Brighten colors selectively

March 14, 2008 by admin 

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.

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

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.

4. Now comes Yellow:

5. White:

6. Black:

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

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.

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

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

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

You can compare the two images now:

After

After

Before

Before

Comments

One Response to “Brighten colors selectively”

  1. pligg.com on March 7th, 2009 09:50

    Brighten colors selectively | MyPhotoSoft…

    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 …

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