yellow in all shades from palest lemon, through bright yellow and gold, to orange; red in diverse shades of scarlet, carmine, tomato red, maroon, wine reds, and blackish reds; pink from pale pink through rose pink to rose red; purple from pale lavender and lilac to deep grape or violet; and melon, from palest cream shades to peach to deep cantaloupe.

“Some colors appear to require the presence of genes for two basic colors; for examples, shades of buff, brown, apricot, and peach are thought to be variations of pink + yellow. Near-whites are found among the palest tints of yellow, pink, lavender, or melon. The actual pigments which produce the colors still need research, as does color inheritance.

“The center area of the flower is called the throat. In most daylilies the throat area differs in color from the rest of the flower. Usually it is a shade of green, yellow, gold, orange, apricot, or melon. It can be very small and narrow or it can reach far up on the segments. The very center of the throat is sometimes referred to as the heart and may be a different color; for example, a yellow-throated daylily may have a green heart.”

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Hello!

This is one of my favorite daylilies to photograph at Oakland Cemetery, and I’ve gone back every late May or early June for several years to hunt down this particular variety just to take pictures of it again. “Hunt down” may be a slight exaggeration, since it’s easy to find — it’s one of the first flowers to be seen just inside the cemetery’s main gate.

This daylily contains one of the purest examples of the color magenta that I’ve found among those flowers I photograph, many of which appear to be magenta but are actually variations of light red (trending toward pink), or blends of orange and red. When editing photos of magenta flowers like this in Lightroom, you have very little magenta color saturation to work with, partly because it’s not a primary color (like red or blue) with a large number of varying shades or hues. If you try to decrease magenta saturation directly, the magenta will quickly turn nearly white; and if you try to increase its saturation, you’ll end up with a garish pink color that nobody wants to see. To effect accurate perceptual saturation of magenta, you instead alter the primary red and/or primary blue color channels, using Lightroom’s Color Calibration function. Similar (yet less subtle) results can be achieved by increasing contrast, increasing blacks, or decreasing whites — all of which make the image darker overall but also yield the illusion that magenta has become more saturated, with some loss of smooth transitions between shades of magenta, pink, and red.

It’s a fascinating flower to photograph and edit because of these special characteristics of magenta, given its petals are almost entirely magenta with some red tones, especially at each petal’s edges. This combination is one that our cameras and processing programs detect quite precisely, but we tend to interpret more simply, as the color pink. This shorthand approach serves us well, since magenta is a blend of equal parts blue and red, yet there’s no visible color wavelength called “magenta” in the physics of color. These two principles are observable in Lightroom: if you increase either the saturation of primary red or primary blue, the magenta color in these petals intensifies by about the same amount. And if you decrease primary red saturation and increase primary blue saturation by the same relative amounts (say -100% red and +100% blue), you arrive at exactly the same magenta color you started with.

Yet in natural light, even magenta’s limited saturation range responds quite differently to sunlight versus shade. Note how the left image below — taken when the sun was out — looks so different from the image on the right, taken when the sun went behind the clouds. The effect of additional sunlight actually mimics decreasing saturation in Lightroom: some of the magenta color shifts toward very light pink or even white because of the floodlighting effect of the sun, while the shaded version retains the saturation that was evident in the flowers in real life.

This is not to say that the version on the left is more accurate than the one on the right. Both are correct but reflect different lighting conditions, even if one version might be more appealing to some people than the other. I typically prefer images like the one on the right — taken in the shade — because I like the color rendition better, but, more importantly, limited sunlight reveals all the color and texture variations the flower presents. The flower’s minute details aren’t overpowered by the sun and color contrasts (like those of the yellow throat and the green heart) are much more precise. Especially with daylilies, though, you can’t wait too long for your favored lighting conditions, because the plant always lives up to its name, and its flowers disappear in a day!

Thanks for reading and taking a look!

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