Color is very important information when it comes to photography. A good amount of color balance can really make your photograph pop out. In this tutorial I will show you how u can make your photographs more vivid with very simple steps.
We usually work on RGB colors mode, which has three channels, RED, GREEN and BLUE. For printing it’s the CYMK which has 4 channels Cyan, Yellow , Magenta and Black. In this tutorial we will be working on LAB color mode. Follow the stepwise process to achieve vividness in your photographs.
Step 1
Change the color mode from RGB to LAB mode from IMAGE > Mode > LAB color mode. The advantage is, LAB offers separate channels for colors and exposure.
Step 2
LAB color mode has two channels A and B for colors where channel A control Magenta and cyan and B controls blue and yellow. The separate channel Lightness controls the exposure of the photograph. When you increase the color you don’t change the exposure of the images.
Now all that you need to do is to increase the contrast of both the channel. When you increase the contrast of these two channels they only affects the color but not the luminance of the color. Luminance is the level of brightness of any color.
Step 3
Select the channel A and apply the contrast either by going to image>Contrast or applying ‘s’ curves. Now repeat the same process for channel B. You can see the difference now. If you have used adjustment layers you can use the opacity slider to control the amount of vividness and makes sure to merge it down.
Step 4
Change the color mode back to RGB from LAB color mode.
See the before and after in the image below
Anup Ghimre About the Guest Author:
Anup Ghimire is a Nepal based photographer & re-toucher, blogger and
educator. He is mostly interested in landscape and fashion
photography. He also has a blog pixeltut.com and has been doing
video tutorials for lightroom and photoshop. You can follow him on
twitter @anupg44.