The Best Technique to Enhance Saturation

Make your photos look vivid with the best method published. This Photoshop tutorial uses a combination of three saturation enhancement techniques to create the best results. Follow this Photoshop tutorial to learn how to the best way to increase saturation.

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• Enhance Saturation

Enhance Saturation Photoshop Tutorial

Step 1

Open a photo into Photoshop. To open an image, choose File > Open. The image I used to present this tutorial already has good saturation and would actually look worse with a saturation boost. So keep in mind that the original image will look better than the one with the saturation boost and that this is done for demonstration purposes only.

Step 2

First, create a duplicate of the layer. Press Ctrl+J or choose Layer > Duplicate layer. We will be using two saturation boosting techniques and a special Photoshop technique called adaptive saturation which we will describe later.

Step 3

First, we’ll use the LAB color method to increase the saturation. Choose Image > Mode > Lab Color.

Step 4

Open the Curves tool by pressing Ctrl+M. The Curves tool can also be found in the Image > Adjustment > Curves menu if the hot key does not work for you. In the Curves tool, select the channel “a” from the drop down menu and create a S curve like the image below. If you want more saturation, moves the two points closer towards the center. For less saturation, move slightly them towards the outer edge. Repeat this with the B channel.

This works by increasing the contrast on the two chroma channels. The LAB color mode separates the luminance (black and white tonal values) with the color. It creates three channels: By increasing the contrast on only the color channels, the luminance becomes unaffected. This saturation increasing method works great with landscape photos but not so well with portraits or photos with a lot of skin.

If you increase the curvature of the S shape, the contrast becomes greater. The image below shows how increasing the curvature and making the s-curve sharper will add more contrast.

More pages: 1 2 3 4

Written by admin on February 29th, 2008 with 10 comments.
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