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Home arrow Tutorials arrow Tips and Tricks arrow Brighten colors selectively

 

Brighten colors selectively Print E-mail

Selective colorThis tutorial is about intensifying colors and making the image brigter with the Photoshop Selective colors.

1. Open your image. I've taken a watermelon on a porch. It has few well-defines colors very suitable for this technique. Make a copy of the original image or just copy the background layer. You can make this original layer invisible; we won't need it any more, if only for reference.

source image

2. Add an adjustment layer 'Levels' and brighten the image a bit.

levels

3. Add another adjustment layer 'Selective color' and start adjusting our colors. First of all it would be Green that is the most in the picture.

green

4. Now comes Yellow:

yellow

5. White:

white

6. Black:

black

7. And Neutral to give more volume to the porch.

neutral

8. Merge all visible layers and change image mode to Lab (Image > Mode > Lab).
9. Open Channels tab in the Layers palette and choose Lightness channel. Go to Filter > Sharpen > Unsharp Mask and use it on the image. Don't forget to change back to RGB mode.

unsharp mask

10. Copy the layer and go to Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur.

gaussian blur

11. Set the top layer to Multiply and reduce its opacity to 25-35 %.

reduced opacity

12. The last touch - add 'Levels' Adjustment layer and use black and white eyedroppers on the darkest and lightest parts of the image.

levels

You can compare the two images now:

before
Before

after
After