Sometimes, it’s quite tricky to work out values, especially when working with an animal that has a lot of lighter colours – or what we perceive to be lighter colours – and white fur, like in the tiger in the video. We see the white fur as white.

Our brain will tell us that it’s white because that’s what we know it is, but in reality it is far from white. So, creating a viewfinder is a really useful tool if you like to look at your images on a screen. As well as helping you pick out colours, it can help you to work out your values.

Again, white is a great example. You can see when watching the video that the white areas on the tiger’s chest and around the head aren’t white at all, but are in fact really dark.

If you’d like to create a viewfinder to use on print outs, you can use a piece of card with a hole punched out.

Watch the video shown above for my tips on how to create a digital viewfinder.