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!