Photoshop Elements 8 for Windows: The Missing Manual

Making Colors More Vibrant

Do you drool over the luscious photos in travel magazines, the ones that make it look like the world's full of vivid destinations that make regular life seem pretty drab in comparison? What is it about those photos that makes things look so dramatic?

Often the answer is the saturation, or intensity, of the colors. Supersaturated color makes for darned appealing landscape and object photos, regardless of how the real thing may rate on the vividness scale.

There are various ways to adjust the saturation of your photos. Some cameras offer to help control it, but Elements lets you go even further. For example, by increasing or decreasing a photo's saturation, you can shift the perceived focal point, change the mood of the picture, or just make it more eye-catching.

By increasing your subject's saturation and decreasing it in the rest of the photo, you can focus your viewer's attention, even in a crowded photo. Figure 9-15 shows a somewhat exaggerated use of this technique; you can download the photo (jars.jpg) from the Missing CD page at www.missingmanuals.com to try it out for yourself.

It's super easy to change saturation. You might want to start out with the Raw Converter's Vibrance slider—remember that you can open other image formats there besides Raw files. If that doesn't work well, try using either of the more traditional methods: the Hue/Saturation dialog box or the Sponge tool, which are explained in the following sections. For big areas, or when you ...