A Couple of Simple Steps in Photoshop To Improve Color

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: image-1474903979616.jpg

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. image-1474904048005.JPG 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. image-1474904301998.JPG

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.

image-1474904306256.JPG

Here you can see the improvement in color just by doing that. image-1474904345404.jpg

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.

image-1474904441696.JPG

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%. image-1474904665471.JPG

And now the image looks like this: image-1474904701941.jpg

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.