Now that we have some experience adjusting the lighting in an image, let’s take a look at some additional ways we can adjust the color of an image. Each of the methods we’ll explore are located inside the Adjustments panel.
Adjusting the vibrance of colors in an image
One method of enhancing an image’s color is by applying a Vibrance adjustment. The Vibrance adjustment has two sliders we can work with to affect the colors in the image: vibrance and saturation. The vibrance slider works by increasing the color saturation (or intensity) of less saturated colors as we drag the slider to the right, making muted colors more vibrant and bright. The saturation slider increases the color saturation of all colors in the image, regardless of their current color intensity, when dragging the slider to the right.
Let’s practice adjusting the vibrance of the colors in Happy Angelica edit.psd to make the red harness Angelica is wearing appear a brighter shade of red.
To open the Adjustments panel, if necessary, in the Panel dock,
Click
To add a Vibrance adjustment layer to the document, in the Adjustments panel,
Click
To increase the vibrance of colors in the image, using the Vibrance slider,
Press & Drag the slider to the right until the color of the dog’s harness is a brighter shade of red
NOTE: The value in the Vibrance field should be somewhere around 60.
The adjustment is subtle, but when we toggle the Vibrance 1 layer’s visibility on and off, we can see that the more muted colors in the image are a little more intense after applying the Vibrance adjustment.
Changing the color balance in an image
Another way we can enhance and change an image’s color is by applying a Color Balance adjustment, which allows us to change the overall hue of an image by choosing which colors we want to add or remove from the image. As part of this adjustment, we can choose which tonal range we want our edits to focus on — working with Shadows will focus our color changes on the darker colors in the image, while working with Highlights will apply the adjustments to the lighter tones in the image.
We’ll use the Color Balance adjustment to give the image a warm red tint, to match the harness Angelica is wearing. We’ll focus on the midtone tonal range with this adjustment.
In the Panel dock, switch back to the Adjustments panel.
To add a Color Balance adjustment layer to the document,
Click
To select the tonal range to work with in the image, in the Tone field of the Properties panel, if necessary,
Click, Click Midtones
To add more red to the image, on the Cyan/Red slider,
Press & Drag the slider to the right until the value in the Cyan/Red field shows +52
To add a small amount of magenta to the image, on the Magenta/Green slider,
Press & Drag the slider to the left until the value in the Magenta/Green field shows -10
To add a small amount of yellow to the image, on the Yellow/Blue slider,
Press & Drag the slider to the left until the value in the Yellow/Blue field shows -9
To save your work, on the keyboard, press:
Control key + S
Now the image has a more pronounced reddish hue. We can see the difference between the original and the recolored image by toggling the Color Balance 1 layer’s visibility off and on.
For more information about performing color adjustments in Photoshop, visit the Adobe Help page Understand Color Adjustments.
, Click Midtones