I was having a conversation with a friend last night about Photoshop and how there are about 900 ways to do the same thing or variations on the same thing. Photoshop is such a versatile tool that I don’t think you can ever run out new options to discover.

My friend was looking for a method to make colors pop in pictures so here’s what I came up with. I have been experimenting with inverting layers and playing with blending a good bit lately to see what interesting things might result. There are already many tutorials on how to make colors pop out there, but maybe you’ll find this one has a slightly different effect. I’ve noticed it tends to emphasize Yellows a bit more than some approaches I’ve tried before.

Before	After

You can download the action that I created for this, but if you’re curious about what it’s doing or you just like to do things the hard way, here are the steps:

1. Open a copy of the photo that needs some enhancement
   
2. Duplicate the background layer (Layer->Duplicate Layer) and name it Inverted
3. Select Inverted and choose Image->Adjustments->Invert
   
4. Change the Blending Mode on Inverted to Luminosity
   
   
5. Duplicate the background layer again and name it Merged 1
6. Select Inverted and choose Layer->Merge Down
7. Change the Blending Mode on Merged 1 to Linear Dodge
   
8. Duplicate the background layer again and name it Merged 2
9. Select Merged 1 and merge down
10. Change the Blending Mode on Merged 2 to Multiply
    
11. Duplicate the background layer again and name it Color Pop
12. Select Merged 2 and merge down

There you go! Your colors should be pretty saturated. At this point it’s a matter of playing with the Color Pop layer. You can tone it down by adjusting the Opacity, and you can also get some interesting effects by changing the Blending Mode:

• For pictures that started out “pastel” (not saturated and possibly over exposed), Multiply gave good results.
  
• For pictures that started out fairly well contrasted, Overlay and Soft Light had nice boosts.
  
• If seems that there’s too much yellow in your Color Pop layer, try Saturation
  
• For hyper saturation on an almost cartoony level, try Vivid Light.
  

While playing with this, I also found an interesting way to subdue the colors in an image for a nice washed out effect that doesn’t reduce the depth of your shadows. See the Subdued Color tutorial if you’re interested!

While playing around with inversions and trying to figure out how to make colors pop, I stumbled across a nice way to achieve the opposite effect: making colors subdued and washed out. The nice thing about this effect is that it doesn’t also wash out your shadows, only the color is affected (unless you use some special blend modes).

Before	After	Second Pass

Here is the action I created if you’d like to download it and save some effort. Otherwise, here are the steps to do it yourself:

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Feeling grey today? Need a little color inspiration for that new web design? Here’s a list of 20 color palette tools and generators that will help you color your world (or at least your web pages) a little brighter.

Well Styled - Color Generator 2

This is one of my favorites to play with. I really like the way it is laid out and organized. Click on a color on the color wheel to have it generate a palette for you. There are controls for four different color relationships to experiment with as well as several different saturations, and even a checkbox to only show “web safe” colors and display the colors as viewed by people with different types of color vision disorders. There’s no way to export the palette but you can grab a permalink to it.

Colr.org

This one wins the award for tool you can lose the most time playing with. Its kind of like a socialware site for colors. A picture is displayed at the top of the page that you can change if you desire. You can grab a random color or a random palette from the image and then tag the color or palette. There’s also a running list of recently added/tagged palettes that you can select and add more tags to. And, of course, you can look up palettes by tags as well. Its total fun for the folksonomy addict.

NetCocktail

More of a place for inspiration than generation… This site looks at popular and “well designed” sites and creates a profile of their color palettes. Some interesting browsing and tangents to follow.

Return of Design - Web Color Schemes

Not as flashy as NetCocktail but also a repository of web schemes from popular and well designed websites. You can click on the palette in the list to get more detail and scheme variations. This page is part of a blog that has some other good design and color information.

Color Blender

This is another one of my favorites that I use a good bit. You enter two hex values and choose a number of stops and it will generate a list of that many the colors in between the original values. This is really invaluable when you have a color you need to make a little lighter or darker, just choose black or white as the second color.

