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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I really enjoy making and playing with patterns. I don’t know why I like it so much… I usually don’t have any good practical use for what I come up. Most of my results are fairly busy and not suited for the web design and photo retouching projects that I do for “production” most often. But I can spend hours playing with patterns anyway. I should have been a gift wrap or fabric designer instead!

A lot of the patterns I come up with end up being grayscale which at first doesn’t seem to be very interesting. But actually there’s a lot of potential in greyscale patterns. They don’t limit you by having pre-existing colors that you may or may not like, or force you to try to change one color that you don’t like to make it fit into your project’s color scheme. They’re blank color canvases, just waiting for you.

This tutorial will be about the Gradient Map method of colorizing two different types of grayscale patterns. This method can give you complete control over the way the colors are rendered, or allow you to use blending modes with preset options to come up with some interesting and sometimes surprising coloration. Gradient Map shading works by taking all the colors in an image in order of value and replacing any pixel in an image by its “match” in a gradient you choose. It is an interesting effect but depending on what gradient you choose to apply can often come out with garish results. You’ll learn how to take even the most gaudy gradients and turn them into something more sophisticated.

Grayscale patterns can be grouped into two categories, each of which has slightly different applications for Gradient Maps:

Limited Shade Patterns

2 shade (B&W)

3 shade (black, white & gray)

These are halftone patterns I made for another tutorial you can download.

Many shade grayscale patterns

Unlimited amount of shades

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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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While perusing the Technique group on Flickr the other day I found a post about creating “Amazing Circles”. The name sounded so cheesy I couldn’t resist checking it out. And now it’s my latest addiction. I spent the better part of a weekend going through my old pictures looking for good candidates to try out this technique on and in the process learned a few things about how to make a good Amazing Circle.

I learned how to do it from a tutorial that one of my fellow Flickrers wrote up, but I made a few changes to the process to suit my needs. This is a description of how I make mine.

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