As my example, I have selected a photo which at first glance doesn't even seem to have much color in it. As you will see, there is still much to be improved, even in a situation with minimal color such as this.
The first step with any picture that has people in it is to correct skin color. One of my big beefs with ANY camera is the redition of skin tones. I have never seen any camera at any cost that accurately reproduces skin. Nearly all digital cameras will add a red tint to skin. So the first step is to remove this.
In Photoshop, select Image->Adjustments->Selective Color. It will start you out on "Reds" from the drop down field for "Colors:". As you can see from the settings here, I'll typically turn the cyan almost all the way down, turn the magenta about halfway down and turn the yellow and black slightly up. Ahhh. So much better already! For each step as we go along, toggle the "preview" checkbox to see how your changes are looking. We want to make the colors pop but we don't want them unreasonably loud.
We can take it a step further by changing the "Color:" srop down field to yellow and doing pretty much the same thing there. Not that "yellow" and "red" affect each other. All red has yellow in it, and vice versa. You may also notice a signficant alteration of other areas in the image which contain these colors; in this case, the inside of my friend's hood, and the stripped portion of the treebark to the lower left of the Selective Color window. In this case, I think the changes made to benefit the skin tone also look good in these areas too. In the even that you have significant red or yellow elsewhere in your image that is starting to look a little bland now, click cancel on your selective color and do a selection of the person's face and any other exposed skin. Using a feathered selection will avoid a visible line when you make your changes. After making these changes to red and yellow, your skin tones will look far more true to life.
For a short and quick selective color portrait treatment, doing red and yellow is sometimes all you want to do. For the sake of illustration, let's look at what else we could make pop a little better. The next color on the drop down "Colors:" field is green, which happens to be the color of the jacket in this photo. To enhance green, we'll crank the cyan and the yellow (the two colors which make green when combined) and we'll drop the magenta down real low. Boosting the black will also make the color more present. Don't get too carried away with the black though.
Since outdoor photos will tend to have a lot of blue in them (due to the color temperature of sunlight) we'll skip down to edit the whites before we mess with the blue and the cyan. With this much snow in the photo we definitely want the white to look right, and cranking up the blue or cyan before we adjust the white could make it harder later to get it to be a pure, clear white color. In this case, what I've done is to strip away all cyan/magenta/yellow until I see the snow as only white color. As I do this, I keep a close eye on an area such as the snow on the tree branch right above the selective color box; one that is a transition between white and another color. Note that the black stays right at zero.
Now that the white is white, we can crank up the blues without messing up the snow. I used the same settings for "Cyans" and "Blues" from the Colors field. In the image shown here you see both changes being applied. In this photo, editing of the blues is more subtle than dramatic, but you can observe a differece in the band over his forehead, the patch of blue in the jacket, the collar below his chin, and his eyes. In a photo with a large blue sky, this step would be very important. Note that as before with "Reds" and "Yellows" I applied the same settings, and similarly it is also true that all blue has some cyan in it, and vice versa.
For whatever reason, "Magentas" in the Colors field is one color I never adjust. Also noteworthy is the fact that rarely would it make sense to drastically edit the contents of "Blacks" and "Neutrals" from the Colors field, as we have done with all these colors here. Doing so yields drastic changes in the color of the image. If you wish to correct for an overall color shift, maybe you might make a very small adjustment (less than +/- 5 or so) in the contents of "Neutrals." In the "Neutrals" color field I have performed a +3 to yellow and -1 to cyan here, to give it a slight 'warmth'. However, if the problem you have is an incorrect white balance, what you want to do is correct this through Image->Adjustment->levels... but that is another topic for another day.
Finally, as an example of how you might use selective color to fine tune a specific part of a photo, I have used the lasso tool with a feather of 50 pixels to select the red part of the hood on my friend's jacket. Notice from the history at right that I started with a conservative selection and then added to it a few times to get the whole area I wanted. In this case, what I'm worried about is messing up the skin tone on his neck while I strengthen the red in the hood. When I perform this adjustment, I toggle the "preview" checkbox many times to make sure I'm not interfering with anything I don't want to. You can apply this idea of feathered lasso tool and selective color to make targeted adjustments to specific elements in any photo. If a particular leaf comes out too saturated in an autumn photo, select it with a feathered lasso and tone it down in selective color.
You may also notice that the first thing in my history is to convert to Lab Color and perform an unsharp mask, then convert back to RGB color and perform the operations we discussed here. Image sharpening in lab color will be the topic of a future post, and is a sweet technique.
To wrap it up, here is the before and after. I think the after looks much better, much more true to life and vibrant, WITHOUT using the saturation or vibrance controls!
