When it comes to photography Adam is a believer in pushing limits and experimenting until perfection. His recent creative pursuit is blending photography and graphic design to visually communicate abstract concepts, but he also enjoys capturing portraits and landscapes. Aside from photography, Adam enjoys playing music, traveling, and staying flexible last minute adventures. To see more of Adam’s work, visit his website at: adamhbrandt.com.
Have you ever wondered how photographers capture that unreal vibrant color that looks like it came straight out of a Willy-Wonka scene? The truth is… it’s all fake.
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Only the photographers with 1K in lighting equipment and creative engineers and assistants can sometimes get those colors to pop straight out of the camera. But for the rest of us, we cheat and avoid going broke by using editing software. Because more often than not, we’re shooting in less than ideal lighting conditions.
Take this “before” portrait I took of my friend Sly (and no his mother did not actually name him that). I took this in the shade at about 1pm on bright summer day, which makes for really poor light color-wise. It’s not horrible, but his wife probably wouldn’t frame it.
I’m about to show you 4 easy ways to create vibrant colors in a professional way that does NOT look like an Instagram photo where the saturation and vibrance is boosted to a nauseating degree.
1. Use a wide aperture
I took this photo at f/1.4. I’ve found that the wider the aperture, the better color you get. There’s two reasons for this… 1) you’re getting more light into the camera, which usually brings out vibrance and 2) your eye is forced to see only the color in the background rather than be distracted by its details.
Now lets go to Lightroom to explore the rest of the process. I’m using LR3 so the controls may look a bit different from yours, but you should still be able to find them all the same. If you don’t have LR, I’d highly suggest buying it, and you should be able to achieve the following editing steps in any semi-advanced editing program.
2. Create the S tone curve
The S tone curve is my favorite editing step, and it’s purely preference. The S curve fades the black in your photo and makes your image very flat looking. The S curve is the main ingredient in making your digital photos look like film. In my opinion the S curve also allows your eye to focus more on color because there’s less of a 3-D dynamic to be distracted by.
You can create your own S curve or you can do what I did and download an S curve preset for free here. This preset also boots the vibrance up just a hair to make your colors pop. You will most likely have to do a few minor exposure, white balance, fill-light, blacks, and contrast adjustments. Also, if you don’t like film grain, this preset does have a tad bit of that (which you can change).
3. Vignette
A subtle vignette darkens the corners of the photo and draws your eye into the subject and the colors you want to pop out at you. The key word here is subtle. Most photographers can note when a photo has been vignetted, but if your average joe would notice, you’ve gone too far.
4. Play with specific color hue, saturation, and luminance
This is the fun part. This step is what differentiates your photos from photos with boosted vibrance or saturation. The vibrance and saturation is good in small doses mostly because it boosts all the colors in your photo. However, if you go too far with the saturation/vibrance you will get unintended colors to blow out of proportion. This step lets you really target specific colors and avoid your photo looking like a rainbow exploded all over it.
Knowing what colors to adjust all depends on your photo. This photo consists mostly of green (trees), blue (shirt), yellow and orange (trees, skin, and teeth). So those are the colors I hone in on.
I wanted to bring out the blue in his shirt, so I bumped up the blue saturation and bumped down the luminance (meaning less glow in the blues).
Then I noticed the white in his shirt was a little yellow. This preset automatically makes the white balance (WB also known as temperature in LR3) more yellow, so I moved the WB so that white in his shirt was actually white.
Even after I adjusted the WB to a cooler temperature, the green in the trees was too much of a yellow-green for my taste. So I went to the green hue slider and moved it till I got the greenest of greens I could find. Then I bumped up the green saturation and luminance slider to make the greens strong and glow as if the sun was illuminating each leaf. Think of color luminance as the amount of glow each color has.
Now for his skin. I wanted him to look a little less yellow and a little more brown. There’s no brown color listed, so I had to fidget with the orange and yellows. I moved the orange hue to slightly bring out more of the reds in his skin. I decreased the yellow saturation a lot, which not only removed the yellowy skin but also unintentionally removed most of the yellow in his teeth.
Now with teeth you can also use a teeth-whitening brush in most programs to lighten them, but I’ve learned from my mistakes that whitening teeth is a very delicate art. More often than not, teeth-whitening brushes over-whitens the teeth and makes everyone look like Crest models. You don’t want that. Always leave a tad bit of yellow (as weird as that sounds) and don’t make them too bright.
That’s as far as I went with this photo. Pretty painless right? You get such a dramatic difference color-wise too. You can always take it further in Photoshop, but hopefully this provides a good foundation for you.
Rethink Creative 