Creating Colour Punch using Photoshop

Having read about a number of techniques to increase colour oomph, Matthew Page came up with a technique that involves switching to Lab mode and adjusting curves on the a and b channels.

That got me thinking, especially about those I know who have Photoshop Elements (which doesnt have Lab colour mode, nor curves). So, I started creating a FilterMeister filter to do the job. This worked quite well, but was very slow.After a little bit of head-bashing and thinking, this utterly simple technique popped out!

These techniques work in both Photoshop and Photoshop Elements!

Simple tools
You’re going to use the Brightness/Contrast tool. “What a dud tool!” I hear you say. Ah, but with a slight twist:

Hold down the ALT key
Hit the Adjustment Layer tool in the Layers palette

Select “Brightness/Contrast”

In the dialog box, name the layer and change the mode to Color

Adjust the contrast to around 20 to 30%

And thats the colour popped!
Whats going on is that Photoshop is leaving the luminosity information alone and just adjusting the colour. The Contrast boost stretches the colour without touching anything else

Doing the same for Luminosity
You can add some extra contrast without adjusting the colour.
Use exactly the same approach, but instead of setting the layer blend mode to Color, set it to Luminosity.Now, when you tweak the contrast and brightness Photoshop leaves the colour alone, and only modifies the luminosity!

Perceptual Black & White
For a final little tip, Ill show you how to create a very nice black and white image with almost no work at all!Again, well use a simple tool the Hue/Saturation, but again with a layer-twist!

If you added a Hue/Saturation with Saturation set to -100 you usually get a rather bland black and white. This is because Photoshop does a straight conversion all colours get converted the same. By this, I mean that a 50% yellow, and a 50% red, and a 50% blue will all be converted to the same shade of grey. This isnt how your eyes see things!

Try this instead
Hold down the ALT key

Hit the Adjustment Layer tool in the Layers palette

Select Hue/Saturation In the dialog box, name the layer and change the mode to “Color”

Set the Saturation to -100

Now what you see is a perceptual conversion, where yellows are converted to lighter shades of grey, and blues are converted to darker shades.

Regular

Perceptual

This can also be accomplished in full Photoshop with a mono channel mixer set to 30% red, 59% green, and 11% blue, which just so happens to be the mix for the grey scale content of the JPG standard, if thats of interest!