Lately while riding my bike, I find myself attracted to the colors around me, and almost feel moved by the diverse hues, shapes, and colors in the county town I live in. With my trigger finger on my camera’s shutter button, firing away in machine gun fashion, shooting up the neighborhood. So the question is: How come the colors in my processed image don’t look as “vibrant” as they did when I made the shot?

The answer lies beyond the scope of this article, but perhaps I can help.

So here’s an image I took of my neighbors cabin door. (left) I swear, it was much better looking color wise when I took the image!  So how did I improve the saturation in two (2) easy steps to get the image you see below? Simple Photoshop’s ”Apply Image”!!

1. Lets begin by duplicating the background layer (ctrl+J)

2. Now we’re going to change from RGB to LAB mode.

 3. Now comes my secret “Apply Image”

As soon as you apply image you’ll get this dialogue box.

The dialogue has just the right (image left) defaults you want: Channel: LAB and Blending: Multiply

Reduce layer one’s (top layer) opacity to suit your taste. (image top)

Your finished now except for one more step…convert the image back to RGBImage>Mode>RGB.

I usually don’t flatten the image when converting back to RGB. That way I can always change the top layers opacity if I decide to.

You’re done!

(c) 2006 Robert Mizerek [contact] [bio ]

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