You may already know this, or have a seperate method, but this is how i go about colour correcting my photos to create a much more visually appealing outcome. And the best thing it should only take about 2 minutes to do!

1. Start off by opening your image up in photoshop, im using this picture one of my parents took of me and two mates in Bali.


it's a great image but some of the colours could be a lot more vivid and eye catching.

2. Ok, next thing to do is go up to the menu, select "image" then chose mode>lab colour from the drop down menu's


3. Once this is done then go, Image> adjustments > curves. once the curves box is open you will see something like this


4. then you want to selct "a" from the channels drop down box, once you have completed that then you want to grab the little points on the slider and pull then away from there original position in a straight line, so this for both the top one and the bottom one. The futher you go the more vivid your colours will be, make sure to not go to far and over saturate them though.

the top part adjusts them warmer colours, while the bottom will adjust the cooler colours, so if you want a warmer image make the top a little further out than the bottom and vice versa for a cooler image. make sure to have the preview button checked and look at your image to find what you like.

your sliders should look something like this



5. Once that is done, go back up to the channels pull down box and select "b", do exactly the same thing as the step above. Once you have reached a result you like press ok.

6. Your image is looking pretty good now, but theres a few more little things we can do to make it look even better. do exactly the same thing as step 2. But instead of slecting "Lab colour" select "RGB colour". This just changes the image mode back to normal.

7. Next go Image>adjustments>curves. we are now going to add some contrast to the image, to do this simply make a s bend with the line by clicking and pulling the line. You want something like this


8. Now to sharper the image. First off select the magnifying glass, right click and select "actual pixels", this zooms you into 100% after that Go Filter> Sharper>Unsharp Mask, a dialog box will open, heres you just need to use your discretion mainly, make sure to have preview click and always click it off then back on to look at any changes the sharpening will make. I used the following settings.




just fiddle around with the settings until you see something you like.



and thats it!! heres what we've done

copypasta?

no, try and find this anywhere else on the internet... i dare ya

nice effort then man

can u do this with foggy photos? ive taken a heap of snaps where there is condensation (put my camera in the esky to keep it out of the water when i went fishing) on my lense and makes the picture look foggy and ick.

yeah, don't see why not. You cant really get rid of the fog but theres no reason why you cant try it out. When you do the sharpening step increase the threshold a bit, this helps with grainy pictures

Or you could use the hue/saturation panel.

Great work, good to see someone actually making tutorials

Why work in lab colours? and not sRGB?

http://blogs.tech-recipes.com/qmchenry/200...-park-wysteria/
http://blog.epicedits.com/2007/12/20/photo...on-adjustments/
http://www.flickr.com/groups/technique/dis...57594133492563/
http://blogs.tech-recipes.com/qmchenry/200...nyc-from-above/

Thanks for the tips.

So you can use the a, b and lightness channels instead of red, green and blue

nice tut .....

of cource there is going to be tutorials explaining the same thing. It's the most efficient technique of doing it.

lawlz