Boost colour

By jEN on September 12th, 2006

Written on 12 September, 2006

I’m getting the photography bug in a big way. I’m becoming a flickr junkie and just got a digital SLR camera. With this increasing passion comes the need to refine my Photoshop skills for post-processing images.

Most digital images require some sort of manipulation in order to get the most impact, typically through colour correcting and sharpening. The camera I used to take the example photo below is nothing special: a point-and-shoot Sony Cybershot DSC-P41. Its top resolution is 4MP. It’s a good little camera, but still limited at what it will capture. I took the photo of this seaside restaurant in Portugal to remember it for being both the first place we had dinner in Portugal as well as to capture the five language menus on display (the coloured papers on the sign). It is far from an artistic composition, but serves its purpose for my holiday memories. It now has a new purpose: it is a perfect candidate to show off this colour boosting technique.

The left side is the original shot and the right side shows the colour boost.

What you need: Photoshop and a digital image
(If you use a different image manipulation application: you need layers and channel mixing capabilities.)

Step 1:
I’m paranoid, so I always make a copy of the original background layer and save the document under an altered name. I tend to save my retouched photos under the same file number assigned by the camera but preceded by ‘re’ — DSC04041.jpg becomes reDSC04041.psd. I do it that way so I can search my computer for all versions of particular images. Do whatever works for you.

Step 2:
Click the new background copy and add a Channel Mixer Adjustment Layer. (It’s the almost yin-yang looking button at the bottom of the Layers palette.)

Step 3:
Make your adjustments one colour at a time. With Red selected in the dropdown of the Channel Mixer, change your numbers below to read:
Red +120, Green -20, Blue -20.

After altering the Red Channel, switch the dropdown to Green and input:
Red -20, Green +120, Blue -20
Then switch the dropdown to Blue and input:
Red -20, Green -20, Blue +120

See the pattern?

Click OK.

Step 4:
Salt and pepper to taste. What I did in the example (which is purposely a bit exaggerated) was applied a Blending Mode of Soft Light to the Adjustment Layer itself. You could also try Overlay or Normal… whatever suits you. If the results of your colour boost are too dramatic, try lowering the opacity of the Adjustment Layer to soften the effect.

This technique won’t sharpen your photo, so you’ll have to do that in a separate step, but you should be able to really make your colours POP! in a much more pleasing way through this method.

Enjoy!

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