Learn to tame a problem that plagues color in digital images. Get fine-detailed, vivid, saturated reds, oranges, and yellows by following these Adobe Photoshop tips and tricks.
Reds—as well as oranges and yellows—are bad news for color in digital images. These colors may be a victim of the red channel overexposing, which causes loss of detail, or they may register as weak and under-saturated, especially in cloudy light or shade. Similarly, prints made from color files often have disappointing color. It can be fixed in Adobe Photoshop, but it’s tricky.
If we resort to saturation to pump these colors up we may need to go so far to get the color we want that they will loose detail. But there is a way to have reds that rock. Here is an image I shot of the Golden Gate Bridge 45 minutes after sunset. It was made at ISO 400, 4 sec at f/13, with my Canon 5D, 24-70 f/2.8 lens.
The sky is a beautiful blue, but the reds are disappointing, possibly due to the color temperature of the lights illuminating the tower. Doing the RAW conversion at a higher color temperature could help the reds, but would desaturate the sky. The bridge is more orange than red, but it isn’t this weak salmon color. And I’m into art, not photojournalism, so if I want to give it some punch I have my permission. This adjustment isn’t that different from using a warming polarizer.
To bring the reds to life I made a Selective Color layer and went to the Colors dropdown and tweaked reds and yellows as shown below. Selective Color allows considerable leeway in altering colors. In the yellows I boosted magenta and reduced cyan a little. In the reds I boosted yellow and magenta and added a trace of cyan. These adjustments result in the reds being dramatically improved without loss of detail. (Of course you can’t see both the red and yellow color adjustment dialogs at the same time – the illustration is a composite of both.)
Another example that shows the advantages of improving reds in Selective Color is the image of a gerbera daisy shown below. It was the most striking deep, rich red a flower could ever be. The arrangement was indoors on a table in indirect window light, and when I saw the light on the flowers I had to photograph them. But somewhere in what the digital sensor captured or what happened in RAW conversion, the lush beauty of the reds was lost. Adjusting the black and white points, as I discussed in an earlier tutorial, and adding some contrast with Curves didn’t bring it back.
To give more richness to the reds I added a Selective Color adjustment layer and worked on the red color as shown in the figure below.
It seems paradoxical, but adding cyan to the reds with the top slider increases the shadow detail in the petals without significantly degrading the red color, and adding a little magenta and quite a bit of yellow gives the reds a big punch without loosing as much detail as you would have lost by increasing saturation directly with Hue and Saturation.
The close-up below shows how the details have been revived by this Selective Color adjustment, on the left half, compared to a visually equivalent increase in saturation with the Hue and Saturation adjustment, on the right. If you look closely you can see that with increased saturation there is a loss of detail in the reds and the transition to the shadow detail has become “gritty” whereas it remains smooth with the Selective Color adjustment.
Selective Color is a powerful and useful adjustment which I use on many images. It is particularly useful for adding richness to reds without oversaturating them.
Diane Miller is a widely exhibited freelance photographer who lives north of San Francisco in the Wine Country and specializes in fine-art nature photography. Her work, which can be found on her web site, http://www.DianeDMiller.com, has been published and exhibited throughout the Pacific Northwest. Many of her images are represented for stock by Monsoon Images and Photolibrary.
