your dull photos into vibrant, impactful images.
and the creator PS321QR monitor.
Let's start by looking at one
of the easiest ways to make the colors in your images pop,
and that is by increasing Saturation, you can do so in several ways.
In Photoshop, you can start by going
into the new Adjustment Layer icon and from here selecting Vibrance.
Now I want to point out that the Hue Saturation Adjustment layer
is also an adjustment layer that you can use.
But I prefer to use the Vibrance Adjustment layer
because in my opinion, it gives you better results.
If you want to learn the technical
differences between these adjustment layers, check out my tutorial
on the differences between Saturation and Vibrance.
I'll place a link to it below in the description.
But anyway, with the Vibrance Adjustment layer,
you get two sliders Vibrance and Saturation.
Saturation increases the saturation of all the pixels in the image equally.
You can see that when I drag the slider
all the way to the right, pretty much all the pixels in the image
get overly saturated, and that's not a good look.
But if I increase vibrance all the way to the right,
you'll notice that the colors pop,
but they don't necessarily oversaturate the image.
The difference between these two sliders in this adjustment layer
is that Saturation increases the saturation of all pixels equally,
while Vibrance protects already saturated pixels and skin tones.
You can see that her skin tones are not blown out
and the red pixels in the dress are also not overly saturated.
So this is what I would recommend to increase the saturation of your images.
In some cases, you may also need to increase
the saturation just to make the image pop even further.
But again, don't get heavy-handed with the Saturation slider,
because pretty quickly you can start blowing out the pixels in the image.
Try to keep your adjustment subtle.
For the purposes of demonstration and so that you can see the difference
I need to increase the effect a lot more than I normally would.
What I'll do now is disable the Vibrance Adjustment layer.
Another thing that you can do is create a Hue and Saturation adjustment layer
and selectively target the pixels that you want to saturate.
You can click on this finger icon and then Hover over the image and click,
and you can drag to the right to increase the saturation of those selected pixels.
Notice in the Properties panel, Photoshop selected the Reds from the dropdown.
Notice that we have six colors Reds,
Yellows, Greens, Cyans, Blues, and Magentas.
And when you click over a color while this icon is active.
Photoshop will change the drop-down
to the selected color, and you can click and drag to increase or
decrease saturation in that particular color.
So what you can do is hover over the image
and click-and-drag over the colors that you want to saturate so that they pop.
Now there's another way that you can do this,
and I think it works a little bit better.
So, let me show you how that works.
I'm going to right-click on the layer and convert it into a smart object.
A Smart Object is a container that holds
one or more layers, and it allows you to apply non-destructive
adjustments, distortions filters, and transformations.
In other words, you can always come back and make changes.
Then I'm going to go into the Filter menu
and Select Camera Raw Filter.
In the Camera Raw Filter, under Basic,
you'll notice that we have those same two slider vibrance and Saturation.
They work exactly the same way.
I can increase the Vibrance as you can see
and then add overall Saturation
by dragging the Saturation slider to the right.
And also more importantly,
under the Color Mixer, you can see that I have now eight sliders
they control different colors.
Reds, Oranges, Yellows, Greens, Aquas, Blues, Purples, and Magentas,
giving us more control than the Hue and Saturation Adjustment Layer.
Since it only has six.
This one has eight.
So, I can control the hue, saturation,
and luminance of the colors that you see here.
So, I can go into the Saturation.
Click on this tool, which is basically the same thing as
the finger tool in the Hue and Saturation Adjustment layer.
Hover over the image and click-and-drag
to the right to increase or decrease the saturation of the selected color.
And you can see that in this case,
I'm adjusting both the Reds and the Oranges.
If I want to change the luminance,
I can click on the Luminance tab and continue clicking and dragging
on that same location to change the luminance of that particular color.
So in my opinion, this gives you much more control
and it helps you make the colors in your image pop even more.
When you're done, you can press OK, notice that this is a Smart Filter.
You can see the Camera Raw label here.
If you want to edit that adjustment,
you can always double-click on that label and it will bring up the Camera Raw filter once again
and you can continue making any adjustment that you like.
