This tutorial will show you how to adjust your photo color to give it a nice saturation quick and effective.

Here is the a split version of the photo before and after.

In this tutorial I will show you how to quickly increase the saturation in LAB space, LAB uses Lightness, A and B instead of red, blue and green channel. The advantage of using LAB (pronounced L – A – B, not lab) is you can manipulate the color without influencing the tone which is controlled by the L channel.

I’ve changed the color space to LAB mode and strengthen the contrast of the AB channel to increase the saturation and give it higher contrast by manipulating the lightness channel. The rest are just adding special effects such as blur and creating a more pleasing color value. The effects I add was glowing effect by duplicating one copy and blurring it and increase the contrast so that more highlight shows, than blur it again. After blurring it twice set the correct blending mode and turn down the opacity if necessary, go ahead and experiment with the effect to see what you come up with.

If you have questions please leave comments. Thanks!

This is part of my tutorial set. Please visit the TUTORIAL PAGE for a list of all the tutorials.

Original for the Selective Colors Photoshop tutorial

This is the original photo I shoot in he morning in Hawaii, there was a lot of clouds and the sun was interacting with the sky very nicely. I wanted to try to mess with the color of the sky and cloud to give it a completely different feeling so I used the Selective Color adjustment. This is different from selecting a specific color using the Color Range tool method or simply using the Hue adjustment. It lets you change a single color one at a time. You can find the under the layer pallet and in the black/white circle icon you will find the “Selective Color” adjustment. Go through each of the color and play around to see which section has been changed. To see a more obvious result move the black on each of the color, if you do not see anything shifting than that color is not used in the photo. The White will allow you to change all the highlights, so it is great if you want to change the glow or highlight colors in the photo. The black will change the shadow, you will notice that changing the blacks will affect most of the photo, so you do not want to change too much of it. The grey will give your photo an overall color tint or tone.

This is after my photoshop tutorial

This is the final version that I have from the video. So here I’ve made the orange highlights from the original photo even more powerful and I changed the temperature from cool to warm. You could have done most of the editing changing just the gray, but you get a more realistic result if other colors are changed too.

This is another possibility

This is another possibility that can be done, I change the temperature to an even cooler value. So go ahead and experiment with the settings and see what you come up with. Try changing just one color to anther too.

This is part of my tutorial set. Please visit the TUTORIAL PAGE for a list of all the tutorials.

In this tutorial I will show you how to “erase” or clone out the people from this Japanese Garden photo.

japanese garden

The first part of the tutorial I created a new layer and sketch what I think should go behind the people I wanted to erase. Its always a good idea to sketch the background out when there is a good amount of details.

The second part I use the marquee tool to select the upper part of the door and pasted down, than use a soft eraser to blend it in. You can use this to help you align the doors by moving the copied layer around until it fits.

Next I used a solid color for the small area on the bottom next to the door. When the area is small it’s ok to use a solid color but don’t over do it or it will look fake.

Finally I use the clone stamp to finish the rest of the image, when you first activate the clone stamp you will need to “sample” an area on your photo by holding the Alt key and clicking on a area that you want to clone, than you start painting over the area that needs to be covered.

A Video tutorial on how to add special effects with lightning and adjustment layers.

This is a 2 part video tutorial that teach you how to add special effects and lightning through adjustment curve. Here is the original photo

and here is the after

Please leave a comment if you have any question regarding this video and let me know what needs to change so I can improve on future videos, thanks!!

This video tutorial will teach you how to turn a ordinary photo to something more interesting.

More…SET UP – I use a photo that was shot using a consumer camera with flash, no professional lightning was used. The first thing that I did was delete the background, since my background is fairly plain, I just use the Magic Wand to delete them. You can access this tool on the tool bar or by pressing (W) on your keyboard. For photos that are more complex, you should use the pen tool. I also combined eraser tool and marquee tool to help delete the background.

SMOOTHING EDGES -The problem with using Magic Wand is that it leaves jagged edge, so you will need to smooth out the edge once you are finished. First start by selecting the empty pixels, you can use Magic Wand to do this or by Ctrl click the layer icon, it will select all the active pixel than inverse the selection. Than enter Quick Mask Mode, it can be found on the tool bar, the icon right below the color icon or by hitting (Q) on keyboard. Now you will notice everything that was selected is red and everything that is not is clear. Anything thing you do now will be reflected in the selection once you exit the Quick Mask Mode. Now go to filter-noise-medium and smooth out the edge than exit out of the Quick Mask and hit delete, now all the uneven pixel will be deleted.

BACKGROUND – The bacground is fairly simple, its just a series of filters and adjusting the color until you are satisfied.

LIGHT RAYS – To create the light rays that are shining behind her, first paint in some white in a new layer than use filter-blur-radial blur. Select the zoom option and hit ok. The white that you just painted now looks a bit more like light rays. However, light rays are usually broken up into tiny rays by the atmosphere or surrounding so lets break up the rays. Using the Quick Mask Mode again we will create a noised selection and delete that selection on our newly made rays than radial blur it again. You might not be able to see much now because the density of the pixel is low from all the blurring, you can increase density by duplicating the layer about 2-3 times, and don’t forget to merge them when you are done.

I repeated the same steps for another set of ray that will be overlapping her. After finishing with this second set, clean it up so the direction of the light make sense.

HAIR – I want to create the illusion that my subject is underwater but she is in a standing pose and her hair is down so I will have to paint the flowing hair myself. First is paint brush to paint in blobs of hair, use the noise filter to create some white noise than smudge it out. If you want you can duplicate this and make it a light color so it looks like the light is illuminating the edge of her hair.

COLORS – You should use adjustment layers to correct the color so you can come back later to make more adjustment. Adjustment layers are located at the bottom of the layer pallet, It looks like a ying-yang circle. Ctrl click on the subject’s layer and select the Level Adjustment Layer, by having a selection ready before you choose your adjustment layer, photoshop will automatically create a mask according to your selection, so now the adjustment layer only effect the subject and not the background.

FINISHING TOUCH – I’ve added some bubbles by duplicating them and went into liquify filter to to change her body, I didn’t spend a lot of time on liquify filter but I will show you a more detailed tutorial on this later.

I hope you didn’t have problem understanding it. If there is any part that you do not understand please let me know so I can change it or just any general comment and recommendation on how to improve on this will be appreciated. Thanks!