Part 8 :- Putting 'pop' in your colour - Technique #2

This section covers an alternate technique for getting a little more 'pop' from your colours. The important thing when doing this is not to introduce noise. This technique provides a simple method without creating, or amplifying, noise.

The original image.

Step 1 - Change the image color mode to Lab Color.

Step 2 - Make a duplicate layer.

Step 3 - Select Curves.

Here, I am using 250 but experiment a little and see what works best for you.

Step 4 - When Curves is open, select the drop down box. Note there are three Channels - Lightness, a and b.

I am showing this screen simply to familiarise you with the settings on the screen.

Step 5 - Adjust the Lightness channel.

Here, I am simply moving the top point and bottom points (inwards) to add a slight contrast to the image. This is purely personal taste, however, do not over do this part if you wish to retain shadow and highlight detail.

Step 6 - Now, select the drop down box and select the 'a' Channel. Once selected, move the top and bottom sliders inwards, in equal amounts. The amount does not matter too much as long as they are equal.

In this step, the colour will change dramatically, don't worry as we will fix this in a minute.

Step 7 - Repeat the above step, but this time for the 'b' Channel.

Be sure to move the top and bottom sliders inwards in equal amounts.

Step 8 - OK, let's fix the 'wonky' colours. What we do now is to convert back to RGB mode.

Step 9 - When we select RGB Mode, a dialogue box will open - Click 'Don't Flatten'.

Step 10 - In this step, we will adjust the 'impact' of our changes. The first thing to do, is make sure that the Layers screen is open and select 'Background copy' and the Opacity slider.

Here, I have adjusted the slider to zero, so that I can now 'dial-in' the amount of effect I want.

Step 11 - Adjust the Opacity slider to achieve the effect you wish.

Here, I have chosen 25%. This gives me a slight lift to the image without over-saturating (clipping) the colours.

Experiment with this adjustment to achieve the effect you want.

Step 12 - Flatten the image.

That's it.

Comparison image of the original and the finished images.

Pretty much that is it. I hope you find it beneficial.

Remember, do NOT save over your original file. Use 'Save As'.

There are hundreds of ways to post process. This is just one technique and I find it works well for many images.

Try it out and have fun. Be sure to try different values in the steps as this will provide you with a wealth of 'self-learned' views of how the values affect the outcome.

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