Photoshop - Advanced Saturation Without Artifacts

Here's how it works: Have you ever wanted to boost the saturation in your photographs but when you start to adjust the Hue, Saturation and Lightness settings, the image starts to look pixelatted and unnatural? Here's a technique to make your photograph look juicer and richer and still maintain a natural look. If you would like to watch a step-by-step video demonstration, you can click on this link on Advanced Saturation-Avoiding .jpg Artifacts . You can also get the Photoshop .PSD exercise files by right-clicking on this link.

Ah, Venice, a beautiful, romantic city that's full of color and vitality! Unfortunately, this photograph was taken on a grey overcast day which kills all the splendor of this city. We will work on this photo to bring out the true beauty of Venice!

Step 01 - To begin this technique, I duplicated the first layer of the Venice image. You can either right click and press "duplicate" or drag the first layer to the "new layer" icon. This is the second button to the right on the layers panel. (I sometimes even make yet another copy and then put it in a separate layer folder for safe keeping in case anything goes drastically wrong!)

Step 02 - Next, I clicked on the adjustment layer button. This is the 3rd button to the right on the Layers Panel. The, I selected the Hue, Saturation, Lightness panel. We're mostly concentrating on the Saturation option which adjust how much concentration of color is on a an image. If you over saturate an image the colors will look very bright while if you desaturate the colors, the colors will eventually go away until the image is a straight black and white.

**Now here is a little know trick, hold down the alt-key, option key for Mac user and then drag it to the affected layer. It should look like the illustration on the left.This action tells Photoshop to only affect the immediate layer below this adjustment layer. Otherwise it will affect all the layers below it..

Step 03 - I boosted the saturation to +78. It looks a bit garish and exaggerated now but trust me all this will work out! You'll also notice that in certain area it's starting to look a little pixellated. On the affected layer, just the HSL adjustment layer, you should apply a Gaussian blur on the image. Just a little bit, maybe just a 1.5 pixel blur will do. This action will smooth out the boxiness of the image.

Step 04 - Now I clicked on this image layer that's been oversaturated and blurred to select it. Then, I went to to the color blend mode, the window that's on the upper left of the Layers panel and the I selected the color blend. The color blend mode takes the gray information in the base image and blends it with the the hue and saturation information of the layer that you select. of the blend color. This blend mode is very useful for coloring monochrome images and for tinting color images.







Step 05 - And viola, here is the resulting image . . . Venice in all of it's beautiful glory! Notice how the blues of the sky and the water is popping out and you get a better sense of space and perspective!

Again, if you would like to follow a similar tutorial step-by-step, you can check out a video of this technique here.

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I hope you enjoy this lesson in Photoshop 7 tutorials! If you have a question, please drop me a line or write a comment.