Post-processing and digital art. Build skills in Photoshop, Lightroom and more.
A Couple of Simple Steps in Photoshop To Improve Color

There are a couple of small things I often do to improve color in my photos. I use a Canon EOS Rebel T3 camera. It's not the best DSLR, but when I started I had to save up for three months to affort the $550 I paid for the camera kit online. I have even less of a budget now. So I use Photoshop to make up for what I lack in camera and camera skill.
Here is the picture out of camera:

When opening RAW images Photoshop starts in Adobe Camera RAW and I add in the camera profile and then open up the highlights and shadows.
Sometimes I'll need to back out one or the other depending on exposure. I've seen tutorials that show experts doing spactacular edits only using the tools availble here.
The first thing I often do is add a Levels Adjustment layer and bring the white left to meet the left edge of the histogram.
I'll move the middle slider just slightly to the right where it looks good. If my black slider is futher to the right than the right side of the histogram I'll move that over a bit too. There is no right or wrong here, only what looks good for your image. Every image will be different.
Here you can see the improvement in color just by doing that.

Next I'll often (but not always) add a Vibrance Adjustment layer. I'll push the Vibrance slider way up and take the Saturation slider down until the image looks natural.
I also like using a Color Lookup Adjustment layer. These are worth playing with. I'll have a future article just discussing what these are, how I use them and how to create your own. Here I use the dropdown to find the LateSunset.3DL, change the Blend Mode to Soft Light and drop the Opacity down to 40%.
And now the image looks like this:

To finish this I croped it using the Rule of Thirds and embeded my watermark.
I hope this helps some of you out there. If you have comments or questions please leave them below. I'm always looking for better ways to improve my skills.




Great tips for exposure adjustments. I do something similar in Photoshop Elements, generally starting with a Levels adjustment as you show here.
Thanks Holly. I've never used PE, but I thought most of the tools would be the same.
I love the result you got with this image!
Very Nice!!! Color lookup adjustment... Hmmm... I have to see if I can find that... nice effects...
When using the Color Lookup adjustment - play with blending modes and opacity. I most often use Color and Soft Light blending modes, but I've been known to use others depending on the photo and once or twice I've used two different layers.
I JUST found out that color lookup layers didn't arrive until CS6... I'm using CS5... Can't afford the upgrade... I've considered changing to Elements, but I'm not doing anything until I convince myself that I will actually start doing photography again... :o/
I see. I have the whole Creative Cloud Suite paid for by a client. They use it for marketing and I use it for their web work. Before that I did pay the $10 a month for the Photographers Subscription for Photoshop, Lightroom and Bridge.
I am very resistant to subscription software... You'd think that having been a software developer for many years would give me an appreciation for subscription software... Instead I've become a modern-day Luddite...
Well in my case the upfront cost is way too much while the monthly cost is more manageable. This client I spoke of is using a cloud database service and an Office 365 subscription. It works for them very well as half the sales agents are scattered across the state.
Love your avatar, Mal.
Thanks Ben... There's room for more images... we can even swap in and out images periodically, like we did with the Photographers group on the Vine...
I've got no problem with that, just post a request in /photopigs whenever you feel like updating it. We could make it into a contest too.
Wow, that made a huge difference. Nice job.
Thanks!
Now to try to find something similar in PSP X7. Cleaning things up without making them look photoshopped can be a very fine line.
Yes. I've had to learn to back off on some of the sliders or things end up looking unnatural.