Photoshop Elements 3: The Missing Manual

Making Your Colors More Vibrant

Do you drool over the luscious photos in travel magazines, the ones that make it look like the world is full of destinations so vivid they make your regular 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. Super-saturated color makes for darned appealing landscape and object photos, regardless of how the real thing may rate on the vividness scale.

Figure 9-7. You can create your own patterns very easily. Just open an image and make a rectangular selection. Then go to Edit → Define Pattern from Selection. You'll get a pop-up asking you to name the new pattern, and your pattern appears at the bottom of the current pattern palette.To rename or delete a pattern, just right-click (Control-click) it in the Pattern palette and choose what you want to do. You can download hundreds of different patterns from various online sources. See page 421.

There is a variety of ways to adjust the saturation of your photos. Some cameras offer you settings to help control it. Regardless of how much control you have over saturation in the camera, Elements lets you make all kinds of adjustments to your color saturation. You can manipulate saturation to achieve many different effects. For example, by increasing or decreasing the saturation in ...