Photoshop® CS3 Channels and Masks Bible

Chapter 12. Enhancing Details with Channels

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Enhancing flesh tones

• Sharpening your image

• Using Lighting Effects

• Mapping images with channels

Pay attention to the details and everything will fall into place so says the adage. Image detail can make or break a photograph. Photoshop has the ability to enhance what the camera captured by modifying color and contrast. Areas can be sharpened to enhance edge detail and colors can be blended to produce more saturation. Sharpening techniques can refine edges and blurring can reduce noise. Details from a source channel can be superimposed on an image with great precision.

With a few simple adjustments you can also enhance flesh tones and other colors that give the image more color depth and add interest. You can also create lighting effects that can add drama to an otherwise ordinary image.

In this chapter, I discuss how to get the most detail from your images and present a few simple tricks that can make a big difference.

Enhancing Flesh Tones

You can add detail and contrast to portraits with color channel manipula-tions. This technique focuses on enhancing flesh tones while maintaining color balance and saturation, but you can use variations of it on any image. You use the information from the channel with the most detail to modify the other channels. Normally the Green channel is the source channel for an image with fleshtones but occasionally it might be one of the others. On images without fleshtones, the most detail can be found ...