For each work assignment, photojournalists must decide whether to use black-and-white or color film and how to frame the picture. These decisions are considered crucial, yet little is known about how the presence of color and design complexity affect how people process the information in photographs. A study tested whether color and design simplicity affect the amount of mental effort required to make sense of a photographic image and looked at the effect of color and simplicity on viewer memory for still images. Forty photographs were videotaped in both black-and-white and color, and a set of brief captions describing each photograph was created to accompany the photographs. The matching task was constructed so that subjects saw congruent pairs 50% of the time and noncongruent pairs 50% of the time. Subjects, 52 students enrolled in a communication course at a major university, participated in the study for course credit. Twenty-six were randomly assigned to the color viewing condition and 26 were assigned to the black-and-white condition. The object was to determine if the students would match captions with photographic content for color photographs more quickly than for black-and-white photographs. Results indicated that color is an important perceptual feature that facilitates the processing of a photographic message. The implications of this result for photojournalists suggest that color film may be the proper choice when it is important to facilitate viewer processing of photographic information. Complexity manipulation did not significantly affect the mental effort required to process a photograph. (One figure is included, and 47 references are appended.) (MS)