When working on these techniques,
you need to make sure that you have a monitor that displays colors accurately.
I'm currently using the MSI creator PS321Q.
It's a fantastic monitor for creatives.
It has so many, many wonderful features,
but there's four that I really think make this monitor stand out from the rest.
First, it's a rapid IPS display, giving you ultrafast one millisecond GTG
response time while providing crystal-clear images.
Second, it meets a high color standard
by covering 99% Adobe RGB, 99% RGB, and 95% DCIP3.
Third, it has VESA HDR 600, which enhances the intensity impurity
of screen colors to provide next level immersion.
And finally, the builtin software called Creator OSD, which provides easy to access
color modes and profiles to help you find the perfect balance for every project.
So, if you're looking for a new monitor, I will highly recommend the MSI Creator PS321QR
I'll place a link to it below in the description.
Now, let me show you another way
in which you can make the colors in your photos pop!
I'm going to go into this image of this man hiking,
and you can see that the image is fairly saturated, the blue is popping,
and the green is a little dull, but it still has some saturation.
Now, we can, of course, create a Vibrance Adjustment layer
and increase the vibrance to try to make the colors pop even more.
But you don't get that much more of a pop
because the color is already fairly saturated.
So, what can we do to make the colors in this image pop?
Well, we can take advantage of color theory,
and we can put complementary colors side-by-side so that they pop.
Let me show you what I mean by that.
I'm going to bring up this page color.Adobe.com,
and you can see the color wheel here.
And under Color Wheel, you have these options.
Make sure that you click on "Complementary" and you can see the complementary colors.
You can click-and-drag on these circles to select the color,
and on the opposite end, you'll see the complementary colors.
In other words, the colors that stand out
when place next to each other.
In the image that we're currently working on,
we have a green background and a blue jacket in the front.
But notice that the complementary color to green is actually red.
So, we can actually make the colors in this image pop if he were wearing a red jacket.
So, what we can do is change the color of the jacket to red
and the color should pop even more.
So let's give that a try.
With this layer selected, I'm just going to click on
the New Adjustment Layer icon and Select Hue and Saturation.
You can click on this icon
and hover over the blue jacket and click-and-drag.
Which will, of course, saturate the image
or desaturate it if you go to the left.
But if you hold Ctrl on Windows
Command on the Mac
as you click-and-drag,
you will instead adjust the hue of the image.
So, now you can drag the slider to the right until the jacket turns red.
Then you can use the sliders here at the bottom
to increase the range of pixels that are affected by that color adjustment.
Until the entire jacket looks red.
Notice that after we make this adjustment, the jacket no longer looks red.
It looks yellow.
All you need to do is just
click and drag on the Hue slider and get it over into the reds.
And you'll have a red jacket.
Now that we have red in the foreground and green in the background,
we have complementary colors.
And the red jacket pops even more than the blue.
Another method of making the colors in your image pop is by desaturating
all the colors in the image except the ones that you want to pop.
So, in this case, we can desaturate the background
and saturate the blue just a little bit more to do so,
you can create a Hue and Saturation Adjustment Layer.
Click on this icon and click over
into the green area here and just drag to the left to desaturate.
And maybe you can even drag the Lightness slider
to the left as well, to darken it a bit.
Then you can click over the blue jacket
and drag to the right
just so that the Blues are even more saturated.
Also, this image might benefit by having a darker background.
So, I can create a Levels Adjustment Layer.
Drag the midpoint Gamma slider over to the right.
And then with the Layer Mask selected, I can activate the Brush Tool,
make sure that black is my foreground color,
and I can just paint with black on that mask to brighten up,
making him and the colors around him pop.
Before
and after.
Obviously, I was very loose when creating that mask.
Spend more time on your projects to get better results.
Make sure that you check out
the MSI Creator 15 laptop and the MSI PS321QR monitor.
The link to both is in the description.
Also, click over now to watch this video
on the difference between Vibrance and Saturation.
I'm sure you'll enjoy it.