Style Phreak - Color Match Redux

Simple, but handy, 9 color palette generator from either an RGB Slider or by entering a hex value. Palettes are exportable to Photoshop, Illustrator or plain text.

ColorCombos.com

This site has a “combo tester” where you can play with colors to come up with a pleasing palette, as well as a tool that will take a url and pull the predominant colors from it to construct a palette and also a library of all the palettes that have been generated or “lifted” on the site. You can also subscribe to the palettes as they are generated by RSS and search by tag.

Spin the Color Wheel

Gamble with your colors… Spin the wheel to select random colors which you can then “hold” or not and spin again. When you’ve found 3 you like, choose what they’d be used for on your web page and then see a preview of your new combination. Fun! Wish you could pick more than 3 though.

Color Wheel

Color Wheel generates sets of colors to use in a color scheme using a number of standard methods: Red/Green/Blue, Angle, and Tint/Shade.

Color Whore

Self proclaimed “Directory of nice colors”. You can browse colors that people have added and classified by main color family and saturation.

Color Blender

Create “blends” with a set of sliders and export them to Photoshop, Illustrator or email it to yourself. There are also tools to do Pantone matches.

Red Alt: I Like Your Colors

Enter a URL and it extracts the colors and their hex codes from the CSS stylesheet that was referenced as well as including a link to the file that it pulled the colors from.

Steel Dolphin Color Scheme Tool

Flash tool that generates a 5-color palette from the “seed” hex code you provide or by adjusting several different sliders.

Color Palette Generator

This tool lets you upload an image and generates a palette for you based on the colors that are predominant in the image. You can’t upload anything larger than 15K. You can also choose from other images/palettes that have already been uploaded. Nice tool.

Color Schemer Online v2

A 16-color palette explorer that I haven’t quite figured out yet. It’s not very clear how the colors relate to each other and 16 of them at about the same intensity is a little too much for a viable scheme, but here it is never-the-less.

Color Schemer Gallery

This site is related to the tool above. It is a gallery of schemes that have been created and uploaded by users of the Color Schemer software. Some nice schemes to browse through here, organized by tags. If you have the software you can download the schemes to use in your projects.

4096 Color Wheel

This site allow you to hover over a color wheel and displays the web-safe, “web-smart” and unsafe hex versions of the color. Clicking on the wheel records the color to the palette on the left which can be saved as an image as export.

Color Selector

This page is a bit confusing but useful once you get the hang of it. Mousing over the numbers on the left side controls the background color. The right side controls the font color. The hex character positions are represented vertically on the page. The page referenced shows web-safe 216 colors, but there is also a page to play with 16 million colors.

VisiBone Webmaster’s Color Lab

Simple tool that lets you click on colors in the wheel to the top left and displays them to the right with all their information such as hex and RGB values. You can keep clicking on items until you’ve got a suitable scheme.

CSS Color Chart

Not so much a tool as a very handy reference. Lists the name, hex value and displays the color for all the “predefined” colors you can use with CSS. Definitely useful.

And as a bonus, here’s a few color web toys that I like to play with. They’re not really useful tools but good inspiration or just fun!

Etsy’s #Goods

A flash site that pulls up pictures of Etsy’s merchandise by color.

Color Quiz

This is a personality quiz where you pick the colors you’re most attracted to. I have taken it at several different points in my life and been amazed at how accurately it assessed my situation and mood. Definitely worth checking out.

Colorstrology

Similar to Astrology (and probably with as much credibility), this site analyzes your personality by your birthdate and the color supposedly associated with it. Maybe silly, but still interesting.

Squared Circle Colr Pickr

A nice Flicker based Flash app that pulls up pictures from the “Squared Circle” group that match the color you pick on the color wheel. A good way to kill some time browsing.

Enjoy!

I just figured out an accurate way to correct color casts in your photos in 4 easy steps with Photoshop without having to use Curves or advanced color management.

Here’s a picture of some penguins with a yellow/greenish cast:

And here they are after the technique, in their black and bright white glory:

How to do it:

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