MAKING THE GREENS LOOK GREENER WITH SELECTIVE COLORS

Friday, June 23, 2006

I always had problems getting good green colors in my images. It was the same story when I was shooting slides(Sensia), and when I moved to digital. Whenever I saw saturated images shot with Velvia, I used to look at them with awe. And I had seen similar images made with digital cameras, enhanced beautifully using Velvia Vision or other Photoshop plugins. Photoshop's color saturation tool never managed to get such rich colors, since applying too much saturation introduces unbearable noise. I was playing around with the image of forest colors I posted yesterday, when I considered trying out selective colors. I got some positive results, and tried on a few more images with good outcome. Here is an example.



This image is already slightly color enhanced using Hue/Saturation tool(Image >> Adjustments >> Hue/Saturation). Increasing the saturation any further would have added noise and make the image look artificial.

Then open selective colors tool(Image >> Adjustments >> Selective Colors). In the drop-down menu for colors, choose green. Choosing green ensures that any changes you make in the sliders affects only the green colors in the image, and leaver everything unaffected.



Magenta is the color opposing green. So reducing magenta in green has the same effect as increasing green color in green areas of the image. Move the magenta slider all the way to -100% and see how it affects the greens in the image. Now adjust the slider until you get the desired level of saturation. See the resulting image below.



See the difference. Selective colors has enhanced only the green portion of the image and left everything else untouched.