Photoshop Tutorial - Punchy Colour

Here’s a quick and simple tutorial on how to get some really punchy colour into those flat photos. Oh and these instructions are based on Photoshop CS2, it’s probably similar in other versions though.

Ok so we’re starting with fairly flat, lifeless photo that could do with a bit of tweaking. We could bang around with the levels and curves and maybe even with the saturation, but all that takes too much time and often you’ll throw out your backdrop.

This method avoids all of that and is really quick and effective.

Duplicate the layer by either clicking on the layer menu and selecting duplicate, or by simply clicking the duplicate layer button in the layers palette in the bottom right corner.

Over in the layers dialogue area you should have something similar to the image below.

Now we’re going to apply a Gaussian Blur filter, so head on up to the filters menu and with your mouse / trackpad go down to the Blur menu, then across to Gaussian Blur and click on it.

You’ll get a pop up on your screen where you can select the strength of the blur. I’ve found that somewhere between 10 and 20 pixels works best, most of the time I leave it on 11 which works well for me 90% of the time. Click ‘OK’ when you’re happy to move on.

Back down to the Layers area now. Click on the blend mode, usually it’s just set to Normal, you should get a drop down menu the same as the following screen shot.

Again this one will come down to personal preference but most of the time I’ll select ‘Soft Light’, occasionally I’ll select Overlay for a slightly softer, less saturated effect. So the only thing left to do is to play around with the Opacity to lessen the effect if you need to, but otherwise that’s it.

And voila’ you’ve now got an image with really solid punchy colours without doing too much to the background, and without spending too long playing with the levels, curves and saturation. It’ll also work well for reducing a bit of noise in those high ISO images.

And just in case you missed anything above, or my directions are sketchy, here’s a link to download the action. Just unzip it and then import the .atn file into Photoshop, in Mac OSX you can just double click the file and it will install…..sorry Windows guys, not 100% if the same goes for you.

Enjoy.

Comments