Enhance Colour Saturation in Photoshop

With the introduction and advancement of digital photography, many people who have "converted" over from traditional or slide film miss certain qualities that they had.

One of the most prominent for many is the colours that you got from slide films such as Fujichrome Velvia, an absolutely stunning film for really vibrant colour saturation.

Now whilst you can enhance colour saturation in Photoshop, it won't match exactly what you got from Velvia but it can come pretty close and add some real punch and colour to your digital images.

You may have noticed that files directly from your Digital SLR may appear a little bland, especially if shooting RAW, and that is where this process should help.

If the histogram has gaps at either base section, close them in by pulling the dark and light sliders inwards as in Fig.1. If there are no gaps, try pulling them in a bit anyway and see what happens, but don't overdo it.

This should start to increase the contrast and saturation but there are a couple of more stages we can try to really saturate the colours.

Now select inverse so that you have just the dark areas highlighted. Then you need to feather the selection to blend your work seamlessly. If it is a 3-6MB image, try feathering about 20 pixels.

Now you can work on just the darker areas. Repeat step one, i.e. the dark and light sliders.

2 more steps and we are done, but you should already start to see some difference?

Go to IMAGE - ADJUSTMENTS - CURVES and make some very minor alterations as in the image below.

The red circle shows a very small increase in lightness and the blue circle shows a small increase in the darkness. These 2 minor adjustments should add to and increase the contrast and now we can do the final stage.

Quite simple really, we just go to

IMAGE - ADJUSTMENTS - HUE/SATURATION

And increase the center bar (saturation) by about 25 points or until it looks good.

You should hopefully end up with a noticeable difference to both the contrast and saturation of your image as below.

Another example is to look at the previous Levels and Curves tip and simply add the saturation onto the end.

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