Basic Colour
Adjustments
Using the Basic panel’s Presence controls we can tweak and adjust
the colour balance and saturation of digital photos, creating stunning
scenes with life and colour; as with most image editing operations, the
key to success is subtlety.
1
For our basic image, we’ll use this woodland scene. It’s
a decent shot with good composition and a nice bright
sunny glow to the light; but the colours look a little muted, it
lacks punch and it doesn’t really capture the full potential of
what should be a striking scene. There are several things we
can do to adjust the colours in this photo.3
The Vibrance control is more subtle. Instead of boosting
the saturation of every pixel, it boosts under-saturated
colours more and colours already well saturated less. The
result is a more colourful image but without the cartoonish
over-saturation of the previous example. The grass looks more
natural and the sky is more vivid.2 Simply boosting the saturation by +65 does make
the colours pop but the Saturation slider is a very
indiscriminate control when used on its own. The colours are
certainly richer but it makes the already bright greens of the
grass look too bright and unnatural. It also does nothing to help
boost the contrast.4 The Clarity control doesn’t make much difference to
the colour balance but what it does do is affect the
contrast of the mid-tones by increasing some of the edge
detail and adding a general sharpening effect. It really helps to
emphasise the contrast and texture of the trees. Clearly what
we need is some sort of combination of these three effects.This tutorial
content is
available for
download68
IMPROVE YOUR IMAGE: THE DEVELOP MODULE
BDM’s Made Easy Series | Volume 22