How to Dramatically Enhance Picture Colors with Photoshop

Posted on Sep 02, 2009 in Tutorials

Enhancing photos digitally is an extremely popular technique, so we’ll quickly review a simple method to bring much more life to a photo with Photoshop.

Step 1.

Grab a photo to use. We’ll start with this stock. Insects are nice to use because they have very vivid colors.

Step 2.

First, we need to add a little focus. Start out by adding a black and white filter to the image (Click the bottom right icon where there’s a circle split in halves, beneath the layers pallet and select Black & White).

Lighten the opacity to around 35% so that you still maintain nice color in the image.

Step 3.

Now we’ll pull back our colors from the original image. Use the pen paths tool to select around the target with the color and just make a selection. I feathered it 1 pixel. It doesn’t matter too much at this point as we’ll clean it up anyways.

Step 4.

With that done, add a nice brightness / contrast filter from the same place as the Black and White filter. Play around with the settings to find whatever suits your image best.

Step 5.

Now find the color that pops out the most from your image. If there’s multiple, repeat this for the different colored parts. Find a heavily saturated, and slightly lighter version of the color (for this I used pure red), and paint over the colored part of the image.

Make sure to keep the lines clean. It’s better to go too far inside the lines than outside.

Step 6.

With the coloring nicely finished, that doesn’t look quite right at the moment. So we’ll change the blending mode to “Color Dodge” and choose a lighter opacity. For this image, 50% worked nicely. Already we can see the red shell pops a lot more. But there’s more…

Step 7.

Here just add some darkening with a soft black brush and set the layer mode to soft light. You can also lighten the opacity, as it should be a very soft darkening just to keep the attention towards the image focal.

Step 8.

The image seems like it could do with a little more emphasis on the bug, so we’ll add a soft shadow for the bug. Brush with a black soft brush beside the bug, and then erase what goes over the bug itself.

Step 9.

Now we can add a gradient map to the image, so use the colors from your image. I used a nice dark green for the darker parts and a softer, light red to brighten up the image some more.

Step 10.

Naturally, that won’t fit as an end result. So we’ll take the gradient map layer and leave it on “Hard Light” at an opacity of 40%.

Step 11.

To brighten up the shell even more, duplicate your coloring layer (or layers) and bring it to the top of the layers. Now erase some more from the edges so it highlights the center where the lighting would hit and change the blending mode. This layer worked nicely on Linear Dodge at 30%.

Step 12.

Use a Color Balance layer to adjust some more of the colors. Since this image uses red as the highlighted color, naturally we emphasize some more red on the highlights and more green in the shadows.

Step 13.

For one last adjustment layer, use a levels adjustment layer to play around with the image and contrast it nicely.

The original:

As compared to:

Stock credits to rjdp1.

There you have it! The result and the original image are very different.

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