Digital Photography: The Missing Manual

Making Your Colors More Vibrant

Do you drool over the luscious photos in travel magazines—the ones that make regular, non-vacation life seem pretty drab in comparison? What is it about those photos that makes things look so dramatic?

A lot of the time the answer is the saturation, or the intensity, of the colors. Supersaturated colors make even ordinary landscapes and objects really pop (to use the technical term).

It’s not necessary to work on an entire photo when changing its saturation. By increasing the saturation of your subject and decreasing the saturation in the rest of the photo, for example, you can call attention where you want it, even in a crowded picture. Figure 12-12 shows a somewhat exaggerated use of this technique, and you can download the photo (shelfsitter.jpg) from the “Missing CD” page at http://www.missingmanuals.com to try it out for yourself.

Figure 12-12. Top: In this photo, all the little shelfsitter figures are about equal in brightness.Meanwhile, the rest of the photo was desaturated. The effect is exaggerated here, but a subtler use of this technique can help call attention to the part of a photo where you want people to focus their attention.

It’s quite easy to change saturation. You can use either the Hue/Saturation dialog box or the Sponge tool, which are explained in the following sections. For big areas, or when you want a lot of control, use Hue/Saturation. ...