Enhancing Individual Colors Using the Hue/Saturation Control
Yellow House, Stonington, Maine, no saturation applied
Yellow House, Stonington, Maine, with yellow selectively saturated. Because there is so much yellow in red and in green, those colors were also slightly saturated by increasing the yellow saturation.
Saturating Individual Colors
Most photographers like overly-saturated colors and
I'm no exception. In fact, one of the things I miss most about shooting
slide film (other than the thrill of seeing slides spill out onto a
lightbox) is that incredible "neon" saturation that films like Fuji's
Velvia and Provia films provide. For that reason one of my favorite
Photoshop tools is the Hue/Saturation adjustment which, if you use it
sparingly, can really help bring back the vibrant colors of color
transparency films. Using the basic tool is utterly simple, of course,
you simply move the "Saturation" slider to the right to increase
saturation or slide it to the left to decrease saturation. In fact, if
you slide it far enough to the left ou can actually de-saturate all the
color from the image, essentially giving you a black and white image. If you look at the first of the three dialog boxes
below you'll see a drop-down box at the top marked "Master" which is
the default position for this tool. The problem is that when you use
the Hue/Saturation tool in the Master position and you increase (or
decrease) saturation, you are affecting all of the colors at the same
time. That’s perfectly fine if you just want to pump up an image
a bit and create a little more color drama. There will be times, however, when enhancing the
saturation of just one color is a more effective way to make an image
pop. If you click on the "Master" box, a drop down menu will open up and
it will provide you access to each of the colors individually (see
middle box below). By clicking on any one of those colors you can adjust
the degree of saturation one color at a time. You can saturate as many
or as few colors as you like. In this street scene shot in Amboise, France (in the
Loire Valley region), by selecting just the yellow and increasing the
saturation, I was able to make the sign jump out of the background
without necessarily giving the entire scene an overly-saturated look.
If you look carefully you will see that the green vines on the left of
the frame and the foliage of the geraniums above the sign have picked
up some saturation also. That's because when you increase yellow
saturation you do affect the hue of greens to some degree--so you do
have to keep your eyes on the greens whenever you adjust the yellow
saturation. (In fact, usually when I want to adjust the look of greens, I do it by adjusting the yellow saturation.) By the way, if you want to get more precise with which color you are saturation, use the eye-dropper tool to select a specific (and very precise) color and then Photoshop will latch onto just that tiny group of pixels and you'll be saturating on a more fine-tuned level. Play around with individual colors whenever you're
trying to enhance the "wow" factor of your photos. It's a lot of fun to
be able to zap the colors independent of each other and it is a very
easy technique to learn. I use this little trick on virtually all of my
photos--though the degree of saturation varies greatly.
Hue Saturation Dialog Box
Hue Saturation Dialog Box Pull Down Menu
Hue Saturation Dialog Box with Yellow Indicated
This is a shot of a wild horse on the King Ranch in Texas (the biggest ranch in the United States). While the colors are fine and pretty realistic, in my memory of the scene the greens were more lush and more pastel and the golds of the tall grass were more brilliant.
Here's the same photo, but by simply selecting the "yellow" color option from the drop-down menu, I was able to saturate the green and yellow simultaneously (in most images yellow has more effect when it comes to saturating the greens, as well).
Here's the "after" shot of an oil slick, saturated in Photoshop. In this photo I went through each individual color and saturated it, trying to create a kind of Peter Max 1960's poster appearance.
Here's the "before" shot of the oil slick. Remember, all that I did to turn this into the shot above was to select each individual color from the drop-down menu in the "hue/saturation" dialog box and then crank up the saturation for each color until I liked what I saw--very easy. Yes, this is an extreme example, but I love this Peter Max look.
Tips for shooting more dramatic sunset photos
Entire Site Contents Copyright 2012 Jeff Wignall
An Ambitious Dogs Production In Association with Boo Boo & Mama Cat Films Please also visit my Photo Tip of the Day blog.
