hello all,

so, i took a few shots in an attempt to capture fall colors. i was wondering if anyone had any tips on getting the reds more red and the yellows more yellow without messing with the evergreens or the blue sky.

ive shown a few people the shots and they are interested in purchasing larger prints to hang in thier businesses, so i want things to pop as much as possible.

i shot them in RAW+JPG and i am using Adobe CS3 bridge/photoshop.

thanks,

tg

Try adjusting the levels and if you've done that and want more pop, you could adjust the hue and saturation of just those colors. Hope that helps!
Candy
p.s. remember to work in layers!

You may want to play with LAB color.
From what I've seen, you can really pop the colors w/o degrading the overall image.

Here's a wikipedia entry about it.

And here is a guy who edits in LAB.

A book on LAB

Cool!!
I'm gonna go play in lab now!!
Thank's Johnny!

Is this what you do?

Nope.
Unfortunately, with being a wedding shooter and all, I haven't had time to photograph the fall colors.

What I do though is use the HSL selection tool in Lightroom to boost or reduce colors. Works well too - but I have always wanted to play with LAB... never have the time to learn it.

Try the sponge tool... set to Saturate, around 20% opacity, brush it over the areas you want to make pop.

His stuff is awesome!! Thanks for posting that link

I have an action Paul & I put together which uses a selective color adjustment layer and individually adjusts each color in the drop down menu according to which colors make it up. I also recommend using a duplicate layer on your image, set the blending mode to overlay, add a layer mask and use a paint brush to bring back anything that's "gone too far".

Here's an attachment:
First image, as shot.
Second image, with action.
Third image, with action & duplicate layer. If you add some levels & curves & sharpening after all that, you're sorted!!

Click to view attachment

If you PM me with your email & I can figure out where the action is, I'll send it to you. It's the only action set that isn't showing up in my Presets/actions folder (typically!). Maybe I need to restart the computer as I just moved it into a new action set???