Photoshop CC: The Missing Manual, 2nd Edition

Making Colors Pop

Once you’ve corrected an image’s color and lighting, you can have some serious fun by boosting or intensifying its colors. You’ve already learned how to do that in Camera Raw with the Clarity, Vibrance, and Saturation adjustments; this section focuses on what you can do in Photoshop.

Tip

Remember, you can use the Adobe Camera Raw filter to make your colors pop. To learn how, flip back to the box on Using the Camera Raw Filter.

Intensifying Colors

After you’ve got an image’s colors just right using what you’ve learned in this chapter, you can boost ’em so they pop right off the page. One of the simplest ways to emphasize colors is with a vibrance adjustment layer (see Figure 9-26), which has less of an effect on intense colors (because they’re already highly saturated) than on lighter tones—yet it miraculously manages to leave skin tones relatively unchanged. You can also use a vibrance adjustment layer to tweak an image’s saturation (its settings include a Saturation slider), but when you do, Photoshop applies that change evenly to the whole image no matter how intense the colors already are and with zero regard for skin tones. So if your picture includes people, stay away from the Saturation slider and stick to Vibrance instead…unless your clients like hot-pink skin.

To create a vibrance adjustment layer, choose Layer→New Adjustment Layer→Vibrance. You can also click its icon in the Adjustments panel (it looks like a triangle) or click the half-black/half-white circle ...